Cardinal John de Lugo. Disputationes Scholasticae et Morales, vol. vi; De Justitia et Jure, disputatio x.
St. Augustine. I Contra Petilianum, cap. 24; Ad Marcellianum Comitem, cap. 21; De Civitate Dei, cap. 17 to 28.
Aristotle. III Ethicorum, cap. 7, and lib. v, cap. ii. Plato. Phaedo.
Cicero. Quaestiones Tusculanae. I, lib. v; De Somno Scipionis.
Lessius. De Justitia et Jure, lib. ii, c. 9, dub. 6, 7.
Molina. De Justitia et Jure, vol. i, tr. 2, disp. 119; vol. iv, tr. 3, disp. 1 and 9.
St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica, 2, 2, q. 64, a. 5, 7.
St. Alphonsus Liguori. Theologia Moralis, vol. iv, tr. 4. See this book for opposed opinions and a bibliography.
Costa-Rossetti. Philosophia Moralis, thesis 120.
Ferretti. Philosophia Moralis, theses xci, xciv.
Macksey. De Ethica Naturali, theses xxxiv _et seq._
The members of the human body may be injured (1) by a blow, which without bloodshed causes pain or a bruise; (2) by a wound, which breaks the continuity of the tissues; (3) by mutilation, which, without killing, removes some member requisite for the integrity of the body. The term Mutilation as applied to the human body has various meanings. In the civil law mutilation of a person is called Mayhem, an old form of the word Maim, and is defined by Blackstone[5] as "such hurt of any part of a man's body as renders him less able in fighting to defend himself or annoy his adversary." By statute in the United States and Great Britain the scope of the offence has been so extended as to include injuries to a person which merely disfigure or disable. Mutilation in the civil law now implies the taking away of some part of a legal instrument, as a will, contract, or the like, by any one who has no right to make this alteration.
In canon law mutilation is like malicious or accidental mayhem in the civil law, and it has also a technical phase in relation to irregularity as affecting the reception of ecclesiastical orders. The mutilation requisite to irregularity as affecting the reception of Holy Orders may differ from mutilation in its purely moral and accidental aspects. Broadly, an irregularity is a canonical and permanent impediment to the reception and exercise of ecclesiastical orders. It does not exist unless it is actually promulgated in some canon, and it is not necessarily grounded on corporal deformity. Defects of the body that cause canonical irregularity are such as would render the public ministration of a clergyman either impossible or indecent.