Incompatibility of benefices. - According to can. 1439, it is not permissible to accept and retain, in title or in perpetual commendam, several incompatible benefices, that is, benefices whose obligations cannot simultaneously be fulfilled by the same beneficiary, or of which one would suffice for the beneficiary’s maintenance. There are therefore two sources of the i. of b.: 1) the impossibility in which the holder of two or more residential or pastoral benefices, whether major or minor, finds himself of personally performing simul universa opera, as in the case of two bishoprics, two canonries, two parishes, etc.; 2) the fact that one of the benefices is sufficient for the decent support of the beneficiary. Judgment on this second point is left to the prudent discretion of the Ordinary. Every i. of b. ceases if benefices incompatible by their nature are canonically united in perpetuity, in accordance with cann. 339 § 5, 460 § 1, 1949.
The plurality or accumulation of benefices was forbidden as early as the Councils of the fifth century, with various sanctions that became increasingly severe under the pontiffs Alessandro III, Innocenzo III, Bonifacio VIII, Clemente V, and Giovanni XXIII. Here too it was the Council of Trent that abolished all the exceptions which above all the sublimes et litteratae personae had succeeded in obtaining.
Under current law, the acceptance of incompatible benefices entails the invalidity of the provision; indeed, upon acceptance of the second benefice, the first becomes vacant (can. 188, 3).
Moreover, whoever, having obtained an office or benefice incompatible with the previous one, presumes to retain both is deprived of both (can. 2396).
Only the supreme pontiff may dispense from this law of common law, and the dispensation will be valid only if the petitioner, in the request, has mentioned the previous incompatible office or benefice, or if the grant contains the derogatory clause of the common law (can. 156 § 3).
Incompenza.
Incompenza. - That which cannot in any way be known. The term and concept are used in philosophy, theology, and mysticism.
Sophistry, scepticism, agnosticism, and phenomenalism hold being, in its objective reality, to be i. Plotino affirms the i. of the One; mystics tend to emphasize the unknowability of God; Cusano, by understanding the Absolute as the coincidence of opposites, compromises its knowability. Kant, with his positing of the thing in itself as theoretically unattainable, expressed the clearest and historically most important affirmation of an i., subsequently attenuating it by declaring the noumeno to be a postulate of practical reason, and therefore in some way apprehensible. Positivism, especially in Spencer (cf. First principles, part 1ᵃ), popularized the term and concept, proclaiming that the ultimate ground of reality is i. because to know is to relate, whereas the Absolute, in order to be such, must be beyond and exempt from every relation.
In a certain sense it is contradictory to call wholly unknown that whose existence is affirmed. The error arises from failure to distinguish between the narrow horizon of immediate experience and the unlimited scope of rational inference. To know is to apprehend being:
knowledge is commensurate and coextensive with being; therefore, in the absolute sense, nothing is i. Of the Absolute, existence and nature are knowable; of mystery, the terms that express it and their non-contradictoriness are knowable. The unfortunate term poorly expresses the quite true concept of the limitation and inexhaustible progressiveness of human knowledge.