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Canon law (from Ancient Greek: κανών, kanon, a 'straight measuring rod, ruler') is a set of ordinances and regulations made by ecclesiastical authority (church leadership) for the government of a Christian organization or church and its members.
The jurisprudence of canon law is the complex of legal principles and traditions within which canon law operates, while the philosophy, theology, and fundamental theory of Catholic canon law are the areas of philosophical, theological, and legal scholarship dedicated to providing a theoretical basis for canon law as a legal system and as true law.
Canon 285 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which governs the Latin Church, states that priests "are to avoid those things which, although not unbecoming, are nevertheless foreign to the clerical state" and prohibits clergy from assuming "public offices which entail a participation in the exercise of civil power."
The Catholic Church utilizes the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West, [1] much later than Roman law but predating the evolution of modern European civil law traditions. The history of Latin canon law can be divided into four periods: the jus antiquum , the jus novum , the jus novissimum and the Code of Canon Law . [ 2 ]
The Jurist is the only journal published in the United States devoted to the study and promotion of the canon law of the Catholic Church. It was initiated in 1940 [9] to serve the academic and professional needs of Catholic church lawyers. It originally focused on the canon law of the Latin Church, but came to include Eastern Catholic canon law as
Some, such as the Church of England, has an ancient, highly developed canon law while others, such as the Episcopal Church in the United States have more recently developed canonical systems originally based on the English canon law. Unlike the system of canon law in the Church of England, which continues to be drawn from the canon law of the ...
Philosophy and theology shape the concepts and self-understanding of canon law as the law of both a human organization and as a supernatural entity, since the Catholic Church believes that Jesus Christ instituted the church by direct divine command, while the fundamental theory of canon law is a meta-discipline of the "triple relationship ...
In canon law, a canon designates some law promulgated by a synod, an ecumenical council, or an individual bishop. [ 2 ] The word "canon" comes from the Greek kanon , which in its original usage denoted a straight rod that was later the instrument used by architects and artificers as a measuring stick for making straight lines.