A Question of Interpretation: The Roman Rota and the Theology of Marriage

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (39) ◽  
pp. 425-437
Author(s):  
Aidan McGrath Ofm
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
Complete Reversal ◽  
The Law ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Way

Judges need guidance if they are to apply the law in particular circumstances with an even hand. For Roman Catholics, Canon 19 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law provides this guidance by reference to the practice of the Roman Curia and by the constant opinion of learned authors. Useful as these supplementary sources are, they mean that judges have to trust that those responsible for making decisions in the Roman Curia and the learned authors have drawn their conclusions on a sound basis. This study considers what happened when a specific document was misunderstood in the Roman Catholic Church for almost four hundred years. The document, a letter from Pope Sixtus V to his Nuncio in Spain in 1587, responded to a specific query concerning the capacity for marriage of men who had been castrated. The interpretation of the letter defined the Roman Catholic Church's concept of marriage in general and its understanding of the impediment of impotence for four centuries. In the twentieth century, several Roman Catholic judges and canonists refused to take at face value the conclusions offered by other judges and learned authors, and decided to carry out their own analysis of the document in question. This resulted in a complete reversal of the way in which marriage cases were considered by the Apostolic Tribunal of the Roman Rota, and contributed to the emergence of a much richer and more integrated theology of marriage.

The Use of the Term ‘Pastoral’ in the 1983 Code of Canon Law with Reference to the 1917 Code

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
James Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
Ecclesiastical Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Latin Church

This article compares the use of the term ‘pastoral’ in the canon law of the Western Latin Church as it occurred in the 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law and then in the revised Code of 1983. This is because the revised Code increased the use of the term ‘pastoral’ and I wish to see if its meaning had changed and, if so, in what way. Hence, the article considers how ‘pastoral’ occurred in the 1917 Code and then in the equivalent canons in the 1983 Code. There follows comparison with the earlier canons, which were sources for the 1983 canons to see if the term has changed in meaning and, if so, what that change is. I am interested to track the use of ‘pastoral’ because it has become ubiquitous in the churches and in society and has different meanings and expectations associated with it. As far as canon law and ecclesiastical law generally are concerned, it is interesting to consider how the term is used and this article is a contribution to an understanding of ‘pastoral’ in the law of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland and its Newsletter

1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (25) ◽  
pp. 284-285
Author(s):  
Robert Ombresop
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Pope John Paul Ii ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
John Paul Ii

The organisation now known as the Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1957, and its Newsletter was first published in 1969. The activities, publications and achievements of the Society within the Roman Catholic Church are manifold, and were acknowledged by Pope John Paul II when he granted an audience to participants of the 1992 annual conference held in Rome. This papal address is printed at the beginning of The Canon Law: Letter & Spirit (London 1995), the full commentary on the 1983 Code of Canon Law prepared by the Society.

Papal Primacy: An Anglican Perspective

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (33) ◽  
pp. 112-126
Author(s):  
John Hind
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
Ecclesiastical Law ◽  
The Church

I am grateful to the Ecclesiastical Law Society and the Canon Law Society of Great Britain and Ireland for their invitation to address this theme, although I have to confess, as a non-lawyer, I do feel rather a fraud standing here. I take comfort, however, first from the fact that, albeit welcome, your invitation was unsought, and second from my understanding that the purpose of canon law is to give legal expression to the theology of the church and that the purpose of the theology of the Church (in its positive and articulated aspects) is to explain the purposes and the work of God. In other words, the ultimate point of canon law is and must be pastoral, as is well expressed by the last canon, Canon 1752, of the 1983 Code of Canon Law for the Roman Catholic Church, with its reference to ‘the salvation of souls, which in the Church must always be the supreme law’.

The Catholic Tribunal System in the British Isles

1991 ◽  
Vol 2 (9) ◽  
pp. 213-221
Author(s):  
Gordon Read
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
Church Life ◽  
The Church

“The claim to have succeeded in covering every side of Church life at the conclusion of the herculean labour of codification on this scale would indeed be a bold one, and one very uncongenial to the spirit of English law”, comments the report entitled ‘The Canon Law of the Church of England’. Despite the production of a Code of Canon Law for the Church of England, the provisions of law as applying to the Church of England are much more complex, involving not only the provisions of the Code, but also Common Law, Statute Law, judicial decisions and occasional survivals from Mediaeval Canon Law. For this reason although the ecclesiastical courts of the Church of England and of the Roman Catholic Church have common origins and features, there are also many differences, not only in structure, but in the material that comes before them.

