LENOCINIUM. - It is an intermediary activity in the service of another's lust with a view to one's own profit.
In doctrine, the notion of pandering as a crime is defined in various ways. Some find the reason for its punishability in the incitement to corruption and prostitution done with intent of profit; hence the necessity of repressing it not so much on account of the damage and the injury to chastity, as for the subjective dangerousness of the offender.
Carrara defines the protection effected against pandering as the protection of minors against the snares of corruption, and this not with regard to the venality or habitual nature of the act, but in consideration of the necessity of defending the individual chastity of minors; not, therefore, in order to protect public morality and the corresponding right of society.
Listz establishes the foundation of punishment in the social interest, since it is necessary that sexual life be kept within given limits in defense of the order of families and of the psycho-physical health of the rising generations.
Manzini determines the object of criminal protection, with respect to the crimes of procuring, in the interest of the State aimed at guaranteeing the juridical goods of public morality and good morals, insofar as it pertains to public chastity and sexual honor, against every form of parasitism of corruption, whether this consists in pandering in the proper sense or in the exploitation of prostitutes or in the so-called traffic in women and minors.
One may therefore conclude that the figure of pandering, as a crime, subsists when, given the particular conditions due to inexperience or weakness of character in which the passive subject finds himself, or by the particular nature of the means used, the act presents itself as harmful to public and private interests.
Already repressed in Roman law, pandering was punished, in the decrees of Paul IV and of Sixtus V, with the death penalty; but practice attenuated the penalty, reducing it to exile or to flagellation. The criminal constitution of Charles V punishes the pander with relegation, with the torture of the beam about the neck, with the cutting off of the ears and with other penalties.
The current Italian Penal Code regulates the matter of pandering in arts. 531-40 and 544. The cases provided for are: non-violent pandering of minors or of the mentally deficient; non-violent family pandering of a normal woman of full age; violent pandering; the exploitation of prostitutes; the non-violent or fraudulent traffic in women and minors; and that in women and minors which is violent or fraudulent.
The CIC also provides for the crime of pandering, but in the infliction of penalties it distinguishes the case in which it is perpetrated by laypersons or by clerics not in sacris or by clerics in sacris.
Can. 2357 § 1 indeed establishes that laypersons condemned for pandering are ipso facto infames, in addition to the other penalties (ferendae sententiae) that the Ordinary deems fit to inflict.
Can. 2358, on the other hand, concerns clerics in minoribus ordinibus constituti, to whom, therefore, the obligation of celibacy is not yet imposed. By virtue of this canon, they, guilty of some crime contra sextum, in addition to the penalties ferendae sententiae which they may possibly have incurred, like laypersons, for the crimes contemplated by the preceding can. 2357, must be punished by the superior proportionally to the fault and also, if necessary, with dismissal from the clerical state, a dismissal which is a true and proper expulsion, to be carried out by a condemnatory sentence. The reason for such severity lies both in the demonstrated unfitness, given the kind of crime committed, to assume with decorum the charge and burden of the Sacred Orders, and also in the particular holiness of life required by their state.
The severity, moreover, is accentuated still further when one considers can. 2359 § 2, which provides for the crime of pandering committed by clerics in sacris, that is, by the subdeacon, the deacon and the priest, whether secular or regular.
These, in fact, must be punished by means of suspension, infamia iuris, deprivation of office, of benefice and of any assignment they may have in the Church and, in the graver cases, deposition. All these penalties are ferendae sententiae, to be inflicted by a condemnatory sentence.
BIBL. V. Manzini, Trattato di diritto penale italiano secondo il Codice del 1930, VII, Torino 1936, p. 433 ff.; M. Manfredini, Delitti contro la moralità e il buon costume, in Trattato di diritto penale a cura di E. Florian, Milano 1934, p. 225 ff.; I. Chelodi - P. Ciprotti, Ins canonicum de delictis et poenis, Vicenza-Trento 1943, p. 128.
Francesco Ercolani