Towards Refining the Notion of ‘Office’ in Canon Law

* Professor of Canon Law, Saint Paul University, Ottawa 1 All translations in this study are mine. 2 May, commentary in Handbuch des katholischen Kirchenrechts, 2nd ed., ed. Joseph Listl and Heribert Schmitz (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1999) 175. 3 Chiappetta, Il Codice di Diritto Canonico: Commento giuridico-pastorale, 2nd ed. (Rome: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1996) 1:231. These could not be considered offices without canonical provision, which certainly is not done in the case of godparents and sacristans; but this points to the need to include canonical provision as a defining element of office. 4 According to Jesús Miñambres, “The principal traits of the concept of ecclesiastical office have not yet been pacifically shared by all the authors.” See “Concorso di diritti nelle provviste canoniche,” in Ius Ecclesiae 7 (1995) 115. 5 Juan IgnacioArrieta describes five of the “more useful classifications” of offices: by origin, by the nature of the position, by the scope of competence, by stability, and by the manner of designating the officeholder. See Exegetical Commentary on the Code of Canon Law, ed. Ángel J. Marzoa, Jorge Miras, Rafael Rodríguez-Ocaña, English language edition ed. Ernest Caparros et al. (Montréal: Wilson & LaFleur, 2004) 1:897–898. He offers his own classification of offices in Diritto dell’organizzazione ecclesiastica, Pontificio Ateneo della Santa Croce, Trattati di Diritto 3 (Milan: Dott. A. Giuffrè Editore, 1997) 154–156. 6 Officium also has other meanings in canon law, especially that of “duty” and, less commonly, an institution of administration such as a catechetical office (c. 775, §3). It can also refer to secular offices, e.g., canons 289, §2; 317, §4; 385, §§3–4; 1042, §2. See Hubert Socha, commentary in Münsterischer Kommentar zum Codex Iuris Canonici, ed. Klaus Lüdicke (Essen: Ludgerus, 1984) 145/1 and 145/5. 396 The Jurist 70 (2010) 396–433 TOWARDS REFINING THE NOTION OF ‘OFFICE’ IN CANON LAW John M. Huels* Canon 145, §1 of the Code of Canon Law (CIC ) defines ecclesiastical office (officium) as “any stable position (munus) established by divine or ecclesiastical ordinance to be exercised for a spiritual purpose.”1 This definition has been critiqued by authors for being too broad and imprecise. Georg May dismisses it as “infelicitous and practically unusable.”2 Luigi Chiappetta says that something is lacking in the definition because it can be applied to positions and competencies that are not ecclesiastical offices in the juridic sense, like catechist, godparent, or sacristan.3 This lack of technical clarity and juridical precision has resulted in relatively little consensus among the authors on the essential elements of office4 or the ways of classifying offices.5 Also contributing to the lack of clarity is the inconsistent use of different terms closely related to office such as benefice, dignity, ministry, and munus, and the word officium itself is used variously in the law.6 The Eastern code, in marked contrast, uses officium exclusively for canonically established offices. For a discussion of this point, see Jobe Abbass, Two Codes in Comparison , 2nd ed. (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 2007) 152–155. 7 Souto, La noción canónica de oficio (Pamplona: EUNSA, 1971) 259. 8 Among the fundamental rights of the lay faithful is their eligibility for ecclesiastical offices (c. 228, §1), apart from those offices to which clergy have either the exclusive or the first right (c. 274, §1). 9 Labandeira, Tratado de derecho administrativo canónico, 2nd ed. (Pamplona: EUNSA, 1993) 153. towards refining the notion of ‘office’ in canon law 397 These are not new problems.A canon of the 1917 code (coincidentally also numbered 145, §1) offered two definitions of ecclesiastical office, one broad and the other strict, but a number of authors thought even the strict definition of office was too broad, and they offered their own stricter definitions. Authors differed on theoretical questions, especially whether an office is a juridic person. The Second Vatican Council, in Presbyterorum ordinis 20, added to the confusion by presenting a definition of office that was even broader than the broad definition of the 1917 code. In a book published in 1971, which is the most comprehensive study of the canonical notion of office in the 1917...