Canon Law

Abstract

The history of canon law, the western church’s legal system, reaches back almost to the origins of Christianity itself. Despite the aversion of Jesus and his earliest followers to legalism, their successors quickly discovered that good will and brotherly love were not by themselves sufficient to form a viable community. Rules concerning worship, property, and relationships within the community started to appear around CE 100 and multiplied rapidly thereafter. Canonical rules varied considerably from one region to another; however, until around 1140, when Gratian’s Decretum finally provided a body of texts that all could accept as binding. Popes and councils during the following centuries promulgated a substantial volume of new canon law and by 1250, the church had a working system of courts, complete with professional canon lawyers. These courts and lawyers sought with mixed success to regulate the personal lives and religious practices of medieval Christians in great detail. While the sixteenth-century Reformation rejected much (but not all) of medieval canon law, the Catholic Counter-Reformation sought to reshape the medieval law and to centralize authority firmly in the papacy, through the Roman Congregations that the Council of Trent established. In 1917, the Catholic church again reorganized its legal system, which had grown unwieldy over the centuries, in the form of a Code, which was further revised in 1983, which remains in force among Roman Catholics.