In the jurisprudence of the canon law of the Catholic Church, a dispensation is the exemption from the immediate obligation of law in certain cases. Its object is to modify the hardship often arising from the rigorous application of general laws to particular cases, and its essence is to preserve the law by suspending its operation in such cases.
Concept
Since laws aimed at the good of the entire community may not be suitable for certain cases or persons, the legislator has the right (sometimes even the duty) to dispense from the law.
Dispensation is not a permanent power or a special right, as in privilege. If the reason for the dispensation ceases entirely, then the dispensation also ceases entirely. If the immediate basis for the right is withdrawn, then the right ceases.
Validity, legality, "just and reasonable cause" There must be a "just and reasonable cause" for granting a dispensation. The judgement regarding what is "just and reasonable" is based upon the particular situation and the importance of the law to be dispensed from. If the cause is not "just and reasonable", then the dispensation is illegal and, if issued by someone other than the lawgiver of the law in question or his superior, it is also invalid. If it is uncertain whether a sufficiently "just and reasonable cause" exists, the dispensation is both legal and valid.
History
In canonical legal theory, the dispensing power is the corollary of the legislative. The dispensing power, like the legislative, was formerly invested in general councils and even in provincial synods. But in the West, with the gradual centralisation of authority in the Roman curia, it became ultimately vested in the pope as the supreme lawgiver of the Catholic Church.
Despite frequent crises in the diplomatic relations between the Holy See and temporal governments in the later Middle Ages, the authority of the papacy as the dispenser of grace and spiritual licences remained largely unchallenged. In the early thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) fostered the extension of papal political power. He emphasised, "as had no pope before him, the pope's plenitudo potestatis ("fullness of power") within the Church." Since the Church comprised the whole of mankind, medieval jurists were accustomed to what we might call shared sovereignty, and freely accepted that the pope had a concurrent jurisdiction with temporal sovereigns. The temporal princes could administer their own laws, but the princes of the Church, and especially the pope, administered the canon law (so far as it was subject to merely human control).
In the decretal Proposuit, Innocent III proclaimed that the pope could, if circumstances demanded, dispense from canon law, de jure, with his plenitude of power. He based his view on princeps legibus solutus est ("the prince is not bound by the laws"). Because the pope was above the law, time or precedent did not limit his power, and he could dispense with any law.
Such a dispensation was not, strictly speaking, legislative, but rather a judicial, quasi-judicial, or executive act. It was also, of course, subject to the proviso that his jurisdiction to dispense with laws was limited to those laws which were within his jurisdiction or competence. "[T]his principle would have been a commonplace to anyone who had studied in Bologna."
By this power of dispensation, the pope could release clergy and laity from the obligations of the canon law in all cases that were not contrary to ius divinum and even in a few cases that were. This power was most frequently invoked to enable laity to marry notwithstanding impediments of affinity or kinship, and to enable persons labouring under an irregularity (such as of bastardy, servitude, or lack of age) to take orders or become regulars.