should not become a burden and a restriction to liberty, yet it lays on all the obligation of respecting the privilege, and of doing nothing contrary to it. Moreover, those privileges which are granted not to individuals, but to bodies of men like clerics and religious, cannot be dispensed with or used at the good pleasure of members of the privileged bodies. Individuals cannot renounce the privileges of their order, but they are bound to act in accordance with them.
2. A privilege is against the law if it derogates from the law in favour of the privileged person; it is beside the law if there be no law from which it derogates.
The lawgiver to whom the law is subject can alone grant a privilege against the law, and within the territory subject to his jurisdiction. Within that territory all, whether subjects or strangers, may enjoy the privilege,; no one may enjoy it outside the territory of the grantor, unless it be in the nature of a personal dispensation from the law. A privilege which is against no law may be granted to anyone.
A personal privilege is directly and immediately granted to a physical or moral person; a real privilege is granted directly and immediately to a place, office, dignity, or thing, and mediately to persons with respect to the place, office, dignity, or thing.
3. Privileges are to be interpreted according to the terms in which they are granted. And thus if a privilege is granted by the Pope to a confessor by which he may absolve from cases reserved to the Holy See, he cannot thereby absolve from specially reserved cases, much less from the cases most specially reserved to the Holy See, and which can only be absolved by faculties specially .delegated by the Holy See.
Privileges granted to corporate bodies, such as Religious Orders, inasmuch as they are rewards for services rendered to the Church, and are for the common good, admit a wide and favourable interpretation. Even privileges granted to individuals, if they cause no prejudice to others, such as leave to eat meat on days of abstinence, receive a wide interpretation. Personal privileges, however, which benefit the privileged while curtailing the rights of others, as exemption from paying tithes, are regarded as a wound inflicted on the law which should be equally observed by all, and so they receive a strict interpretation.
4. Although privileges are in general granted in perpetuity, yet they cease in many ways: by revocation of the competent superior, by renunciation accepted by the competent superior,
