Council of Trent: Session XIV, Reformation, Chapter II

CHAPTER II. If a bishop shall confer any orders whatsoever on one not subject to him, be he even his own domestic, without the express consent of that individual's proper prelate, both shall be subjected to an appointed punishment.

And forasmuch as certain bishops of churches which are in partibus infidelium, (in the districts of unbelievers), having neither clergy nor Christian people, and being in a manner wanderers, having no fixed see, and seeking not the things of Christ, but other's sheep without the knowledge of their own pastor, finding themselves prohibited by this holy Synod from exercising episcopal functions in the diocese of another, without the express permission of the ordinary of the place, and then only in regard of those who are subject to the said ordinary, do, by an evasion and in contempt of the law, of their own rashness choose as it were an episcopal chair in a place which is not of any diocese, and presume to mark with the clerical character, and to promote even to the sacred orders of the priesthood, any that come unto them, even though they have no commendatory letters from their own bishops, or prelates; whence it for the most part comes to pass, that, persons being ordained who are but little fit, and are uninstructed and ignorant, and who have been rejected by their own bishops as incapable and unworthy, they are neither able rightly to perform the divine offices, nor to administer the sacraments of the Church: none of the bishops, who are called titular, even though they may reside, or tarry in a place within no diocese, even though it be exempted, or in a monastery of whatsoever order, shall, by virtue of any privilege granted them to promote during a certain time such as come unto them, be able to ordain, or to promote to any sacred or minor orders, or even to the first tonsure, the subject of another bishop, even under the pretext of his being his domestic fed constantly at his own table, without the express consent of, or without letters demissory from that individual's own bishop. The contravener shall be ipso jure suspended during a year from the exercise of pontifical functions; and the person so promoted shall in like manner be suspended from the exercise of the orders so received, for as long as to his own prelate shall seem fit.

Translation: J. Waterworth, The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (1848), Hanover Historical Texts Project transcription (1995).