Truth of the Law

In the article A New Impediment (2/27), Msgr. Thomas D. Candreva writes concerning The Instruction on the Criteria of Vocational Discernment Regarding Persons With Homosexual Tendencies: This document, if I am not mistaken, establishes a new impediment to ordination.... Further: The document does not use the word impediment,’ but it seems to be the proper category under which this prohibition must be considered. Then he proposes an interpretation as if a legal impediment had indeed been established.

For the sake of the truth of the law, I submit that Monsignor Candreva’s interpretation is incorrect and misleading. First, no Roman congregation has the legislative power to establish a new impediment; second, an instruction can never be equivalent to the enactment of a law.

To the first: only the pope has the power to add anything to the Code of Canon Law.

To the second: an instruction is always meant to facilitate the application of an existing law. See Canon 34: Instructions clarify the prescripts of the laws and elaborate on and determine the methods to be observed in fulfilling them. Also, the Pontifical Commission for the Revision of the Code of Canon Law stated as a guiding principle, No law can be enacted in the form of instruction (Communicationes, 1982, p. 136).

It follows, on two counts, that the instruction is not and cannot be a piece of legislation. Consequently it does not establish a new irregularity or impediment to ordination, as they are defined and listed (following an old tradition) in Canons 1041 and 1042 of thecode.

The instruction has the authority of a prudential directive (nothing more and nothing less), strictly within the framework of the existing laws, as to how the general criteria for admission to seminaries should be applied. It leaves, however, the final concrete judgment about the suitability of a given candidate to the discretion of the person authorized to admit him. Interestingly, the congregation is putting more trust in the judgment of a living person who meets the candidate than in an abstract, general and impersonal legal normas an impediment would be. This makes a world of difference in theory and in practice, in approaching the problem and in dealing with human beings. Verbum sap sat: let the wise understand it.

Ladislas Orsy, S.J.