Canon Law as Ministry: Freedom and Good Order for the Church.

Canon Law as Ministry: Freedom and Good Order for the Church
By James A. Coriden
Paulist, $14.95, 205 pp.

James Coriden is one of the best-known canonists in the English-speaking world. Among other things, he is one of the authors of the authoritative The Code of Canon Law: Text and Commentary (1985). His excellent little book, The Parish in Catholic Tradition (1996), I reviewed favorably in these pages. His new Canon Law as Ministry states its fundamental thesis early on: "Canon law is primarily a ministry of the church." While the primary audience for this work is that broad part of the church that comes into direct contact with the workings of the canons (clergy, religious, lay leaders, and students of the "sacred sciences"), it is a very useful work for those who rail against "legalism" in the church without really understanding how, in fact, law works within the Catholic community. In order to make that connection, Coriden frequently shows how certain general strands of canonical legislation touch or do not touch the life of a parish.

After some lucid opening chapters on the development of laws within the church, Coriden argues that the first task of the canons is to ensure the freedom of the Christian who lives within the church. Drawing on both the new code for the Latin rite (1983) and that for the Oriental church (1990), he provides a long list of rights that every Christian, whether clerical or lay, possesses. Such rights are not insignificant. If, for example, the canons say that every person has a fundamental right to hear the Word of God and receive the sacraments of the church, that right has a concrete bearing on the places where priests are not available to serve the people of God. I mention that right since the closing of parishes for lack of a priest involves not just prudential judgments and theological truths (the essential mark of catholicity is full celebration of the sacraments) but rights in law as well.

The second task of canon law, Coriden asserts, is to sustain "good order." By "good order" he does not mean order only from the top down. (In fact, he criticizes John Paul II for modifying two canons in 1998 without due consultation, an exercise Coriden calls a scandalous abuse of papal authority.) Rather, it is that harmonious balance that holds in creative tension the local and the universal, the individual and the common good. It is for that reason he insists that the canonist exercises a church ministry--a ministry that ramifies to everything from liturgical celebration to pastoral strategies of various kinds. The posture of seeing canon law as ministry explains why Coriden frequently reverts to the parish to explain how one or another facet of law impinges on the lives of ordinary communicants.

Coriden takes up briefly the issue of marriage tribunals, a topic which deserves a book in its own right. In a tough paragraph he calls the current procedures dealing with the validity of marriages awkward, cumbersome, and in many parts of the world, nonexistent. Without going into detail, he argues for some alternative strategies that might be used to deal with the huge problem of divorce and remarriage. The range of those strategies is such that one would only hope that the author will use his considerable knowledge of the field to advance some further considerations. The one point he does insist on is this: most people who come to a tribunal seek forgiveness and reconciliation with the church and not (as ancient Roman law thinks) their status as marriageable or nonmarriageable. Here, as elsewhere, Coriden notes the tension between the roots of the canons in Roman law and a more recent desire to highlight their connection to the imperatives of the gospel life.

This unfailingly interesting and well-written book ends with a bibliography and a usable index. One hopes that Coriden will continue to write from his learned vantage point as a canonist who also has a deep sympathy for the ordinary Catholic.

Fitting for someone who spent many years in the Franciscan Order, Leonardo Boff, the Brazlian theologian, has had an abiding interest in Saint Francis. His 1984 biography of the saint reflected a close acquaintance with the standard scholarship, which is vast. This current volume is a series of meditations on the famous and much anthologized "Prayer of Saint Francis" ("Lord, make me an instrument of your peace...") which, of course, is ascribed to but was not written by Saint Francis.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.