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“Omnium in mentem” English translation by a reader
A reader has offered the following. Canonists will be interested:
I recently translated Pope Benedict’s revisions to the Code of Canon Law, which he made this past December in the document Omnium in mentem. It appears that there is still no English translation of this document available online, and so I was wondering if you would be interested in posting it on your blog. The translation is attached. If you have any questions, I would love to answer them.
Click HERE for the document in English.
The best thing about the translation is the return to the royal We: Everything that has been decide by Us in this Apostolic Letter.
Comment by robtbrown — 10 March 2010 @ 12:23 pmIs it just me or does Canon 1009 § 3 still seem overly vague? From this read it would seem that mixed marraiges are now harder to get or easier? Who would be the competant authority? Would this be the local parish priest or the some person, tribunal, etc. at the diocesean level?
Comment by moon1234 — 10 March 2010 @ 1:03 pmI’m confused moon – canon 1009 has nothing to do with mixed marriages. The new paragraph added to the canon clarifies the fact that deacons do not receive the mission and faculty of acting in persona Christi capitis, but are ordained for service. A necessary clarification, and this aligns the law of the Church with the catechism.
A mixed marriage is now no easier or harder to obtain than before – recourse is still needed to the competent authority, which is clarified in the following canon (1125) to be the local ordinary (see canon 134 for a definition of who a local ordinary is). The local ordinary must grant permission for a Catholic to marry a baptized non-Catholic (and a dispensation, ceteris paribus, for a Catholic to marry an unbaptized person. That hasn’t changed.
What has changed is that a person who was baptized Catholic but later abandoned the practice of the faith, either formally or informally, is still considered a Catholic. No dispensation or permission is required for him to marry another Catholic in the Church. This will have great impact in the United States, where people frequently drift from denomination to denomination. If John was baptized Catholic at grandma’s parish when he was a baby, but then raised as a Presbyterian by mom and dad – despite the fact that he never really considered himself Catholic, in virtue of his Catholic baptism, he is Catholic, and as such is bound by canon law.
Comment by Tim Ferguson — 10 March 2010 @ 3:37 pmThanks to the translator for this work.
The changes to clarify the meaning of the diaconate are interesting. I wonder whether the previous version’s lack of specificity had enabled any misunderstanding about the distinctions between the priesthood and the diaconate. Had some theologian tried to speculate that deacons could perform priestly acts in some circumstance?
Comment by chonak — 11 March 2010 @ 12:22 pm