Matrimonial Dispensation - Costs of Dispensations

Costs of Dispensations

The Council of Trent (Sess. XXIV, cap. v, De ref. matrim.) decreed that dispensations should be free of all charges. Diocesan chanceries are bound to conform to this law (many pontifical documents, and at times clauses in indults, remind them of it) and neither to exact nor accept anything but the modest contribution to the chancery expenses sanctioned by an Instruction approved by Innocent XI on 8 October 1678, and known as the Innocentian Tax (Taxa Innocentiana). Rosset holds that it is also lawful, when the diocese is poor, to demand payment of the expenses it incurs for dispensations. Sometimes the Holy See grants ampler freedom in this matter, but nearly always with the monition that all revenues from this source shall be employed for some good work, and not go to the diocesan curia as such. Henceforth every rescript requiring execution will state the sum which the diocesan curia is authorized to collect for its execution.

In the Roman Curia the expenses incurred by petitioners fall under four heads:

1. expenses (expensœ) of carriage (postage, etc.), also a fee to the accredited agent, when one has been employed. This fee is fixed by the Congregation in question;
2. a tax (taxa) to be used in defraying the expenses incurred by the Holy See in the organized administration of dispensations;
3. the componendum, or eleemosynary (alms) fine to be paid to the Congregation and applied by it to pious uses;
4. an alms imposed on the petitioners and to be distributed by themselves in good works.

The moneys paid under the first two heads do not affect, strictly speaking, the gratuity of the dispensation. They constitute a just compensation for the expenses the petitioners occasion the Curia. As for the alms and the componendum, besides the fact that they do not profit the pope nor the members of the Curia personally, but are employed in pious uses, they are justifiable, either as a fine for the faults which, as a rule, give occasion for the dispensation, or as a check to restrain a too great frequency of petitions often based on frivolous grounds. And if the Tridentine prohibition be still urged, it may be truly said that the pope has the right to abrogate the decrees of councils, and is the best judge of the reasons that legitimize such abrogation. The custom of tax and componendum is neither uniform nor universal in the Roman Curia.