June 22, 2007 – An Introduction to the Canonical Achievements of Pope John Paul II
His Holiness Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła, reigned 1978 to 2005) was not a jurist-pope in the tradition of, for example, Pope Gregory IX, who directed St. Raymond of Peñafort in the production of the Liber Extra, also called Decretales. St. Raymond’s work served as a cornerstone of canon law until the twentieth century. Other examples of jurist-popes abound: Pope Innocent IV was a curial canonist during the drafting of Gregory’s Decretales. Innocent’s Apparatus in quinque libros decretalium was regarded by many as the best commentary on decretal law ever produced. The Baroque Pope Benedict XIV, often called the first modern canonist, authored extensive canonical publications both before and after his elevation to the Chair of Peter. Some of Benedict’s work remained in print until the twentieth century. Finally, Pope Pius XII, as a young priest with doctoral degrees in canon and civil law, served as an immediate assistant to Pietro Cardinal Gasparri while the master drafted what would become the Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law. Pope John Paul II, in contrast, left us no imposing legal treatises, presided over no legislative councils, and rendered no significant judicial decisions. But do not conclude from this that my thesis is basically mooted; to the contrary, far from being a canonical sleeper, the papacy of John Paul II had an enormous impact on the canon law of the Catholic Church.
I will divide my remarks into three main areas. First, I will try to set out in some detail what John Paul II actually did in the area of canon law. Even trained canonists have trouble keeping track of the many canonically complex areas of ecclesiastical life that John Paul II worked in, and most non-canonists are quite unfamiliar with the breadth of the fontes cognoscendi—the basic texts and works containing the law—developed during his lengthy pontificate. This Article should help the reader to recognize the major areas in which modern popes impact ecclesiastical law and indicate those areas of law that John Paul II affected.
Second, I will briefly look in a more precise way at how John Paul II did what he did in canon law. His very approach, built on a genuine willingness to listen to others whose expertise might have exceeded his own in this area or that, left us an instructive, but disarmingly simple, example. John Paul II’s approach befits not only practitioners of canon law, but of civil and common law as well, and indeed all leaders of large projects and undertakings.
Finally—with what I hope is a healthy timidity inspired by realizing how much more others know than I about Catholic history, theology, and the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council—I want to suggest why Pope John Paul II did what he did in canon law. I do not wish to speculate on the psychological motives behind his approach to law; rather, I wish to discover the principle that guided his canonical thinking. I think that principle was missiological, specifically evangelistic, in nature.
Before we describe, however, the specific canonical activities of his papacy, I would like to devote a few words to highlighting how close we came to having a jurist-pope in John Paul II after all. The evidence for this lies in a small but fascinating episode from 1959, that is, at the dawn of Karol Wojtyła’s episcopal career. But for the startling nature of this event to stand out correctly, we need to back up just a bit.
Karol Wojtyła’s seminary education, given the terrible conditions then in Poland, contained little in the way of formal canon law. His post-war graduate studies in Rome centered on theology generally and mystical theology in particular, the latter not being a field known for its affinity to canon law. Finally, upon returning to Poland to teach, most of Wojtyła’s university activities revolved around philosophy, theology, and literature, and even these occupations would have been hard-pressed by the time he needed to devote to his pastoral duties. In brief, we have in Fr. Wojtyła’s primary academic years a very bright priest with almost no formal training in canonistics.
It is, then, almost unbelievable that, despite this very light background in canon law and notwithstanding many other time- demanding commitments, Fr. Wojtyła managed to publish a paper in 1959 on, of all things, a highly technical and long-disputed question regarding the medieval master canonist Gratian’s authorship of the famous tract De Penitentia. That article not only satisfied the perennially high editorial standards of the journal Studia Gratiana, but its findings were basically accepted by later canonical experts. If an episode like this had occurred in another age, one might be tempted to think that some obscure but competent scholar had hoped to gain wider acceptance of his hypothesis by retroactively attaching to his paper the name of someone who turned out to be a famous pope. But in our case, the obscure scholar himself turned out to be a famous pope.
On the faculty of the Jagiellonian University when Fr. Wojtyła first arrived, was one Dr. Adam Vetulani, a well-regarded scholar and historian of canon law. Apparently this seasoned academic could spot new talent among the junior faculty and was quick to try to make use of the young Fr. Wojtyła, who had just been assigned to teach at the university. Wojtyła looked back on the episode at a small gathering of friends and fellow faculty members held at the time of his elevation to the See of Krakow in 1964. As Bishop Wojtyła remarked to the small circle of friends:
Prof. Vetulani wanted to make a canonist of me, or at least a theologian cooperating with canonists, especially in studies of the great Gratian . . . But my love of philosophy and theology proved stronger. The only publication in this area appeared, thanks to the Professor, in Studia Gratiana in French, my only foreign publication.
What we see here is more than a glimpse at how close Pope John Paul II came to a life of canonical studies and perhaps fame. What we see is Karol Wojtyła’s uncanny ability to learn quickly and deeply from those around him, to master complex issues in fields not formally his own, and to make contributions to the development of those fields on par with those who have dedicated their lives to such work. I hardly need observe that it was a gift upon which he would draw many times in his life of service.
I close my observations on this episode by noting that 1959 was the same year that Pope John XXIII announced his intention to convoke an Ecumenical Council and to reform the Pio-Benedictine Code. Karol Wojtyła’s 1959 essay was, it turned out, his only significant foray into canonical writing until the day he signed into law the revised Code that had been called for that year by Good Pope John.