Dispensation

• dispensation: in Roman Catholicism, the suspension of Church law by higher authority in order to avoid a hardship from too strict enforcement. Most famously, this power is used in annulling marriages and permitting weddings that do not conform with canon law. It was also used to give ecclesiatical titles and benefices too very young or otherwise ineligible people.

• dispensation: In religion, a distinctive arrangement or period in rekigious history. In Christianity, dispensations are a series of chronologically successive periods of Biblical history. The Mosaic dispensation, which extends from Exodus 20 to Acts, in other words, the history of the Jewish faith in Israel, is the longest and most important. → musaic