JURIST Guest Columnist Paul Goda S.J. of Santa Clara University School of Law says that Pope John Paul II articulated a larger vision of law and freedom founded on respect for human life and dignity that transcends modern Western legalistic definitions…

I have been asked to write an op-ed on what might be called the "legal legacy" of Pope John Paul II, perhaps with some reference to his work on canon law.

I preface this short essay with that summary of my “charge” because I must begin with two disclaimers. The first is that I cannot nuance what I say, or even begin to say all that I was requested to say, in a thousand word op-ed. The second is that my expertise is civil law rather than canon law.

I do know, however, that as a legislator alone Pope John Paul II would have gone down in history with his name attached to the promulgations of the revised Code of Canon Law in 1983 and to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches in 1990. These two documents are a legacy to help the Church, and Europe, “breathe with two lungs,” with western and eastern traditions.

I read recently that Pope John Paul II amazed those around him when he personally reviewed and annotated the draft of the revised Code of Canon Law for the “western” church and that he also did so with the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. Both codes were built on centuries of tradition, with a great deal of modern study which were not his, nor was the original impetus his. And therein lies a truth. At the beginning of the Apostolic Constitution, Sacri Canones Pope John Paul II wrote in 1990:

The Fathers gathered in the seventh ecumenical council in 287 A.D. at Nicaea. The legates sent by my predecessor, Hadrian I presided. … the Council brought forth the Sacred Canons and confirmed them …

It is almost stunning to feel the years of history and tradition that those words reveal. The vision behind those years of history and tradition, is, I believe, the legacy in law of Pope John Paul II. I choose not to use the word legal because that word usually has connotations of describing a system composed of legalistic, dry formulas which destroy vision. St. Thomas Aquinas said that of the canonists once upon a time and it can still be true. On the other hand, the word law has myriads of meanings, depending on the assumptions of the one who verbalizes it. The meaning of law can range from raw power to visionary ideal.

In its ideal meaning, law is not just a legal system but a translation of the highest aspirations and loftiest challenges of human beings into the enforced norms of a community. Therein lies the sad tale of humanity, with political messianism, of whatever stripe, including the Roman Catholic Church, enforcing by blood its highest ideals. It is the terrifying temptation of power. Pope John Paul II, assailed for apologizing too much and for not apologizing enough, nevertheless made his apologies for the misuse of ecclesiastical power in the sack of Constantinople and the sins of the Inquisition and the Crusades and for anti-Semitism.

But he never failed to try to teach that the highest meaning of freedom is not simply the capacity to do what we will but rather the possibility of joining our wills freely with God’s will as living and loving human beings, challenged to give ourselves back to God by limiting our self-will, under law, and under love. In Evangelium Vitae, “The Gospel of Life,” written in 1995, he wrote his legacy, his vision:

Every individual, precisely by reason of the mystery of the Word of God who was made flesh, is entrusted to the maternal care of the Church. Therefore every threat to human dignity and life must necessarily be felt in the Church's very heart; it cannot but affect her at the core of her faith in the Redemptive Incarnation of the Son of God, and engage her in her mission of proclaiming the Gospel of life in all the world and to every creature.

Today this proclamation is especially pressing because of the extraordinary increase and gravity of threats to the life of individuals and peoples, especially where life is weak and defenseless. In addition to the ancient scourges of poverty, hunger, endemic diseases, violence and war, new threats are emerging on an alarmingly vast scale.

The Second Vatican Council, in a passage which retains all its relevance today, forcefully condemned a number of crimes and attacks against human life. Thirty years later, taking up the words of the Council and with the same forcefulness I repeat that condemnation in the name of the whole Church, certain that I am interpreting the genuine sentiment of every upright conscience: "Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where people are treated as mere instruments of gain rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others like them are infamies indeed. They poison human society, and they do more harm to those who practice them than to those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator."

In an address to a “Symposium on ‘Evangelium Vitae’ and Law,” in 1996, he argued that there is a necessary link between freedom and truth. I certainly do not mean, and I doubt very much that Pope John Paul II would have wished, to go back to a legal system with an Inquisition. St. Thomas Aquinas himself understood that not all of morality could be enforced by the legal system. But St. Thomas also understood that much of the gap between law and morality existed as an excuse for failure and not as an exercise of freedom in the deepest sense of the word. Pope John Paul II’s incessant argument against abortion was grounded in the reality of his understanding of the dignity of every human life and in the practical realization that generalized, legalized abortion is the enforcement of power by blood and that its broad use is giving to individuals what once used to be the province of armies.

It is the nature of the modern, developed western legal system to emphasize individual freedom, the legal capacity to do whatever one wants to do as much as possible. And that is indeed a kind of good. But the breadth of that legal freedom is paradoxically limited. John Paul II spoke to a larger vision of law and freedom.

The canons of law and tradition flowed from past centuries, from Nicaea and Hadrian I to Pope John Paul II. It will be over future centuries that the larger vision about law and freedom from the legacy of Pope John Paul II will be learned. Such learning always should begin with the present.

Father Paul Goda is a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, where he teaches community property, wills and trusts and jurisprudence. He is a member of the Jesuit order and was ordained in 1966.
——–