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Carlos José ERRÁZURIZ, Justice in the Church: A Fundamental Theory of Canon Law, Gratianus Series, trans, by Jean Gray in collaboration with Michael Dunnigan, Montréal, Wilson & Lafleur, 2009, 354 p. - ISBN 9978-2-89127-918-5 - C$39.95.
"The problem with instant gratification," a friend recently told me, "is it doesn't come fast enough." If you're looking for instant gratification, you won't get it from Carlos Errázuriz' Justice in the Church. It is, instead, a book worth reading and re-reading. Its value is more in the re-reading than the reading; and it's well worth the re-read.
Errázuriz wants to defend the place of canon law in ecclesial life, not as overlay or accretion, but as emerging from the very nature of the Church: not from the ecclesial community as one like other human communities, but from the very ecclessiology of the Church as a community of human beings with a divine aspect, established by God in and through Jesus Christ for the salvation of its members, and indeed for the salvation of the whole world. He does this by applying to the law of the Church a very traditional understanding of justice: Ulpian's "Iusitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius cuum cuique tribuendi" ("justice is the constant and perpetual determination to give to each what is his own"). He argues that justice is the object of ecclesial law, just as it is (or ought to be) of any law. The difference lies in how justice ought to be understood in the Church: What, ecclesially, is it that one is entitled to receive as his or her own? The A. has no doubts about the answer: Word and Sacrament, as the Church is commanded to provide them to the whole world by her Master, Jesus Christ; but also those human goods that every human person is entitled to out of respect for human dignity itself: life, liberty, reputation and privacy (named by...