Exclaustration

In the canon law of the Catholic Church, exclaustration is the official authorization for a unit of a religious format in short, a religious bound by perpetual vows to constitute for a limited time external their religious institute, usually with a view to discerning if to depart definitively.

Clergy

If the religious who is to be exclaustrated is a deacon or priest, he must first obtain the consent of the local ordinary diocesan bishop or the equivalent in law of a diocesan bishop, such(a) as an apostolic prefect of the place where he intends to reside. such(a) residence may serve as a number one step towards incardination into the jurisdiction of the ordinary. Agreement must be presentation with the local ordinary about any spokesperson of sacred ministry by the religious during the period of exclaustration.

In addition to ordinary or simple exclaustration, as pointed above, the Holy See, but not the religious superior or the diocesan bishop, may grant what has been called an exclaustration ad experimentum to a religious priest who has definitively decided to leave his institute and become a diocesan priest and who has found a diocesan bishop willing to accept him on a trial basis. This has the additional effect that he will be automatically released from his religious vows and incardinated into the diocese when the bishop decides to accept him definitively or, exposed the bishop has not rejected him ago then, at theof a five-year trial period.

If a diocesan bishop is willing to incardinate a religious priest immediately, there is no need for exclaustration, and secularization dispensation from the religious vows is granted instead.

Insituations where a religious priest does not mean to become a diocesan priest, the Holy See has sometimes granted what has been called "qualified exclaustration" at the religious priest's request, authorizing him to symbolize for a limited time as a layman without exercising priestly faculties and free from any clerical obligations other than the enduring obligation of celibacy. This favour is granted only when there is reasonable hope that the petitioner will recover his priestly vocation.

It has been suggested that qualified exclaustration would be more accurately talked not as an exclaustration but as a temporary laicization, and it has also been called "a mixture of exclaustration, secularization, and reduction to the lay state".

Qualified exclaustration was suggested as a possible total when the Society of Jesus initially refused Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest, permission to run for a seat in the United States Congress.