The mystical body of Jesus Christ, the Church, is “constituted and organized in the world as a society” (Lumen Gentium (LG), 8). As such, the Church’s visible institutions are derived from and oriented toward the manifestation of her invisible realities. Among these institutions is law. In an essential and fundamental way, law in the Church governs the relationship between the visible and invisible, seeking to ensure that the social actions of the faithful among themselves and towards God and the Church conform to the ultimate law of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is, in a sense, an outworking of the whole mystery of Christ; the revelation in tangible forms of the hidden life of the Triune God.

In a particular way, then, the sacramental-liturgical life of the Church—which is the primary and privileged means of participation in that same mystery—demands regulation by law. The sacraments are the preeminent outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces of God. Their external elements are therefore not just signposts to what they are; they are intrinsic to their underlying reality.

Sacramental Law

Still more, the sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ the Lord and given to the Church. The Church alone, therefore, in accordance with her divine mandate, has the innate right and duty to ensure that the external signs employed in sacramental-liturgical acts conform to the gifts of grace they signify. This is achieved by the establishment and application of laws to govern this relationship.

Laws are used in this way first to regulate what is necessary for the validity of a sacramental-liturgical act. For instance, laws determine not only that bread and wine are required for the valid celebration of the Eucharistic offering, but also establish what is and is not bread and wine in the first place. For instance, the law establishes that the bread used at Mass must conform to certain requirements about wheat content, and that the wine must conform to certain requirements about its fruit and alcohol content. Non-observance of such laws leads to an invalid act, which thus lacks the sacramental reality.

Other laws govern what is necessary for a sacramental-liturgical act to take place according to the mind of the Church, that is, according to her general discipline. Of course, all laws state to some degree what is or what is not lawful, but some laws specify that if a given element is present or absent from an act then the seriousness of this infraction makes the act especially unlawful. If an illicit act is particularly egregious, it may even be accompanied by penal sanctions. For example, a priest is absolutely forbidden from consecrating bread or wine outside the Eucharistic celebration.¹ If he does so for a sacrilegious purpose, the act is still valid according to the principle of ex opere operato, but it is gravely illicit. In fact it is a delict or canonical crime and is to be punished as such.²

These kinds of laws are generally referred to as sacramental laws. They govern the discipline of the sacraments; their confection and administration. They ensure that the sacraments are in fact the result of a given act (confection), and that they are duly given to those who have a right to receive them, at a proper time and in a proper way, by ministers properly appointed by the Church to carry this out (administration).

Liturgical Law

In the division of the Church’s legal discipline we also speak of liturgical law. This is generally considered the regulation not of sacramental discipline per se—what is necessary for validity and the fundamental lawfulness of an act—but of the rites and ceremonies in which context the confection and administration of the sacraments occurs. Liturgical laws are true laws emanating from the competent ecclesiastical authority. To this end they state what is to be done or to be omitted in a liturgical act. They thus provide what is required by the Church for the lawfulness of a liturgical act, but do not generally relate to the validity of an act, nor to serious disciplinary matters regarding the confection and administration of the sacraments or sacramentals.

This distinction between sacramental law (rules for validity and serious liceity) and liturgical law (rules for rites and ceremonies) is what we generally find in canonical and liturgical literature, and it is how—broadly speaking—the laws on the sacraments and the liturgy have been framed for centuries. It is a generally useful way of distinguishing between two areas of the canonical legal discipline, which are incidentally also found represented in the current name of the Roman dicastery responsible for the liturgy: that of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

This categorization should not, however, be considered absolute. It has in fact at times given rise to the suggestion that sacramental law, related as it is to validity and serious issues of liceity, is fundamentally more important than liturgical law, which is concerned “only” with “ephemeral” matters. This view can lead to a dangerously thin reading of the laws governing acts of divine worship. On the one hand, there are those who say as a result that all that really matters is what is required for validity and strict liceity—bread, wine, and a validly-ordained priest; the rest is up for grabs. On the other hand, there are those who read the law governing liturgical-sacramental acts (especially rubrics) in a way that stands apart from other considerations of justice, and so also from the way that all other laws are interpreted in the life of the Church.

Law and Reform

A third way of approaching liturgical law emerges both from a renewed understanding of the liturgy—not least as a result of the Liturgical Movement and the conciliar formulations—and from a recovery of a proper reading of liturgical law grounded in the principles of interpretation common to the entire canonical legal system. This way is first of all rooted in the liturgical act as an instantiation of a higher reality. It understands the liturgical life of the Church to be just that: not some mere element of ecclesial existence, but the very lifeblood of the Church, “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life” (LG, 11). This approach also therefore guards against a kind of “re-ification” of the liturgy; turning “it” into just one more “thing” the Church does, rather than the fundamental basis of what the Church is. For, while Sacrosanctum Concilium (SC) makes it clear that the liturgy does not exhaust the entire action of the Church (SC, 9), it nevertheless insists (as echoed in LG, 11) that the liturgy is “the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the font from which all her power flows” (SC, 10).

