Archibishop Filippo Iannone's Lectio Magistralis

LECTIO MAGISTRALIS
Archbishop Filippo Iannone, O. Carm. 
Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops
Zagreb, Catholic University of Croatia, 1 June 2026

 

The Catholic University of Croatia was founded twenty years ago, on 3 June 2006. Its Decree of Foundation states:
«This University is necessary for the whole Church, and especially for this local Church in service to the Croatian people, for the growth and advancement of Christian culture and human development. The Catholic University of Croatia will serve as a bridge of encounter with other cultures and civilisations.

I am pleased to situate within the fulfilment of this mission — namely, to serve as a bridge and thus to foster dialogue between different cultures and societies — the recent establishment of the Faculty of Law within the University.

It is a widely shared principle that engagement between civil law (ius civile) and canon law (ius canonicum) contributes to a more comprehensive formation of both the jurist and the canon lawyer. For this reason, it is my hope that the University will actively promote such dialogue.

Canon law and civil law are distinct and autonomous within their respective spheres, yet they share a common source in the human experience of law, namely, the need to safeguard the dignity of the human person, with due respect for his or her fundamental rights. For this reason, a fruitful dialogue between the two legal orders is possible.

The Popes of the post-conciliar period have repeatedly reflected on the relationship between these two legal systems. In an Address delivered on 23 April 1993 to the participants in the International Congress of Canon Law, held on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the promulgation of the Code of Canon Law, Saint John Paul II stated:

When conceived, structured, interpreted and applied in this way, canon law, besides benefiting the Church in the fulfilment of her mission, acquires an exemplary dimension for civil societies, encouraging them to regard authority and their legal systems as a service to the community, in the supreme interest of the human person. Just as at the centre of the canonical order there is the person redeemed by Christ and made, through Baptism, a person in the Church, «with the duties and rights which, in keeping with their condition, are proper to Christians» (can. 96), so too civil societies are invited, by the example of the Church, to place the human person at the centre of their legal systems, never departing from the postulates of natural law (ius naturale), lest they fall into the dangers of arbitrariness or false ideologies. The postulates of natural law are in fact valid in every place and for all people, today and always, because they are dictated by right reason (recta ratio). ...

A few years earlier, speaking to Polish jurists, he had said:
«The legal order in force within society is not, and certainly cannot be, an end in itself. It is meant to serve the human being, the human person, as well as the social community in which he or she fulfils his or her duties. By creating the legal order and safeguarding its truth, you are serving the human person in a particular way. You must therefore feel deeply committed to ensuring the legal conditions that foster the development of the person in accordance with his or her truth and dignity. On the one hand, you must create such conditions and, on the other, safeguard them whenever they are in danger. »

In this sense, canon law, as a unique legal system that places the human person — considered in his or her entirety, with all his or her natural and supernatural needs — at its centre and foundation, ought to serve as an example for civil law.

Whereas for a long time canon law was largely indebted to Roman law and to the laws of various peoples, the perspective now seems to be reversing.  Certainly, Roman law, having chronologically preceded canon law, could not but exert a profound influence upon it in the course of its development, by providing it with juridical categories, owing to the degree of refinement it had already attained. It is consistent with the economy of the Incarnation that the Church should have adopted the juridical categories of the civilizations with which she came into contact, yet without losing — indeed, while preserving — her own specific identity. Canon law is, in fact, the law of the Church, which, although configured in its visible element as a true human society, is nevertheless instrumental to the action of the Spirit, the source of the supernatural communion of the members of the Church with one another and of each of them with God.

When speaking of dialogue, it is important to have a clear understanding of the proper identity of the elements being compared. Attention must therefore be directed to the identity of canon law. To this end, reference to the conciliar Magisterium is indispensable.

At the conclusion of the Jubilee Year, Pope Leo XIV began a series of catecheses dedicated precisely to the Second Vatican Council and to a rereading of its Documents, in order to rediscover the beauty and importance of this ecclesial event (General Audience, 7 January 2026) .

Indeed, it is the Magisterium that still constitutes the guiding star of the Church’s journey . As Benedict XVI taught: «With the passing of the years, the documents have not lost their timeliness; their teachings are revealed as particularly relevant to the new needs of the Church and of present-day globalized society» (First Message following the Mass with the Cardinal Electors, 20 April 2005) .

