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Incardination is the formal term in theCatholic Church for aclergyman being under abishop or otherecclesiastical superior. It is also sometimes used to refer to laity who may transfer to another part of the church. Examples include transfers from the WesternLatin Church to anEastern Catholic Church or from a territorialdiocese to one of the threepersonal ordinariates for former Anglicans.
As one part of thehierarchy of the Catholic Church, everyCatholic priest ordeacon must have anordinary as a superior. Such an ordinary is most often adiocesan bishop, but can also be a leader of a religious order, such as theJesuits orFranciscans, or some other ecclesiastical superior.
The purpose of incardination is to ensure that no cleric is "freelance", without a clearecclesiastical superior to whom the cleric is accountable and who in turn is responsible for the cleric.
Incardination does not cease until the moment when that cleric is incardinated as a subject of another superior. An excardination from one diocese, for instance, does not become effective until the moment of incardination to another, so there is no gap during which the clergyman is not clearly answerable to a definitely determined superior.
A priest or deacon may move from diocese to diocese taking a new position, including moving to a new country, while formally still being incardinated in his original diocese, and therefore still under the supervision of his original diocese's bishops, at least formally, bycanon law. For instance, a Philippine diocesan priest may be assigned to a parish in the United States for decades but still be formally incardinated in his original Philippine diocese.
Incardination is dealt with in canons 265–272 of the1983 Code of Canon Law.
There is a similar canonical institution in the law of theEastern Catholic Churches, which appears in theCode of Canons of the Eastern Churches, Title X «Clerics», Chapter II «Ascription of Clerics to an Eparchy», Canons 357–366.
Questions of civil jurisdiction can come into conflict with canon law in situations where a priest is on temporary assignment remotely while he remains incardinated to his diocese of origin. This applied in the case of a French priest involved in a car accident which killed two people, while at his temporary post in California. The question arose in a civil suit, whether the Diocese of Fresno (California) where he was working was responsible legally, although the priest remained incardinated in France(Stevens v. Roman Catholic Bishop of Fresno). The civil court ruled that it was.[1]
Itsantonym,excardination, denotes that a member of the clergy has been freed from one jurisdiction and is transferred to another.
Both terms arederived from theLatincardo (pivot, socket, or hinge), from which the wordcardinal is also derived—hence theLatin verbsincardinare (to hang on a hinge or fix) andexcardinare (to unhinge or set free).
During theordination ceremony, prior to the actual sacrament ofHoly Orders itself, the man places himself under a promise of obedience to his bishop or other ordinary of aparticular church, or makes an acknowledgment of a pre-existingvow of obedience to aprior,abbot, or other superior in aninstitute of consecrated life or society of apostolic life.[2]