This objective understanding of the liturgy, not as a thing but as the very life of God—the mystery of Christ, no less—means that our approach to the laws governing liturgical-sacramental acts must take account not just of the very necessary minimum that brings the sacraments about, but of what in justice is owed God (in the first place) and the people of God (in the second). If the liturgy is the means of the glorification of God and the sanctification and edification of the people (cf. Pius X, motu proprio Tra Le Sollecitudini, 1; cf. SC, 7), then every element of its preparation and celebration is of infinite value and worth. This also means that reliance on the principle of ex opere operato alone is insufficient for a given liturgical celebration to manifest all that the Church wishes to say and do in her worship, and thus falls short both of offering all that is due to God, and of presenting for the faithful the full panoply of riches afforded by the rite, which aids their full, active, and conscious participation (cf. Desiderio Desideravi, 45).

Two remedies present themselves to this reductionist approach, both offered as a kind of going beyond the liturgical norms. The first views the norms as a starting point from which “more” is required, and provided for in free creativity. The second, more authentic reading, sees the liturgical norms not as mere guidelines, but as the first point of accessing the richness of what the Church desires in her liturgical worship. This way leads to an understanding of the liturgy that conforms more fundamentally to the objective reality of the life of God—which is surely not revealed by arbitrary and subjective means!—but also to the broader principles of interpretation common to the entire canonical legal tradition. This approach, properly implemented, thus takes the technical, general norms of legal interpretation (e.g., Canon 17) and applies them specifically to the liturgical law. From this comes, quite naturally, a determination that the texts of the liturgical norms cannot be read in isolation, but only within the context of the worship of the Church as a whole, and thus in continuity with her entire tradition (cf. General Instruction of the Roman Missal, 42).

Discovery and Recovery

How, then, practically, do we resolve these tensions and recover a proper understanding of liturgical law? First, we must recommit ourselves to the essential place of canonical legal interpretation in liturgical studies and praxis. It is a not-altogether misleading caricature that in the past the principal instructors on matters liturgical were canonists who (perhaps by necessity) were established as the sole arbiters of liturgical norms or rubrics. The development of the study of the liturgy as something of a discipline of its own has in part resolved that excess by bringing to the conversation those versed in liturgical history and liturgical theology, among other related disciplines.

Yet this course correction, as is common to such significant shifts in understanding, has in some ways over-compensated to the point of excluding legal experts from the proper study and implementation of the liturgical rites. Seminaries now seem to teach future priests how to celebrate the sacraments from the principles of liturgical history, pastoral practice, and sacramental theology: all of which have their place. But in doing so they risk failing to equip adequately the ministers of the Church with the basic tools of interpreting law, including liturgical law, and so in fact unintentionally contribute to an ongoing tension between creativity on the one hand, and positivist rigorism on the other. For the sake of clarity: it is not my contention that canonists should return to being the sole interpreters of liturgical norms, which by their nature contain many other considerations of similar richness and value, but rather that they should—even must—become significant and determinative voices in the understanding of what are (in the essence) drafted, framed, and issued laws.

Secondly, there should be a more profound reflection on the concept of the ars celebrandi, and thus on the relationship between norms and the actual liturgical celebration. This term, ars celebrandi, has entered the Church’s vocabulary relatively recently and, although it has been readily welcomed, its application (and even its formal definition) still appears to lack sufficient clarity. Again, it has at times been taken as license for creativity (be it changes to the rite in the spirit of “pastoral necessity,” or the unregulated insertion of elements not found in the liturgical books), as well as a kind of positivist rigorism that excludes from the liturgical celebration any element that is not explicitly prescribed in the rubrics. Some helpful clarification has recently been made by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in Gestis Verbisque (GV), which makes clear that: “It is increasingly urgent to develop an ars celebrandi that—keeping itself equally distant from a rigid rubricism, on the one hand, and a limitless imagination, on the other hand—leads to a discipline we are to follow, precisely to be authentic disciples” (GV, 27). But more is to be done.

Both extremes—characterized by Gestis Verbisque as rigidity and an unlimited imagination—are contrary to the true nature of the liturgy, which subsists not principally within or without the liturgical books, as vital as these are, but more essentially in the life of the Church. The antidote to any perceived antinomianism in the interpretation of liturgical law is therefore not positivism (or vice versa) but precisely the cultus of the Church, given and received to be lived out in every age.

1. Canon 927: “It is absolutely forbidden, even in extreme urgent necessity, to consecrate one matter without the other or even both outside the eucharistic celebration.”
2. Canon 1382 §2: “An offender who consecrates for a sacrilegious purpose one or both elements, either in a eucharistic celebration or outside it, is to be punished according to the gravity of the delict, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state.”