AUTHORITY. — In a broad sense, authority means any power that exists in a superior over subjects, to direct, govern, and, if necessary, compel. Authority may have a natural origin, as in the case of domestic or civil society; a voluntary origin, as in contractual society; or a transcendent origin, as in the case of the Supreme Pontiff in the Church, which is supported by a positive divine mandate. Each such authority has a specific content and character that distinguishes it from the others.
Summary: I. Authority in civil society: 1. Necessity; 2. Concept and essence; 3. Origin; 4. Primary subject;
5. Limits of authority
II. Authority in pedagogy: 1. The concept and problem; 2. Moral authority; 3. Authority and didactics.I. Authority in civil society
With regard to social authority, five aspects must be considered, each representing a problem in Catholic sociology: necessity, concept and essence, origin, primary subject, and intrinsic limits. Other secondary questions connected with these will be touched upon incidentally when the occasion arises.6. Necessity of authority
There is no disagreement among serious theorists regarding the necessity of authority in the social organism, with the exception of anarchist ideologies, which, being unrealistic, do not merit consideration. This agreement stems from a simple observation of social reality. Without any distinction of time or place, as soon as rational beings come together to pursue a common end, a dynamic center always emerges from their psychological union, which directs, regulates, coordinates, and, if necessary, compels the members in the exercise of their activity. The constancy of this fact leads to the recognition of a natural law that governs the development of human society in a stable manner, an objective necessity. Every experience that is repeated in a stable and fixed manner, every effect that manifests itself universally in space and time, requires an adequate cause, which can only be the nature of man, identical everywhere and at all times. It follows, therefore, that political authority is of natural origin, just as the origin of public society, over which it is destined to preside, is natural.Authority is imperatively required for many reasons, which it is useful to summarize briefly. Society is essentially an aggregate of intelligent beings who aim to achieve a common purpose through collaboration. For this collaboration to be vital, while preserving within it each subject’s inalienable autonomy of judgment and will, a central force is required to maintain a threefold unity: of ends, of intentions, and of action.
The fundamental unity of the collective purpose exists from the very formation of the social organism, since its effect is the cohesion of wills, which gives rise to the collective entity. However, beyond the universal common end, individual intelligence perceives intermediate, contingent, and historical ends, with respect to which divergences of opinion may arise, to the detriment of harmonious collaboration among members, unless a higher reason and a preeminent will intervene to remove uncertainties and establish common directives.
What has been said about the unity of ends and the consequent necessity of supreme power also applies to the unity of intentions. Society is sustained by an act of consent, which must continually be defended against the seeds of disintegration, so that the rise of personal egoism and partisan passions, not extinguished by the fact of association, may not weaken its cohesive force. This necessity becomes even more evident when it comes to the choice of means to achieve the collective end, with respect to which psychological agreement is ordinarily maintained. Even in this area, the diversity of opinions and the resulting disintegration of social life could not be avoided without the presence of a strong helmsman who guides the social ship and steers it in the proper direction.
Finally, the unity of intentions, which social authority ensures, is already a prerequisite for the unity of action, against which the abuse of individual freedom, intrigue, crime, violation of the laws of justice, or deviation from natural or positive norms of coexistence may arise. The health of social life therefore requires a power that stimulates the indolent, compels the recalcitrant, punishes wrongdoers, and upholds order by protecting rights.
7. Concept and essence
As has been noted, there is no appreciable disagreement regarding the necessity of authority. Disagreements become numerous and irreconcilable, however, when considering the other aspects yet to be examined. The concept of authority reflects all the theories elaborated by different schools of thought regarding the very essence of collective life.According to Rousseau, authority would be the arithmetical sum of individual rights that, converging on the same point of reference through the voluntary renunciation of the members, give rise to the directive power of the collectivity, so that it ultimately reduces to the force of the majority.
