Jimmy Akin

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.

John Allen has a very good piece on the culture gap between America and Rome and how it affects relations within the Church. The article sums up a lot of the differences that you find out if you spend serious time studying Rome and how it operates and is well worth reading.

Allen initially explains the cultural difference like this:

It would be flip to say that “Americans are from Mars, Romans from
Venus,” but there’s more than a smidgen of truth to the perception of
being on different planets.

As an illustration, he compares the American and Roman attitudes toward time:

To take just one small but telling example, consider the difference between American and Roman views of time. In the United States, we have a “microwave” culture. If we perceive a need, we want that need satisfied immediately. If there is a problem, we want a plan to resolve it by the close of business. If you don’t have such a plan, it’s either because you’re lazy or you’re in denial, and either way it’s unacceptable. Our motto tends to be that of Homer Simpson who, when told that it would take 30 seconds for a fried meal, responded: “But I want it now!”

Rome, on the other hand, is a culture notoriously accustomed to thinking in the long term. Its motto tends to be, “Talk to me on Wednesday, and I’ll get back to you in 200 years.” Rome is in that sense a “crock-pot” culture. The idea is that the food simmers for a much longer period of time, but if you get the ingredients right, it will be much more satisfying.

Although Allen doesn’t use the terms I’m about to, America (like England and Germany) has what some anthropologists have called a "low context" culture, while Italy (like the Middle East) has what is called a "high context" culture.

The difference has to do with how much background knowledge you are expected to have in order to function successfully in the culture. Low context cultures don’t require you to know that much of the local cultural lore in order to function successfully. That’s why, in America, if you can speak English and obey a few basic laws which are easy to look up, you can get along well. You don’t have to know all of the unwritten laws and lore and customs and tribal alliances that you would have to in a high context culture.

High context cultures, by contrast, assume that the individual does know the local lore. Among other things, this allows high context cultures to communicate in a way that is less explicit, more allusive. This is one reason that the Bible is as mysterious as it is: It was written in a high context culture that assumed the reader already knew the background to the documents, so it doesn’t waste time explaining that background. If you don’t have that background, the resulting document can seem obscure and mysterious.

(That background, or at least the theoogically salient bits, are preserved in the form of Sacred Tradition, which is why Sacred Tradition is needed to correctly understand Sacred Scripture. It’s the missing background material you need to make sense of Scripture. It’s also notable that sola scriptura arose in a low context culture of Germany, which assumes you don’t need extensive background information to understand a document.)

One of the ways in which high and low context cultures differs is in how they write law: Low context cultures spell everything out in detail in law since they aren’t relying on people to use their knowledge of the unwritten law in interpreting the text. They write law rigorously and, as a result, they expect it to be rigorously obeyed.

High context cultures, by contrast, use law to gesture at what they want to happen, but they admit a thousand unwritten exceptions. Consequently, the laws of high context cultures abound in legamorons.

Allen describes the situation like this:

For Anglo-Saxons, law is a lowest common denominator of civil behavior, and hence we assume that laws are meant to be obeyed. If we find that people aren’t obeying a given law, it’s a problem, and we either crack down or change the law. In Mediterranean cultures, on the other hand, law is more an expression of an ideal, and there’s tremendous room for subjectivity in interpretation and application in a concrete set of circumstances. Anyone who’s ever driven the streets of an Italian city knows what I’m talking about. The bar tends to be set high, with the implicit understanding that most people, most of the time, will far short to varying degrees.

This is a constant source of misunderstanding when the Vatican issues a draconian-sounding decree, which immediately elicits howls of protest from the United States about it being unrealistic or inhumane. Vatican officials are routinely exasperated by the reaction, since they fully expect that pastors and bishops will exercise good judgment about how it ought to applied in individual cases. Most recently, we saw this dynamic with the document from the Congregation for Catholic Education on the admission of homosexuals as seminary candidates. No one in Rome, including the authors of the document themselves, believes that it means absolutely no candidate with a same-sex orientation should ever be admitted to Holy Orders. They saw it as a call to careful discernment, not a blanket ban. (Admittedly, American Catholics can to some extent be forgiven the protest. As the old joke goes, we often have the worst of both worlds – Roman law applied by Anglo-Saxon bishops!)

Ultimately, Allen concludes that America and Rome–despite their culture gap–need each other, and he’s right.

GET THE STORY.