Among the first conciliar Documents examined by Pope Leo is the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen gentium . The Pope states:
«In response to the question of what the Church is, the Council Fathers describe her as «a complex reality» (no. 8). We now ask ourselves: what does such complexity consist in? Some might answer that the Church is complex in the sense of being “complicated”, and therefore difficult to explain; others might think that her complexity derives from being an institution bearing the weight of two thousand years of history, with characteristics different from those of any other social or religious body. In the Latin language, however, the word “complex” rather indicates the ordered union of different aspects or dimensions within one and the same reality. For this reason, Lumen gentium can affirm that the Church is a well-structured organism, in which the human and divine dimensions coexist without separation and without confusion.»

The human and divine dimensions are harmoniously integrated, without one overlapping the other; thus, the Church lives within this paradox: she is a reality both human and divine, welcoming the sinful person and leading him or her to God. (General Audience, 4 March 2026).

When reflecting upon the juridical order of the Church, one cannot, nor should one, disregard the theological vision that underlies it. An old maxim teaches: as society is, so too is its law. Therefore, the nature, characteristics, and purposes of canon law cannot be adequately defined except within the framework of a precise theology of the Church. It is beyond doubt that the theology of the Church developed by the Second Vatican Council presents several elements of novelty in comparison with what preceded it; yet it is equally certain that the Council did not suppress the institutional dimension of the Church. Philips, the Belgian theologian among the drafters of the Constitution Lumen gentium, writes that the orientation of the ecclesiological lines emerging from Lumen gentium is <extremely renewing and perfectly faithful to tradition> [L'Eglise et son mystere, Paris 1966, 323]. One must therefore be wary of the facile <before-after> schematization of the Council, if it is true that Vatican II set itself, and indeed proved to be, in continuity with tradition. To speak, therefore, of the <novelty> of the Second Vatican Council does not mean to assert a rupture with the whole tradition, where, on the contrary, the Council intended to return to the <sources>, reshaping the Church according to Scripture, Apostolic Tradition, and the theology of the Fathers. Rather, it means that the conciliar Magisterium, in its teaching on the Church, brought about a shift of perspective in relation to the previous approach, an operation that made it possible to balance and order, by properly focusing them, the various aspects of the one complex human-divine reality that is the Church. Pope Francis also recalls “the reversal which, following the Second Vatican Council, marked the transition from an ecclesiology modelled on canon law to a canon law shaped by ecclesiology.” 

It is well known that, on the eve of the Council, the prevailing ecclesiology was dominated by a juridical vision, which gave privileged emphasis to the notion of society as its key concept.

This had been the approach of the post-Tridentine period, marked by a sharply polemical confrontation with the Protestant Reformation and with the absolutist pretensions, and at the same time secularizing claims, of the emerging state powers, founded upon the principles of natural law philosophy (philosophia iusnaturalis). In response to these doctrines, which denied the visibility, unity, and public character of the Church in the name of a conception that sought to reduce the religious phenomenon to a purely individual, spiritual, interior, and egalitarian matter, and in an age in which legal positivism was gaining ground, Catholic controversial theology took a stand by justifying and defending the true doctrine and the rights of the Church, with the unintended, yet actual, consequence of accentuating her social and external character.

From this emerged a juridical doctrine which, drawing on Saint Robert Bellarmine, adopted the following as its fundamental thesis: <The Church is a perfect juridical society> (Ecclesia est societas iuridica perfecta), with an apologetic concern committed to demonstrating that Christ founded the Church as a perfect society (that is, complete in a manner analogous to the State, though in another order, namely the spiritual one); perfect because endowed with her own legislative, executive, and judicial power; founded as an unequal society, that is, hierarchical, in which, by divine law, there exists a distinction between those who govern (clerics) and those who are governed (laity), whose role is one of obedience to the sacred pastors or of acting under their mandate. This conception was strengthened by the definition of the primacy of the Roman Pontiff and by the reception of papal jurisdictional prerogatives through the work of the First Vatican Council. This universal, papal, ecclesiological-juridical vision is at the foundation of the Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law, promulgated by Pope Benedict XV on 27 May 1917.

A different ecclesiological conception emerges from the Second Vatican Council and constitutes the frame of reference and interpretative criterion of the current Code, promulgated by Saint John Paul II on 25 January 1983 and in force since 27 November of the same year.

«The instrument, which the Code is — writes John Paul II in the Apostolic Constitution Sacrae disciplinae leges — fully corresponds to the nature of the Church, especially as it is proposed by the teaching of the Second Vatican Council in general, and in a particular way by its ecclesiological teaching. Indeed, in a certain sense, this new Code could be understood as a great effort to translate this same doctrine, that is, the conciliar ecclesiology, into canonical language. If, however, it is impossible to translate perfectly into canonical language the conciliar image of the Church, nevertheless, in this image there should always be found as far as possible its essential point of reference» (Code of Canon Law, p. 27).»