Doctrines with a materialistic bent—sociologism, organicism, racism, and positivism in general—excluding any conscious influence of the human person in the formation of the collective entity and attributing its origin instead to physical, mechanical, or biological forces, conceive of authority as the sum of cosmic and vital forces, physical or biological energy concentrated in a single propulsive point. Authority is thus stripped of any moral or juridical character.
Nor is the stance of immanentism different. Since, in this theory, the State is also an effect of the necessary evolution to which the absolute spirit is subject, the authority that arises by virtue of the same inner evolutionary law is a chain binding the individual to the State. It thus reduces to force, as in theories that trace the origin of the State to subduing struggle. Modern legal science, for its part, regards authority as an original power of the State to impose its will coercively or as a power of self-determination. Both conceptions agree in viewing authority as a prejudicial fact that arises by virtue of historical evolution, unfolding outside the law, and thus State sovereignty would be devoid of any ethical content, as a fact without justification and a power free from every law and unbound by any ties.
From this brief exposition, it may be concluded that almost all contemporary schools of thought, despite their differing principles, arrive at the same distortion of the concept of authority, lowering it—whether openly or covertly—to the level of physical force, however this force may be explained.
Catholic publicists, on the other hand, are accustomed to define authority as the right to govern civil society for the attainment of its own end. Authority, first of all, is a right, whose nature can only be grasped by referring to the more general concept of subjective right, which, according to Catholic thought, is understood as an original or derived absolute faculty to do or to demand something. Authority is therefore not merely a coercive power, although it often must resort to coercion to maintain order, but an essentially and intrinsically moral power. Nor can it be otherwise, if one considers the function that nature assigns to it for the benefit of the social body.
What makes authority necessary, as has been said, is the need for order and internal unity in the collaboration of members toward the attainment of the common good. Now, neither order nor unity can be achieved among rational beings through a mechanical system of rules or the mere threat of the State’s coercive force. Social order, being essentially a human and spiritual order, can only result from the conscious adherence of individuals to certain rational principles of action and from the submission of free will to moral norms. If, therefore, authority is a higher principle of order, it can only be a power that influences free intellects and wills—that is, a moral power.
Internal unity, moreover, arises from the unity of purpose and collaboration, which in turn is the effect of a prior rational evaluation followed by the assent of the will and its direct command to action. Authority must therefore be a force that moves reason and will, and the conclusion follows that it cannot be conceived otherwise than as a moral power producing genuine obligation. A simple observation of reality confirms the correctness of this position. As soon as several rational beings deliberately accept a common end and resolve to unite their efforts in stable cooperation, that end becomes the common purpose of the collectivity as such, which from that moment has the right to demand from each member the contributions necessary to achieve it, while each member incurs the duty to submit to its demands and follow them. This right of the collectivity is precisely authority, which accordingly appears as an original subjective right of the entire social body.
Yet to arrive at a complete concept of authority, it is necessary to determine the specific and proper content of this right. This content is expressed in the definition cited above, which specifies that authority is the right to govern society. It is not an indeterminate faculty of action, a discretionary power—as will be seen more clearly later—but a faculty circumscribed by the end for which nature intends and imposes it, confined within a well-defined sphere of action. It would be superfluous to demonstrate that the function of authority consists positively in directing, governing, and commanding the social body. Rather, it is better to add a few further clarifications that may serve to illuminate the concept just explained.
Political authority differs especially from domestic authority and from that of a master. Domestic authority concerns the private good of the family and its members and is not fully self-sufficient, whereas political authority aims at the public good and possesses full self-sufficiency, being independent of any other natural authority. The authority of a master, in turn, relates directly to the private good of a particular person and exercises its specific function in the administration of goods, affecting personal services only indirectly; political authority, by contrast, attends to the public and general good and provides for the governance of persons and the procurement of means to satisfy their needs. Other distinguishing features will be discussed later.
