Good reform in the Church builds on the past while trying something new

One thing that happened last month, without anybody noticing, was a humble little anniversary on May 27. On that day in 1917, Pope Benedict XV promulgated the “Codex Iuris Canonici,” the first ever complete, universal Code of Canon Law for the Roman Catholic Church.

Up until the 1917 Code, the Church had a dizzying collection of decrees, decretals, books and bulls, a hodge-podge of rules from different sources and times, sometimes seemingly in direct contradiction to each other, and often written out in larger contexts, like letters between bishops or norms of synods and councils, or even school textbooks that wound up being used like law codes. It was difficult to interpret. Even the cornerstone of this collection promised trouble, a 12th Century legal textbook titled “Concordantia discordantium canonum,” The Concordance of Discordant Canons.

To fix this, on May 14, 1904, Pope St. Pius X established a commission to draft what would become the 1917 Code. By 1912, under the leadership of Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, the majority of the first draft was done. Of course, World War I slowed the work, but eventually it was completed and promulgated, as I noted above, in May1917. To give people time to read it, however, and adapt as necessary, the new book of laws didn’t go into effect until May 19, 1918.

All around the world, bishops, priests and canon lawyers read it and started asking questions about it. A flurry of letters went back and forth. May 19, 1918, came and went, and then, a miracle happened: the new law code, which radically simplified a complex, dizzying, centuries-old legal system that the Church both needed and couldn’t quite understand, worked just fine.

Credit for this, according to most historians, goes to Cardinal Gasparri, a man whose mind might have been the original model for the internet. He had read and retained the majority of the corpus of ecclesiastical law and he had a genius for research. Contemporaries described his office walls as completely covered with shelving for books, scrolls, tracts – written and printed material of all kinds. Hence, he did not just make up each of the canons of the 1917 Code. Rather, Gasparri made sure each canon synthesized the many laws that had come before. So, time limits for procedures, steps in the procedures themselves, terminology and distinctions were all reformed but were sufficiently similar to what had come before that there were no major disruptions.

Indeed, it worked so well, that when a new reform of Church Law was proposed by the Second Vatican Council, no one hesitated to start composing another Code, rather than just adding qualifying decrees, decretals, books and bulls to the 1917 Code. No one was going back to the way things had been!

Good reform in the Church always follows this pattern, I believe. It builds on what has gone before but is not afraid to introduce new systems that, only by taking the risk of trying, we realize are better than what came before.