One of the most significant aspects of conciliar ecclesiology, which I would like to emphasize here, is undoubtedly that which considers the Church as an “institutional form of communion”.

The Second Vatican Council, which will rightly go down in history as the Council of the Church, investigated the Church’s innermost nature and affirmed that she is a “mystery”; moreover, by returning to the biblical and patristic sources, the Council Fathers thus effected the transition from an ecclesiology inspired by the concept of the perfect society to an ecclesiology of communion.

The concept of communion, which synthesizes the ecclesiological doctrine of Lumen gentium, is very ancient; it has deeply permeated the Church’s consciousness and ecclesiological doctrine during the first millennium and continues to permeate the tradition of the Churches of the East. Now, the Church as communion is not a reality that is merely spiritual and invisible; in her earthly and historical phase, she is “in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race” (Lumen gentium, 1). As the intimate communion of men with God and among themselves, precisely because it is a communion of human beings (that is, made up of persons who, as such, inevitably retain the need for interpersonal, visible, and external relationships, and who are called to live and build communion according to the vocations and tasks entrusted by God to each one for the good of all), and precisely because these persons together are the Mystical Body of Christ, which continues throughout time His work of grace and salvation and becomes the sacrament of all this (that is, a sign which manifests, expresses, and at the same time effects, accomplishes, and realizes what it expresses), the Church as communion is at once invisible and visible, charismatic and institutional. And she is institutional because the unfolding of the Church’s historical life takes place through a dense network of relationships among different persons with different tasks, yet necessarily and obligatorily converging, in justice, toward the common good, which is communion.

For this reason, the Church is therefore a juridical reality: that is to say, a normative ordering of interpersonal social relationships, required by the social purpose, which is communion itself. The internal, invisible elements of communion are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the theological virtues, and, in Pauline expression, “life in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:23); such elements are ordinarily realized through external elements, namely the profession of faith, the sacraments, the exercise of charisms, and the ministries. The common possession of these goods unites the faithful in a true and dynamic ecclesial communion and brings the Church into being.

The Council rightly insists upon the indissoluble unity of the two constitutive elements of the Church, which are not merely juxtaposed but form a single whole. The external elements, therefore, are not simply added to the internal ones, but are situated and manifested within them, so that, in the absence of the external elements of communion, communion itself could not be socially realized among human beings. Consequently, both elements taken together — both equally and essentially constitutive — form this unity of the life of communion, such that the external elements are expressed and operate as signifying realities. This is what the Council taught in the well-known number 8 of Lumen gentium: “Christ, the one Mediator, established and continually sustains here on earth His holy Church, the community of faith, hope and charity, as a visible structure through which He communicates truth and grace to all. But, the society structured with hierarchical organs and the Mystical Body of Christ, the visible assembly and the spiritual community, the earthly Church and the Church enriched with heavenly things, are not to be considered as two realities, nor are they linked together merely in some accidental way. Rather they form one complex reality which comes together from a human and a divine element” (Lumen gentium, 8).

It therefore continues to be true that the Church is “constituted and organized in the world as a society” (Lumen gentium, 8) and that she is a “society structured with hierarchical organs” (Lumen gentium, 20) and “perfect” in the sense that, although always in need of purification (Lumen gentium, 6 and 8) and renewal, she possesses within herself all that is necessary to attain her proper end and is subject to no dependency of any kind, but rather “claims freedom for herself in her character as a spiritual authority, established by Christ the Lord” (Dignitatis humanae, 13). Yet all this takes place within a horizon in which both the social structure and the law derive not from similarity to civil society, but rather from an intrinsic ecclesial necessity, founded either upon the explicit will of Christ (divine law - ius divinum) or upon the human will of the Church, to whom has been entrusted the mandate to shepherd the flock. She carries out this mission also through the recognition and protection of what pertains to the faithful or is required of the faithful (the rights and duties of Christians in the different states of life), and through those organizational structures regarded as suitable instruments at the service of communion and the ecclesial mission.

Within this theological-biblical perspective, it belongs to the institutional dimension of the Church, and to a Code as an operative instrument, “not to replace faith, grace, and the charisms in the life of the Church or, above all, the charity of the faithful. On the contrary, its purpose is rather to create such an order in ecclesial society that, while assigning the primacy to love, grace, and the charisms, it at the same time renders easier their organic development in the life both of ecclesial society and of the individual persons who belong to it” (Sacrae disciplinae leges, pp. 25–26).

