13 October 2018

Word of the Day: Canon Law

CANON LAW. The authentic compilation of the laws of the Catholic Church. Two major compilations had been made before the Second Vatican Council, Gratian's Decree, assembled about A.D. 1140 by the Italian Camaldolese monk Gratian, and the Code of Canon Law, promulgated by Pope Benedict XV in 1917, and effective on Pentecost, May 19, 1918. Since the Second Vatican Council, a new Code of Canon Law was promulgated on January 25, 1983, by Pope John Paul II.
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The Catholic Church has the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West. It contains elements of Roman, Germanic, and Celtic law, as well as laws taken from both the Old and New Testaments. 

Gratian's Decretum was an attempt at creating a concordance of discordant canons because of the chaos of the millennium of development the law had gone through. It was 'unofficial', so in 1234, Pope Gregory IX issued his Decretalium Gregorii Noni, and later other Papal collections of canons were issued. All of these, together with Gratian's work, comprised the Corpus Juris Canonici, which was in effect until the Pio-Benedictine Code of 1917.


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