The Restricted Eschaton of the Dutch Roman Catholics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Th. Clemens
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
United Provinces ◽  
The Way

What did the eschaton of the Dutch Roman Catholics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries look like? That is the question I will attempt to answer in this article. Before doing so, I should like to note that it is essential to know the expectations, eschatological and otherwise, of a group to get to know its mentality. It is difficult, however, to gauge the nature of expectations and the way in which they operate and it is impossible to arrive at exact ‘measurements’. This article will therefore above all be concerned with the way in which expectations were nourished by doctrinal and devotional books. In addition, it will also refer to the literature about the history of the so-called Dutch Mission—the Roman Catholic Church in the Republic of the United Provinces—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

II. Modernization of the Papacy and Catholicism in the Postmodern: Legacy and Challenges to Vatican I

Horizons ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-119
Author(s):  
Massimo Faggioli
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Pope Francis ◽  
Vatican I ◽  
The One ◽  
Pius Ix ◽  
The Way

In the ongoing aggiornamento of the aggiornamento of Vatican II by Pope Francis, it would be easy to forget or dismiss the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Vatican I (1869–1870). The council planned (since at least the Syllabus of Errors of 1864), shaped, and influenced by Pius IX was the most important ecclesial event in the lives of those who made Vatican II: almost a thousand of the council fathers of Vatican II were born between 1871 and 1900. Vatican I was in itself also a kind of ultramontanist “modernization” of the Roman Catholic Church, which paved the way for the aggiornamento of Vatican II and still shapes the post–Vatican II church especially for what concerns the Petrine ministry.

‘Anglicanism’ and the Origins of the Church of England

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-334
Author(s):  
Peter McCullough
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
Historical Sketch ◽  
Formative Years

This article aims to provide an introductory historical sketch of the origins of the Church of England as a background for canon law in the present-day Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church. Written by a specialist for non-specialists, it summarises the widely held view among ecclesiastical historians that if the Church of England could ever be said to have had a ‘normative’ period, it is not to be found in its formative years in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, and that, in particular, the origins of the Church of England and of what we now call ‘Anglicanism’ are not the same thing.

Reviews of the Literature

1952 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-44
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Church Attendance ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Social Actions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City ◽  
Roman Catholics

With the assistance of ten students and six priests over a period of 12 months, the head of the department of sociology at Loyola University of the South conducted a field study of the social actions of parishioners and clergy in a single Roman Catholic Church unit in the city of New Orleans. The methodology and conceptual framework of the analysis of action within the context of the social institution, viewed structurally and functionally, have been magnificently adhered to. Religious actions, conceived as such by the actors and by others who interpret their behavior, are the substance of this study in parochial sociology. Data were collected by patient observation of the many aspects of the detailed religious patterns of action in which Roman Catholics engage. These are, among others, the typical and atypical behavior associated with church attendance, the sacraments, retreats, missions, recruitment for the priesthood, special devotions and feast-days, and the observances relating to baptism, matrimony and death.

The Never-Ending Story? Or, Does the Roman Catholic Church Remain Vulnerable to Charges of Improper Handling of Clergy Child Sex Abuse?

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick S Nash
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Change ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Sex Abuse ◽  
Organizational Settings ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Child Sex Abuse

Abstract This article explores whether the Roman Catholic Church’s response to the clergy child sex abuse scandal shields it from further charges of improper handling of cases. It begins by noting the current topicality of institutionalized abuse and how several high-profile public inquiries have recently been established to investigate child sex abuse across a range of secular and religious organizational settings. Although numerous religious institutions have become embroiled in clergy child abuse crises, the Catholic Church has come in for particular scrutiny and condemnation on account of its distinctive institutional characteristics which have exacerbated its own abuse scandal in a uniquely severe way. The Church’s own understanding of this issue is that a culture of antinomianism has taken root within the clerical hierarchy and that, were canon law to be applied properly, the crisis would be resolved. This contrasts quite dramatically with the typical external understanding of the crisis which sees the canonical legal system as part of the problem, namely the Church’s refusal to cooperate fully with the secular criminal justice system and effective assumption of a criminal jurisdiction of its own. The article concludes with a final prognosis of the prospects of fundamental legal and cultural change.

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