8. Origin
Having established the concept of authority, we must now address the vital questions touched upon above. One of the most fundamental problems in constructing an organic social theory is undoubtedly that concerning the origin of political power. It is clear that, so long as one does not demonstrate to the rational human being why authority must command and he must obey, and so long as the moral essence of this power and this submission is not grasped, everything in social life remains unsupported. The ancient mind perceived this, and so it first sought to investigate the proximate and remote source of the power to command men and impose precepts upon them; hence it often dwelt at length on the analysis of authority and its causes.By contrast, modern juridical speculation has lacked this precise insight. Since the first half of the nineteenth century, it has relegated discussions about the origin of authority to the fields of morality and politics and has sought to construct a theory of sovereignty using exclusively juridical materials, excluding any foreign elements. This rigid stance arises from a broader conception that maintains that true science must content itself with analyzing facts and given data, without ascending to principles and first causes.
According to the prevailing opinion of contemporary jurisprudence, the State requires no justification beyond its own existence, finding full vindication in the fact of its being; and since political power is an essential element of the State as a juridical person, it too is fully justified by the mere fact of its existence and operation. Hence, any inquiry into its origin would be superfluous.
The poverty of this conception is reflected in the doctrinal elaborations of earlier periods, when there was a keen sensitivity to the problem and various attempts were made to ground State authority on a foundation other than the State itself. Two such supports were proposed: divinity and popular will.
A conception that reaches far back in time located the origin of authority in the supreme being, though it took different forms according to the particular religious vision inspiring the theorists. In Eastern paganism, and later in Roman thought, the head of State was not only the legitimate holder of divine power but was himself regarded as a visible divinity. Against this idolatrous configuration of power, upon which ancient absolutism was founded, Christian thought revolted. While preserving the idea of the divine origin of power, it purified this idea in accordance with the new conception of divinity and of the relations binding man to the supreme Creator, Preserver, and Legislator, excluding and combating every apotheosis of the creature.
The dictum of St. Paul: non est potestas nisi a Deo (Rom 13:1), and other explicit and implicit references to the same effect contained in the deposit of revelation, served as a guide to the new conception of the origin of authority, which may be summarized as follows: political power, as the original right of the community to govern itself, derives from the Author of nature Himself, from the supreme Will that established its laws, and in Him finds its transcendent source and justification. The legitimist theories of the divine investiture of the monarch, which gave Bellarmine and Suárez occasion to refine the Catholic conception of power, rested on the same principle but distorted it to the point of justifying regal absolutism.
The principle of the transcendent origin of power continued to influence social conceptions until the appearance of agnostic rationalism. Then the theorist’s gaze, having extinguished the light of divinity from the horizon of human speculation, turned earthward, from which it would never again rise. According to Rousseau, political power arises through an act of popular will, whereby each individual freely renounces his rights in favor of the collectivity; these rights, accumulating in the so-called general will—the expression of the majority—are transformed into sovereignty. Authority, therefore, is nothing other than the arithmetical sum of individual wills.
Positivism and idealism entirely lose sight of the seriousness of the problem. In the various theories to which they give rise, authority is a naturalistic fact, the effect of biological and mechanical forces that preside over the formation of the social entity, or an unassailable dominion exercised by the absolute spirit, which attains its highest manifestation in the State. The attitude of contemporary juridical theories is identical to the foregoing, as has been explained above.
The positions of Catholic thought regarding the origin of authority, already well defined in previous centuries, have been reconfirmed by the voice of the most recent Pontiffs. In the encyclical Diuturnum, Leo XIII writes: “Moreover, as regards the power to command, the Church rightly teaches that it comes from God; for this it finds openly attested in Sacred Scripture and in the monuments of Christian antiquity.” Pius XI and Pius XII have taught the same doctrine, both directly and indirectly.
