Benefice
From Freepedia
Originally a benefice was a gift of land (precaria) for life as a reward (Latin beneficium, 'means to do well') for services rendered.
Under canon law it came to mean an income enjoyed -often linked to some land administered- by a priest in chief of an acclesistical office, such as a parish or monastic establishment, or a post of canon in a chapter. Each benefice had a number of "spiritualities", or spiritual duties, attached to it. For providing these spiritualities, a priest would receive "temporalities", or pay. From the medieval period onward, priests administered sacraments to their flock of faithfull and provided other services as well, under normal conditions. The pastorally served community was to provide for the priest as necessary, often in the form of tithes (a land based tax; in many cases this was in time partially or wholly lost to a temporal lord), while the elite provided patronage and made significant donations, in time concentrating enormous wealth in the 'dead hand' (i.e. exempt from succesion – and often of some other taxes) of the church.
Over time, the benefice system was abused throughout Europe, with some nations and times being worse than others. As benefices came to priests through feudal patronage and for political considerations, priests occasionally held more than one benefice, called pluralism. This pluralism quite often resulted in absenteeism, where the priest would not take care of his benefice, but was often seen as a really good investment for a (usually noble) rich and influential family to buy, for example, trough simony for a younger son (not the heir, as an alternative to crusades etcetera) or other protégé, especially if he could also be their man in the powerfull clerical hierarchy. Other 'fat' benefices -even abbotships- were sometimes held in a perverse system were the elite held the nominal benefice with rich income, but (almost) never did any pastoral work, delegating this to far less payed priests of lower background. Furthermore, the lack of proper training untill the invention of seminars meant no quality guarantee: some priests were illiterate and a few even found to preach -ignorantly- heretical nonsense.
Such corruption later called for ecclesiastical reform in the church in the 15th and 16th centuries. Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, started as a significant leader in this drive for internal resourcing, but ended up starting the great Western Schisma (creating Protestantism, soon divided itself) in stead. After the Reformation, the new churches generally adopted systems of ecclesiastical polity that did not entail benefices, with the exception of the Church of England, whose founder, Tudor-king Henry VIII, confiscated most church lands (largely distributed amongst loyal nobles, however, otherwise the monarchy might have been financially independent from parliament) and abolished all monasteries. On the continent the French Revolution broke the back of the system by the Constitution civile du clergé, confiscating the vast capital of the church (mainly land; needed for the war effort) and paying for it by awarding the clergy that had lived from its proceeds a state salary (also a great means to get some grip on them), still in force in several countries including Belgium. At the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church called for the abolition of benefices in that church altogether.
