market in a church, or a banquet, or using it to stable horses or cattle. There is, to be sure, a special indecency and irreverence in committing any sin in church, but the malice contracted from this circumstance will only be mortal in certain special cases.
On this ground it is probable that only external and consummated sins against chastity contract the grievous malice of sacrilege from being committed in a church; internal or not consummated sins against purity probably do not contract the grave malice of sacrilege if they are committed there.
5. Real sacrilege is also committed in three ways:
(a) By treating with irreverence sacred things, such as the sacraments, Holy Scripture, relics, sacred images.
It is a sacrilege to administer or to receive the sacraments in a state of mortal sin, to quote the words of Scripture for the purpose of making an obscene joke, 'to treat sacred images and relics with contempt.
(b) By theft of sacred objects. Sacrilegious theft is committed by stealing a sacred object from a sacred place, or a profane object from a sacred place, or a sacred object from a place that is not sacred, according to an old decree of canon law. [1] In the first of these cases a double sacrilege is committed, local and real, as when a chalice is stolen from the tabernacle; in the last case real sacrilege only is committed, as when a chalice is stolen from a priest's room. Local sacrilege only is committed in the second case, and, indeed, according to a probable opinion, then only when the object stolen belongs to the sacred place, or has been entrusted specially to the sacred place for safe keeping. If a thief picks a pocket in church, his sin probably has not the malice of a grievous sin of sacrilege, although it may be grievous as against justice.
(c) By committing the sin of simony, the treatment of which is reserved for the next chapter.
6. Theft of ecclesiastical property or wilful damage done to it is sacrilege, for although the money or other property belonging to the church is not sacred in itself, still by damaging or stealing it an injury is done to those sacred persons, places, and causes that are supported by church property. The private property belonging to a cleric is not ecclesiastical property, but only that which belongs to a church, Religious Order, or pious institution erected by episcopal authority. Theft, therefore, of the private money of a cleric is not sacrilege.
- ↑ c 21, C. 17, q. 4.