In conclusion. Precisely because the Church exists for the world, and is therefore at the service of all humanity, canon law, which inheres in the very nature of the Church, comes to strengthen all the characteristics proper to law itself as a human experience, foremost among them that of universality. For this reason, canon law cannot remain closed in upon itself, directed solely toward ecclesial society, but must also have a function for civil society. The awareness that canon law participates in the very nature and mission of the Church to be “a sign lifted up among the nations” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 2; Lumen gentium, 1) will ensure that the danger of its hardening into a self-contained “system” is overcome. In this sense, canon law, as a unique legal system that places the human person, considered in his or her entirety, with all natural and supernatural needs, at its centre and foundation, ought to serve as an example for civil law and to remain in dialogue with it.
 

[1] Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 95, art. 2) and Cicero (De re publica 3, 33). AAS 86 (1994), 247-248.
[2] Address to Polish Jurists, March 21, 1986, in: Communicationes 18 (1986), 33; original Polish version in: AAS (1986), 1083.
[3] On January 20, 1970, Paul VI, addressing the participants of the 1st International Congress of Canon Law, asserted that the ecclesiological vision of the Council had unsettled the canonist "in his habit, mainly directed toward basing his teaching on a centuries-old and unquestionable tradition and supporting it by comparison and relationship, first with Roman law... and then with the law of the nations to which the Church directed her evangelizing mission; which she will, for many obvious reasons, continue to do in her thought and her history; but, faithful in this post-conciliar hour to the doctrinal and disciplinary impulse of the great Council, she will seek in herself, in her intimate and mysterious constitution, the reason and the way for her ancient and renewed canonical discipline" (AAS 62 [1970], 108-109).
Paul VI explicitly returned to this question again in his address of September 17, 1973, to the participants of the 2nd International Congress of Canon Law, when he said: "Your first concern will not, therefore, be to establish a legal order modeled exclusively on civil law, but to deepen the work of the Spirit which is to be expressed in the law of the Church" (Communicationes 5 [1973], 131).
[4] Saint John Paul II also asserted at the conclusion of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000: "More than ever I feel the duty to point to the Council as the great grace from which the Church has benefited in the twentieth century" (Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte, 57).
[5] Cf. Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, Mission, Final Document: "The entire synodal journey, rooted in the tradition of the Church, has taken place in the light of the conciliar magisterium. The Second Vatican Council was, in fact, like a seed sown in the field of the world and the Church... The 2021-2024 Synod continues to draw strength from that seed and develop its possibilities. The synodal journey, in fact, puts into practice what the Council taught about the Church as Mystery and the People of God, called to holiness through permanent conversion flowing from listening to the Gospel. In this sense, it represents an act of further reception of the Council, prolonging its inspiration and highlighting anew for today's world the power of its prophetic message" (no. 5).
[6] Regarding the reading and interpretation of conciliar documents, the words spoken by Benedict XVI in his Address to the Roman Curia on the occasion of Christmas greetings, December 22, 2005, remain illuminating: "Everything depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or—as we would say today—on its correct hermeneutics, on the correct key to reading and application. Two contrary hermeneutics faced each other and clashed. One caused confusion, the other, silently but increasingly visibly, bore fruit. On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would like to call 'hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture'; it has frequently found favor with the media, and also with a part of modern theology. On the other hand, there is the 'hermeneutics of reform,' of renewal in continuity of the single subject-Church which the Lord has given us; it is a subject that grows in time and develops, yet always remains the same, the single subject of the People of God on the way."
This was emphasized again by the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in the Final Document: "The entire synodal journey, rooted in the tradition of the Church, has taken place in the light of the conciliar magisterium. The Second Vatican Council was, in fact, like a seed sown in the field of the world and the Church. The 2021-2024 Synod continues to draw strength from that seed and develop its possibilities. The synodal journey, in fact, puts into practice what the Council taught about the Church as Mystery and the People of God, called to holiness through permanent conversion flowing from listening to the Gospel. In this sense, it represents an act of further reception of the Council, prolonging its inspiration and highlighting anew for today's world the power of its prophetic message" (no. 5).
[7] Beginning with the General Audience of February 18, 2026.
[8] Message on the occasion of the 16th International Congress of the Consociatio Internationalis Studio Iuris Canonici Promovendo, September 30, 2017.