Word: canon
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Pope Paul called the Second Vatican Council "the beginning not the end" of renewal in the Roman Catholic Church, but apart from the vernacular liturgy, change has come slowly. To get on with reform, a study group of the Canon Law Society of America-representing the U.S. experts who teach and explain the church's juridical code-met this month in Pittsburgh and put forth a series of recommendations for carrying out the spirit of Vatican...
...proposals, which emphasize human rights rather than church discipline, deal not only with the canon-law code but with basic constitutional problems of the church. Arguing that the church should incorporate more of today's democratic ideals in its structure, they urge a more distinct separation of executive, legislative and judicial functions. Under the present code, explained Jesuit Ladislas Orsy of Catholic University, there is a certain "imbalance" in church government: in practice, the offices of the Roman Curia both plan church regulations and enforce them. A wiser mode of government would be to have the law-creating function...
Elected Bishops? In the same spirit, the study group, which included theologians and Biblical experts as well as canon lawyers, proposed restoration of the ancient tradition by which laity and priests participated in the selection of bishops and elimination of free-and-easy transfer of bishops from see to see. Other proposals...
Such proposals, which would be radical enough coming from a modern German theologian, are all the more so coming from canon lawyers, who by the nature of their profession tend to be conservatives. Although church officials from the beginning of Christianity found it necessary to draw up rules of proper ecclesiastical behavior, the first collection of such laws dates only from the Middle Ages. Inspired by the revival of study of Roman civil law, clerical scholars began to organize the various pronouncements of Popes and councils on ecclesiastical discipline over the centuries, deciding what rules were relevant. Canon...
Judge of His Accuser. Based on the presumption that law is a means of enforcing community discipline rather than a guideline for regulating a society of equals, canon law contains numerous inequities that have become glaringly obvious in recent years. There are, for example, almost 50 canons detailing the duties of bishops, only one on the rights of laymen in the church. When Father William DuBay* of Los Angeles charged two years ago that his bishop, James Francis Cardinal Mclntyre, should be removed from office on grounds of "gross malfeasance in office," he had no chance for an unbiased hearing...