simony

The practice of giving or acquiring some sacred object, spiritual gift, or religious office for money, or carrying on a trade in such matters. The practice was most notorious in the mediaeval trade in indulgences.

Simony is the ecclesiastical crime and personal sin of paying for offices or positions in the hierarchy of a church, named after Simon Magus, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles 8:18-24.

The intertwining of temporal with spiritual authority in the Middle Ages caused endless problems with simony and accusations of simony.

Canon Law also outlawed as simony some acts that did not involve the sale of offices, but the sale of spiritual authority: the sale of tithes, the taking of a fee for confession, absolution, marriage or burial, and the concealment of one in mortal sin or the reconcilement of an impenitent for the sake of gain. Just what was or was not simony was strenuously litigated: as one commentator notes, the widespread practice of simony is best evidenced by the number of reported ecclesiastical decisions as to what is or is not simony.

Simony did serious harm to the moral standing of the Roman Catholic Church. Less devout writers, such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Erasmus, condemned the practice centuries later, while Blaise Pascal attacked the casuistic defenses offered by those accused of simony in his Lettres provinciales. While English law recognized simony as an offence, it treated it as merely an ecclesiastical matter, rather than a crime, for which the punishment was forfeiture of the office or any advantage from the offence and severance of any patronage relationship with the person who bestowed the office.