Catholic Canon Law

Abstract

Abstract Catholic canon law is the body of laws and legal principles sovereignly established by Catholic authorities to govern the Catholic Church. Current law has developed into two strands: Western, pertaining to the Roman Catholic Church, and Eastern, pertaining to the Catholic Eastern Churches. After centuries of abiding by the 1582 Corpus Iuris Canonici as the main source of law, the universal law of the church was codified by papal legislation in the twentieth century. The key source of law of Roman Catholicism became the Codex Iuris Canonici, established in 1917 and fundamentally reformed after the Second Vatican Council (the current code is from 1983). In 1990, the pope provided the Catholic Eastern Churches with the Codex Canonum Ecclesiarum Orientalium. Both codes endow the global Catholic Church with a legal frame for regulating the constitution of the church, its preaching, teaching, liturgies, sacraments, and the administration of ecclesiastical goods, sanctions, and procedures. The supreme legislator regulates the legal affairs of the global Catholic Church through further individual laws; local legislators address local Catholic churches’ legal affairs through numerous other laws. Following the Second Vatican Council’s development in ecclesiology, canonical legal theory has curbed much of the quasi-state ambitions of the old law, emphasizing the theological foundation of canon law and its purpose to serve the church as a community of Catholic faithful. This theoretical transformation creates new questions, such as whether it is possible to speak of current canon law as law.