A reader writes:
I certainly agree generally that there is this difference…but this raises a question:
In the observation on the difference in the Roman vs American approach to law–where does that leave those who are engaged in liturgical abuses etc?
Can it not be said then that well…Rome does not REALLY mean for the rubics etc to be so fully followed….etc??? Does that not just undo everything?
I assume this would not be the case…enlighten us.
Indeed, it is not the case, but this is one of those situations where enlightenment comes only with difficulty.
While Rome-written law is more prone to unwritten exceptions and legamorons than America-written law is, we both have them, and you just have to have a feel for them based on your knowledge of the culture in question.
Thus in America laws against speeding usually function as legamorons but laws against homicide do not.
The government isn’t nearly as serious about enforcing the speed limit as it is laws against murder. Americans know this instinctively because they have the experience of living in their culture and noticing the difference in seriousness with which the two cases are treated by the government. Unsolved murders give rise to extensive police investigations. Unsolved violations of the speed limit do not.
Roman law, being produced by a high-context culture, has more unstated exceptions and legamorons than our laws, but this does not make Roman law meaningless any more than the unstated exceptions and legamorons in American law make it meaningless.
The real question is how to know when Roman law contains an unstated exception or legamoron.
That’s something that the folks in the Vatican–who are actually immersed in the culture that wrote the law–tend to pick up by experience. It’s part of the context they bring to the interpretation and application of the law–the same way Americans observing their own culture figure out that murder laws are intended more seriously than speed limit laws.
For those who don’t work at the Vatican, courses in canon or liturgical law at seminaries and universities are meant to impart that context–or as much of it as possible–to students so that they begin to acquire the context, too.
If you haven’t had those courses but work extensively with canon and liturgical law, you can begin to absorb it that way as well.
That’s the category I’m in. I’ve worked enough with canon and liturgical law over the years–talking to canon lawyers and liturgists, reading books on the topics, reading documents that Rome issues dealing with them–that I’ve absorbed enough of the context to have something of a "feel" for where some of the exceptions and legamorons are.
Sometimes documents that Rome issues point to these directly. For example, Redemptionis Sacramentum has a three-fold classification of liturgical abuses as graviora delicta ("more grave delicts"), "grave matters" and "other abuses." What they put in what category tells you what they are going to be the most strict about.
Similarly, there was a letter by the CDW a while back in which it was pointed out that while the laws regarding posture at Mass are intended to provide "to ensure within broad limits a certain uniformity of posture" but not to "regulate posture rigidly in such a way that those who wish to kneel or sit would no longer be free." That kind of response screams legamoron or unstated exception.
And so the posture laws at Mass admit more flexibility than those regarding the graviora delicta, such as throwing away the consecrated species.
After you have enough experience watching Rome apply its law in concrete cases, you start getting a feel for what they’re really concerned about and where they’re only gesturing in a general way at what they want to happen.
The posture of the laity at Mass laws are gesture laws. They really don’t care if everyone else is standing and you choose to sit or kneel. As long as the laity are in the pews and not being disruptive, they aren’t going to get worked up about what posture you’re in.
That’s why you may hear me say on the radio that Rome really won’t mind if a family or group of people at Mass holds hands voluntarily–even though that posture is not mandated in the liturgical books–but it will be more concerned if people are being forced to hold hands against their will. That’s interfering with others–it’s disruptive and gets people upset, and they don’t want the laity acting disruptively.
I’m not sure how to put this next point, but one of the reasons for this is that Rome doesn’t expect that much from the laity. It wants them to be at Mass and watch and listen and hopefully sing and pray and not be disruptive. It doesn’t expect them to have an intimate familiarity with liturgical law and its punctillious observance.
This grows out of a mindset which is in some way a hold over from the Middle Ages, when the laity were almost uniformly uneducated peasants, and you can’t ask too much of them. From an ecclesiastical perspective, we laity are in a sense just in from slopping the pigs, and while it is praiseworthy if a few pigsloppers take enough interest in the Mass to learn the details of liturgical law, this is the exception and not the rule–and always has been.
So as long as the laity are in the pews and relatively calm and not shouting or brandishing pitchforks, Rome doesn’t so much mind if they’re not all in the same posture.
But not all laws connected with the laity display that level of flexibility. For example, the laws against lay folks preaching the homily are meant seriously. Letting lay folks preach homilies starts to blur the line between the priests and the pigsloppers, and that is a Bad Thing.
You can tell that they really mean those laws because of how frequently they reiterate them.
And so, over time, one can develop a sense of what laws are strict ones and what laws aren’t, but it takes work and careful attention.
Which raises Ed Peters’ point about whether for a global organization a high-context approach to the law is the best way to go. Given that the vast majority of Catholics–and even bishops–do not and cannot share all of the context that suffuses the Vatican itself, it could make what Rome wants a lot more obvious if they were more clear and explicit in the way they write law.