What is "benefices"

Usage examples of "benefices".

He publicly chastised the cardinals for absenteeism, luxury, and lascivious life, forbade them to hold or sell plural benefices, prohibited their acceptance of pensions, gifts of money, and other favors from secular sources, ordered the papal treasurer not to pay them their customary half of the revenue from benefices but to use it for the restoration of churches in Rome.

To keep each papacy from bankruptcy, simony redoubled, benefices and promotions were sold under pressure, charges for spiritual dispensations of all kinds were increased, as were chancery taxes on every document required from the Curia.

Increasingly, the popes reserved more and more benefices to their power of appointment, destroying the elective principle.

When bishops purchased benefices at the price of a year’s income, they passed the cost down, so that corruption spread through the hierarchy from canons and priors to priesthood and cloistered clergy, down to mendicant friars and pardoners.

To fill vacant benefices the Church ordained priests in batches, many of them men who had lost their wives or families in the plague and flocked to holy orders as a refuge.

If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you.

A bishop at twenty-three, a cardinal at thirty, he had held at one time or another nine English benefices in London, York, Lincoln, and Canter­bury, making him a principal target of English resentment.

Neverthe­less, papal taxes continued, and incumbents of ruined benefices were often reduced to penury, and deserted, not infrequently to join their persecutors.

Rejecting papal authority altogether, he seized ecclesiastical property, forced the Archbishop of Milan to kneel to him, forbade his subjects to pay tithes, seek pardons, or have any other dealings with the Curia, refused to accept papal appointees to benefices in his domain, tore up and trampled on papal missives.

He reduced multiple benefices, raised the educational standards for priests, took stern measures against usury, simony, and clerical concubinage, forbade the wearing of pointed shoes in the Curia, and did not endear himself to the College of Cardinals.

In the distracted 14th century, when God seemed hostile to man or else hidden behind ecclesiastical counting of coins and selling of benefices, the need for communion with God was never greater, nor less satisfied by His appointed agents.

On the contrary, in the first weeks of the new reign the cardinals treated Urban ‘s pontificate as so much an accomplished fact that they showered him with the usual petitions for benefices and promotions for their relatives.

Pope Boniface in Rome took cuts from usury and sold benefices to the point of scandal, some­times re-selling the same office to a higher bidder and dating the second appointment previous to the first.

He sold the right to hold as many as ten or twelve benefices at a time.

A canon of Chartres who had given him shelter was deprived of his benefices and condemned to perpetual abstinence in prison on bread and water.