[Question:]{.underline} What is the authority of Canon Law?
[Answer:]{.underline} The Code of Canon Law is the book that contains all the principal laws that apply to the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church. The Eastern rites have different laws, and for this reason a different Code of Canon Law. The Code of Canon Law reflects the Pope’s jurisdictional authority to govern the entire Church, for those laws that are universal, or the Latin rite for those laws which are limited to the Code of the Latin rite.
Since the laws contained in the code belong to the realm of discipline, they are not in themselves doctrinal. They are consequently not ex cathedra doctrinal declarations, although they do presuppose the Church’s infallible doctrinal teachings as contained in the documents of the Extraordinary and Ordinary Magisterium. Their authority comes from the Pope’s supreme authority to govern the Church, rather than from his authority to teach.
The consequence of this is that they do not meet up with the four conditions required for an act of the Extraordinary Magisterium: they are not definitions; they often do not directly concerns matters of Faith and morals; they are often not for the universal Church (but only the Latin rite); they are not imposed in virtue of the Faith. The Code of Canon Law can, therefore, contain dangerous and erroneous statements and even laws which jeopardize the salvation of souls. Examples of these abound in the 1983 Code of Canon Law, profoundly penetrated as it is, by the admission of the John Paul II himself, by the ecclesiology of Vatican II. e.g. the reversal of the ends of marriage; the permission of sacramental sharing in both directions between Catholics and non-Catholics, and the new definition of the Church as going beyond the boundaries of the visible Catholic Church.
This means that we have to carefully examine the different laws contained in the 1983 code to see whether or not these disciplinary determinations are in accord with the infallibly defined Catholic Faith or not, just as we have to do with the Pope’s particular laws, such as the “promulgation” of the New Mass. If they are a legitimate exercise of the Pope’s authority, then we must accept them. However, if they are harmful to the Church’s teaching (as Communion in the Hand destroys Faith in the Real Presence), then these laws must be refused. An example of this is the law that permits annulments for psychological reasons, this being a direct attack on the sanctity and unity and indissolubility of marriage. It must always be remembered that if, in promulgating the Code and other laws, the Pope exercises his supreme authority to govern (i.e. there is no higher authority on earth), he never has an absolute and arbitrary authority, and that any laws which do not accomplish the end of the law, the salvation of souls, are null and void, and that he received his authority that he “might guard sacredly the revelation transmitted through the apostles and the deposit of Faith, and might faithfully set it forth” (Vat. I, Pastor Aeternus. Db 1836).
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.