Concerning the competent forum

Attending to the fact that laymen ought not to involve themselves in ecclesiastical business, we interdict all and singular ecclesiastical persons established anywhere through our city and diocese from knowingly dragging any cleric to lay or secular courts, or from consenting to be dragged to such things, or from undergoing such forbidden judgments or answering there in any way, even under the penalty of the loss of their own causes thus moved, or even if judgment were given for them in such forbidden courts, or [under penalty of] the loss of feudal goods—excepting, however, those causes which we wish, as by law, to be treated.

Regarding the same matter of the competent forum, the chapter of the second book is to be observed, the tenor of which follows word for word:

"If, diligently, etc., you have asserted that you have held up to this time that it is lawful for a cleric to renounce his right, at least in temporal causes, and to appoint a lay judge for himself, especially where the will of the adversary has consented, and to keep an oath interposed upon this, you have answered, unmindful of the constitution which provides that a private pact cannot derogate from public law. Since, therefore, this law has been specially promulgated in the councils of Milevitanum an ancient North African council and Carthage, that clerics should not be dragged to public courts having left their own bishop—otherwise they lose their cause and are held as strangers from the communion—and that both bishops and deacons or any clerics in a criminal or civil matter, if they wish to clear themselves in public courts having left the ecclesiastical judge, even if a sentence has been passed for them, lose their place (and this in a criminal action; in a civil one, they lose what they might have gained if they had preferred to obtain their place), it clearly appears that not only unwillingly but even voluntarily they cannot make a pact that they might undergo secular judgments, since it is a general benefit, not a personal one, which could be renounced. But rather, it has been publicly granted to the entire ecclesiastical college, from which the pact of private persons cannot derogate, nor could an oath be lawfully kept which is formed against canonical statutes by illicit pacts."