In what sense must the divine origin of authority now be understood? Not in the sense that God, in conferring authority, intervenes in an extraordinary manner, with a gratuitous gift not owed to the nature of the subject; but in the sense of an attribution necessarily connected with the nature of the entity, which, possessing that specific essential constitution willed by God, postulates a special completion or faculty without which it could not subsist. Political authority, therefore, according to Catholic thought, does not arise from a divine action that transcends nature, but rather from the very laws of the social being, which require it necessarily. And since these laws have been determined by God, the author of nature, so too their effect ultimately depends on the same will. Human will has no causal influence in this production. The efficacy of its causality extends solely to the production of the collective entity, but not to the authority that is to govern it, which comes into being spontaneously at the very moment in which the subjects will the society, and would come into being, as Vitoria and Suárez noted, even in the hypothetical supposition of their contrary act.
In essence, the solution that Catholic thought gives to the problem of the origin of authority is not substantially different from that which it gives to the more general problem of the origin of every natural right, of which the present is a particular aspect. All natural and original rights, precisely because they are connected with the essence of the physical or moral person or with its intrinsic finality, derive from God as the author of nature, and find in Him their ultimate reason and adequate foundation. Authority, on the other hand, is nothing other than a natural and original right of the body politic; it therefore, like every other right, derives from God. From this it is clear how improperly the Catholic theory of the divine origin of authority is, in a disparaging sense, termed “theological” by those who prefer to dispose of it more conveniently, mistakenly supposing that it rests upon an act of faith, to which science cannot resort without renouncing its own principles.
A few simple deductions, supported by two factual data, suffice now to demonstrate the thesis whose meaning has been clarified. First, it is universally admitted—since contractualist theories have been abandoned—that social life is the effect of natural forces. By a legitimate transition from effect to cause, from this incontestable datum of experience, reason concludes that the ultimate source of society must be sought in the author of nature Himself, who, having made man a social being, also willed society. The conclusion to which reason arrives through this simple syllogism then extends to all the essential properties that spring from the same source of natural laws, of which authority is the principal one. For this too, therefore, the preceding conclusion is imposed, namely, that it also derives from God.
Moreover, it is beyond controversy that public authority is required by a natural exigency of the social body, in such a way that it arises and is determined independently of the will of its members. Now if political authority in its genesis does not depend on the free act of men gathered into a collective organism, but instead comes into being by virtue of a natural and unassailable exigency, it is necessary once again to ascend to the author of nature Himself to find its origin and adequate reason.
To this double deduction, which only obstinacy can doubt, another may be added, based on the very nature of political authority. This authority, as has been shown, is a true subjective right to govern the members of the collectivity for the attainment of the social end. Such a right, however, has a content entirely its own, essentially different from that of individual rights, and grants a faculty of action over the subjects capable of binding their will through laws and prescriptions with an unassailable moral bond called obligation. Given these particular properties, it would be an error—pardonable only to Rousseau’s fancy—to consider it as a resultant of individual wills or the sum of private rights. Logic, instead, demands that it be recognized as an original and natural public right of the social body, and that one conclude once more to its transcendent origin.
Connected with the foregoing question is the debate among Catholic authors themselves as to whether authority should be regarded as a substantial form of the social organism or merely as one of its essential properties. While the probability of both opinions may be admitted, the second is to be considered more firmly grounded, since the social entity emerges on the plane of reality when multiple rational subjects have adhered to the same collective end and arrange themselves to coordinate their activity in order to attain it through stable collaboration. As soon as this fusion of wills takes place, the matter, represented by the human mass, is informed by a new spiritual principle—the psychological union of the subjects—by which they are constituted as companions in a single social organism. Authority is required so that this union may perdure and collaboration proceed in an orderly manner, not because it exists. Undoubtedly, the birth of the social being and of authority must be said to be simultaneous, and yet, although no priority in time can be assigned between the two, a priority in nature of the social being over authority must be admitted.
