Ideali e diritto canonico. Il contesto giuridico. (Rik Torfs, Ideals and Canon Law. The Legal Context)

Is it possible to translate Christian ideals into legal rules? Sohm's criticism of canon law denied that a law of the coercive type could achieve such an objective, while the Roman Catholic theorists of the Church as a societas perfecta considered a complete legal system to be innate to the ecclesiastical institution. Both of these formulations idealise canon law: the Protestant version uses the formula sola scriptura, which requires a biblical foundation for all the rules of the Church; the Catholic version uses the formula sola theologia, in which the basis is of the dogmatic type. This latter approach may tend to reduce canon law to a set of norms, rather than to consider it a combination of norms, practices and procedures: this is useful to an idealised view of the law that ignores its real aspects. Different are the ways by which ideals can affect the canon law system: sometimes they reinforce the existing legal structures, at other times they promote more advanced ones. In this regard the concept of divine law appears to be determinant, depending on whether it is considered unalterable or not, and therefore whether it is seen as a limit to the development of the system or a dynamic factor of it. In reality, canon law seems to be governed by possible principles, rather than in terms of ideals without ambiguity, in terms of paradoxes.