ACTIVE AND PASSIVE VOICE. — A juridical term denoting the right belonging to the members of a society to cast their vote on matters concerning the society itself and, above all, the right to elect and to be elected to offices therein. This right belongs, subject to certain conditions, to the members of all ecclesiastical juridical persons, such as chapters, councils, etc., but it has particular importance in religious families (v. RELIGIONE).
In these, as a practice, it arose from the very origins of cenobitic life, but found its full development in monasticism, since the monks had received the right to elect their own abbot (Regula 1, Benedicti, cap. LXIV).
Subsequently, the right of active and passive voice entered all religious institutes, gradually acquiring ever greater importance and juridical definition, until it acquired its own distinct form.
In current legislation, the granting and determination of the right of active and passive voice, as well as renunciation and deprivation thereof in religious institutes of pontifical right, fall within the competence of the Holy See, through the provisions of the CIC and the Constitutions of the individual religious institutes. By can. 578, the CIC grants the right of active and passive voice only to perpetually professed religious, except where the constitutions expressly extend it to temporarily professed religious. However, both under common law and under the Constitutions of the individual religious institutes, the actual exercise of active and passive voice is made subject to many other conditions, such as age, priesthood, and degrees of education, according to the circumstances.
A religious, like any other member of a juridical person, may be deprived of the right of active and passive voice as a penalty for some offense. The following must be deprived by judicial sentence: 1) religious who have conspired against the Roman Pontiff, his Legate, or their own Ordinary, can. 2331 § 2; 2) those who have directly cooperated in the drafting of laws injurious to the rights of the Church or have impeded the exercise of the Church’s jurisdiction by appealing to the secular power, can. 2334, n. 2; 2336 § 1; 3) those who have enrolled in Masonic sects, or sects of the kind condemned by the Church, can. 2335, 2336 § 1; 4) those who have introduced women of any age into the papal enclosure of regular Orders, can. 2342, n. 2; 5) those who have falsified letters, decrees, or rescripts of the Holy See, or have used them while knowing of their falsity, can. 2360 § 2; 6) those who have committed the offense of solicitation in confession, can. 2368 § 1; 7) those who have gravely violated common life and, after being admonished, have not amended their conduct, can. 2389.
The following religious are deprived of active and passive voice ipso facto: 1) those who have apostatized from the religious institute, even after their return (can. 2384); 2) electors who have invoked the unlawful intrusion of lay persons into elections reserved to religious (can. 2390 § 3); 3) a college of religious that has knowingly elected an unworthy person (can. 2391 § 1); 4) religious who have committed the offense of simony in the conferral 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 elected person 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 submitted within the prescribed period the request for the postulation of the elected person (can. 181 § 2). The following may not exercise the right of active and passive voice: 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 who have incurred the penalty of removal from ecclesiastical acts likewise remain deprived of active and passive voice, whether by sentence or by a latae sententiae penalty. Because of their particular condition, cardinals and bishops, even titular bishops, are deprived of active and passive voice, unless dispensed by the Holy See, even when, having relinquished their office, they return to the religious house (can. 629 § 2); the same applies to exclaustrated religious during the period of the indult (can. 639, 640).
The particular law of the individual religious institutes may impose deprivation of the right of active and passive voice as a penalty, provided that the matter concerns a grave offense and that this has been established through a serious process, at least administrative (cf., e.g., Costituzioni della Società del Verbo Divino, Rome 1944, art. 332). That a major superior of a religious institute may be granted the power to punish, at least ad tempus et ad casum, even by depriving a religious guilty of a grave offense of this right, appears to be affirmed on the basis of can. 2291 and 2298, according to which deprivation of active and passive voice is also included among the vindictive penalties that religious superiors may impose.