9. Primary Subject
On the question of the immediate subject in whom authority resides, there is a strong divergence of opinion within Catholic doctrine. Contemporary juridical doctrine is now in agreement in holding that sovereignty must be regarded as an original faculty whose immediate subject and bearer is the State. Sovereignty, according to the most common opinion, is so closely connected with the State that it is impossible to conceive of the State without a relative power of command. Since the State is an original juridical person, it possesses an equally original power of dominion, by virtue of which it can impose precepts, dictate norms, constitute its own legal order, and equip it with coercive apparatus.This conception agrees with one of the major currents of Catholic thought. Indeed, Catholic doctrinal tradition, of which its great theorists—such as VITORIA, SUÁREZ, SOTO, MOLINA, and BELLARMINO—are the expression, was perfectly unanimous until the 18th century in upholding a dual principle. The primary subject in which, by immediate communication of nature and of the Creator, authority resides is the people, the collectivity, the social organism. The monarch, the prince, the physical or moral person who exercises this right receives it immediately from the people. In other words, there is a substantial difference in the value of the titles upon which the possession of authority rests. While the body politic possesses it as a natural endowment, connected with its very being as a unified organization, the monarch or moral person holds it by derived title, since its actual possession and legitimate exercise presuppose a conferral by the people: *auctoritas est a Deo per populum*.
To grasp the exact meaning of this conception, it must be compared with the democratic and demagogic conception of Rousseau, and the differences highlighted. The agnostic thought of which Rousseau is one of the chief representatives derives authority from no metaphysical cause but rather makes it spring from man himself, from the interplay of free wills. The Catholic democratic conception, on the other hand, identifies as the ultimate source of authority the supreme cause, as seen above.
Moreover, agnostic rationalism proclaimed the sovereignty of the people, arguing that the people not only would be the first and original holder of sovereignty but also possessed this right in an inalienable manner, so that those who exercise it would be nothing more than its mandataries, executors of its will or of the general will.
The Christian democratic conception, while recognizing in the people the original and immediate subject of authority, does not uphold the unlimited autonomy of man—from which libertarian autonomy derives—nor, much less, that of the people, both being subject to the moral law and to natural right. Nor, consequently, does it teach that the latter is sovereign and remains so always and necessarily, but maintains that the people transfers in full its own right to the person or group of persons chosen by it, who thereby become the true holders and exercise it as integral organs of the State.
Once the irrevocable transfer has taken place, the people retains the right to express and make known its will and to oversee whether those who possess authority exercise it in accordance with the demands of justice and the common good, there having been concluded a kind of pact, codified or not in a constitution, between the people and the government, by virtue of which the latter commits itself to govern according to institutional laws and the requirements of the common good. In only one case does the people regain full freedom of action and the right to change the form of its regime: namely, when those who exercise power become tyrants, subverting the laws upon which the social organization rests, since—having been granted power for the better and more orderly provision of the common good—when this is seriously compromised by their malice or incapacity, the natural juridical title upon which the possession of authority rests lapses, and authority reverts to its original subject, that is, the people, who may dispose of it as they see fit.
With the spread of demagogic theories in the 18th century, however, even Catholic doctrine changed its orientation, abandoning the democratic conception hitherto unanimously upheld. To better counter the voluntarism of Rousseau’s theory, which derived society from a contract, it was first denied that human persons exercise any causal influence in the production of the social being, attributing its spontaneous emergence to certain facts, termed associative facts. Secondly, to guard against the theory of popular sovereignty and demagoguery, it was denied that the people in any way was the original subject of power; and, extending the theory of facts even to the question of authority, it was maintained that authority was conferred immediately by God upon a determinate physical or moral person, designated for command by certain objective titles, such as, for example, territorial dominion, the development of the patriarchal family, conquest, and especially superior capacity for government.
To TAPARELLI, to whom the elaboration of the new conception is due, others were added, more or less refining and infecting the original core, among whom ZIGLIARA deserves mention. He, while maintaining the principle of the immediate conferral of authority by God, conceded to the people the faculty of designating its subject. This latter form of the theory is the one chiefly reflected in the encyclical *Diuturnum* of Leo XIII. Nevertheless, both before and after the cited encyclical, the opinions of scholars of sociology within the Catholic field have remained divided, with advocates of the two conceptions still in contention. Those who still champion the democratic conception of power observe that the Pope’s intention in issuing the encyclical on the political principle was not to condemn a doctrine professed for so long a series of years and upheld by the most eminent authors of moral sciences and theology, but simply to combat the errors then prevalent and restore the true concept of authority. And in this observation they are supported by explicit declarations of Leo XIII.
