ACTIVE AND PASSIVE VOICE. - Legal term indicating the right belonging to the members of a society to cast their own vote on questions concerning the society itself and above all the right to elect and to be elected to its offices. This right belongs, given certain conditions, to the members of all ecclesiastical moral persons, such as chapters, councils, etc., but it has special importance in religious families (v. RELIGIONE).
In these, as a practice, it arose from the very origins of cenobitic life, but it found its full development in monasticism, the monks having received the right to elect their own abbot (Regula 1, Benedicti, cap. LXIV).
Subsequently the right of a. and p. v. entered into all religions, gradually receiving ever greater importance and legal precision, until it acquired its own special character.
In current legislation the granting and the determination of the right of a. and p. v., as well as the renunciation and the deprivation in religions of pontifical right, are the competence of the Holy See, through the provisions of the CIC and of the Constitutions of the individual religions. By can. 578, the CIC grants the right of a. and p. v. only to perpetual professed members, except where the constitutions expressly extend it to temporary professed members. However, both by common law and by the Constitutions of the individual religions, the actual exercise of the active and passive right is subjected to many other conditions, such as age, priesthood, and degrees of education according to the case.
A religious, like any other member of a moral person, can be deprived of the right of a. and p. v. as a penalty for some fault. Those who must be deprived by judicial sentence are: 1) religious who have conspired against the Roman Pontiff, his Legate, or their own Ordinary, can. 2331 § 2; 2) those who have cooperated directly in the formulation of laws injurious to the rights of the Church or have impeded the exercise of the Church's jurisdiction by resorting to lay power, can. 2334, n. 2; 2336 § 1; 3) those who have given their adherence to Masonic sects, or to sects of the kind condemned by the Church, can. 2335, 2336 § 1; 4) those who have introduced women of any age into the papal cloister of the regular Orders, can. 2342, n. 2; 5) those who have falsified letters, decrees, or rescripts of the Holy See, or have made use of them knowing of their falsity, can. 2360 § 2; 6) those who have committed the crime of solicitation in confession, can. 2368 § 1; 7) those who have most gravely violated the common life and, having been admonished, have not amended themselves, can. 2389.
Those deprived of a. and p. v. ipso facto are religious: 1) who have apostatized from the Religion, even after their return (can. 2384); 2) electors who have invoked the illegitimate intrusion of laypersons into elections reserved to religious (can. 2390 § 3); 3) the college of religious that has knowingly elected an unworthy person (can. 2391 § 1); 4) religious who have committed the crime of simony in the granting of offices, benefices, or dignities (can. 2392, n. 2); 5) all those who, having the right to elect, have not requested the prescribed confirmation of the elect from the competent ecclesiastical authority, when this is required (can. 2393); 6) Chapters, convents and all religious who have accepted those presented or nominated to some office or benefice without first awaiting the letters of confirmation from the competent ecclesiastical authority (can. 2394, n. 43); 7) secularized religious (can. 640 § 1, n. 1); 8) electors who have not forwarded within the prescribed time the request for postulation of the elect (can. 181 § 2). Those who cannot exercise the right of a. and p. v. are: 1) religious incapable of human acts (can. 167 § 1, n. 1); 2) religious who have incurred a censure or infamy of law, after the condemnatory sentence. Those also remain deprived of a. and p. v. who have incurred the penalty of removal from ecclesiastical acts, whether by sentence or by latae sententiae penalty. By reason of their peculiar condition, cardinals and bishops, even titular ones only, are deprived of a. and p. v., unless dispensed by the Holy See, even in the case that, having left their office, they return to the religious house (can. 629 § 2); as are also the exclaustrated during the period of the indult (can. 639, 640).
The particular law of individual religions may deprive of the right of a. and p. v. by way of penalty, provided that it is a matter of grave fault and that this is established through a serious process, at least administrative (cf., e.g., Costituzioni della Società del Verbo Divino, Rome 1944, art. 332). That moreover in the major superior of a religion there may be given the power to punish, at least ad tempus et ad casum, even with the deprivation of this right, a religious guilty of grave fault appears to be affirmed on the basis of can. 2291 and 2298, according to which, among the vindictive penalties that religious superiors can inflict, there also figures the deprivation of a. and p. v.
Bibliography4 works
Giulio Mandelli