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canonical age

American  

noun

Ecclesiastical.
  1. the age specified by canon law when a person becomes eligible to participate in a certain rite or hold a certain office.


Example Sentences

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Both Fellay and Galarreta are also under the canonical age requirement of 35 for bishops.

From Time Magazine Archive

As he was only twenty-three, and the canonical age for ordination is twenty-four, the Bishop of Treviso wrote to Rome to obtain a dispensation.

From Pope Pius the Tenth by Forbes, F. A. (Frances Alice)

In the consecration of their bishops, they pay no regard to canonical age, and the authorities of the Greek church seem to bend to the peculiar exigencies of the case.

From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 60, No. 372, October 1846 by Various

Monsieur," said Ursule, a woman of canonical age, conducting the Abbe de Rastignac by the gallery through the garden, "Monsieur Bonnet told me to ask if you had breakfasted.

From The Village Rector by Wormeley, Katharine Prescott

That son was now the Reverend Thomas Beach, Rector of Kencote, to which preferment the Squire had appointed him nearly thirty years before, when he was only just of canonical age to receive it.

From The Squire's Daughter Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons by Marshall, Archibald

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