CHAPLAINCY. - A c. consists in the obligation to provide for specific functions or acts of worship and in the corresponding right to receive the financial compensation established by the founder. The obligation almost always concerns the celebration of Masses in a specific church or at a specific altar and requires that the holder fulfill it personally or through others, according to the nature of the c. The compensation may be secured either through the establishment of an endowment, whose income goes to the chaplain, or through the imposition of a ground rent or canon to be paid by natural or juridical persons who have received property for this purpose. Often by c. is meant the autonomous and perpetual mass of goods destined to compensate the obligation of sacred functions (T. Mauro, La personalità giuridica degli enti ecclesiastici, Vatican City 1945, p. 190), just as before the CIC the mass of goods or rights constituting its endowment was called a benefice.
A c. is called lay if the authoritative intervention of the ecclesiastical superior having the power to create the juridical entity is lacking in its constitution, or if it has not been assigned to an ecclesiastical moral person (C. Berardi, Commentaria in ius ecclesiasticum universum, I, Milan 1846, n. 442); it is called ecclesiastical, on the other hand, if it is erected by ecclesiastical authority or if it belongs to an ecclesiastical moral person: in the latter case the ecclesiastical character derives from the nature of the goods, which have become ecclesiastical. A lay c. may be founded by anyone who has the power to dispose of his own goods, and this may be done either by an act inter vivos or by an act mortis causa; the goods that secure the compensation for the holder do not become ecclesiastical goods; nevertheless, since multiple wills are involved, the Ordinary has the right of supervision (CIC, can. 1515, § 1). The holder, whose appointment is freely regulated by the founder, may be a cleric or a layperson, a man or a woman. In civil law it may take the form of a legacy, of a foundation for the soul, or of an autonomous entity (V. Del Giudice, Corso di diritto ecclesiastico, Milan 1939, pp. 113-14). An ecclesiastical c., if it is erected as a juridical entity by the competent ecclesiastical authority, is a true and proper benefice, and as such is subject to all the canonical prescriptions concerning benefices (CIC, can. 1412, n. 2).
In Italy the law of 15 Aug. 1867, no. 3348, suppressed all ecclesiastical and lay c.; the civil code of 1866 (arts. 833 and 1075) prevented the establishment of lay c.; these provisions must be considered abrogated by art. 29 of the Concordat of 1929.
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Elio Gambari