The two theories remain, in fact, probable and may be freely defended, although in recent years the older one has again become predominant, resting as it does on more convincing rational grounds. Political power, as has been shown, is essentially an original power, necessarily required by social being as soon as it comes into being, for the ordinary attainment of its natural ends. Given this intimate connection, it follows inevitably that the first subject to whom the order of nature confers the right to command cannot be a determinate physical or moral person but is the entire social body, the collectivity, the people, the State. For if this right is indissolubly connected with the very being of society, so that it accompanies its birth always and necessarily as an inseparable property, it exists together with the collective organization; and since this is actual at the moment when many wills conspire to the same end, authority is also actual at that moment, and for very obvious reasons finds no other subject to which it can adhere than the entire community, the people gathered into society.
Moreover, it is the common opinion of Catholic publicists that the will of rational subjects exerts no causal influence in the production of authority. Once this independence from free will—which, if it wills society, must also necessarily accept authority—is posited, no succession of time can be asserted between the collective act of willing, which creates the social being, and the act of the superior Cause that joins to it the right to govern. This leads, as has not been overlooked, to the simultaneous birth of both, and, as above, to the presence of a single possible subject to whom this right originally belongs, namely, the community, the people. It is further added that, beyond all contestation, the organic collectivity, as soon as it is brought into being by its productive causes, becomes a moral person, to which an objective order assigns its own proper end. Now, when the natural order assigns a necessary and intrinsic end to a physical or moral person, it also confers the suitable and indispensable means to attain it, which are original faculties and rights. Authority, on the other hand, is nothing other than one such right, the principal and most necessary one. It must therefore belong to the person to whom the end belongs, that is, once again, to the community, the people, the State.
All these arguments, in another form, are gathered in two passages, one by VITORIA and the other by BELLARMINO, which it is fitting to cite. VITORIA writes:
“The material cause, where such power resides by natural and divine right, is the society itself, to which it belongs to govern and administer itself and direct all its forces to the common good. Since by natural and divine right there must be a power to govern society, and with the removal of positive and human common law, there is no greater reason why that power should reside in one rather than another, it is necessary that the community itself be sufficient to itself and have the faculty to govern itself. For if, before men gathered into society, no one was superior to another, there is no reason why in the community, that is, in civil society, someone should claim for himself a power over others” (De potestate civili, n. 7).
More succinctly, BELLARMINO writes:
“This power is of divine right, but divine right has not given this power to anyone, therefore it has given it to the multitude. Finally, human society must be a perfect society; it must therefore have the power to preserve itself and thus punish the disturbers of the peace” (De laicis, III, 6).
The theory of associative facts is then not reconciled with the history of institutions, which demonstrates how at all times the power of those who govern has been restricted by fundamental charters, constitutions, and transactions imposed upon the sovereign by the collectivity. If authority were conferred directly by God upon a determined subject, it should pass entire to that subject, without any other restriction than that deriving from the natural end of society. But in that case, the interferences of the collectivity, which seeks to secure itself against the abusive exercise of power by the aforementioned means, would have to be judged illegitimate. A conclusion difficult to accept.
The principal difficulties usually opposed to the democratic conception are easily surmountable. It is objected that if authority resides in the people and is transferred by them to those who exercise it, the instability of institutions cannot be avoided, since the people can revoke the act of consent by which they transmitted power. The consequence would be legitimate if it could be shown that, according to the laws of nature, no act of voluntary consent can produce a stable effect, which, once brought into being, is withdrawn from the discretion of the cause that produced II. But such a demonstration is impossible, since there are cases in which the contrary occurs, as for example in marital consent. In this case, the necessity of the end detaches the effect from free will: the same must be said analogously of authority, whose stability is required by the social end. It is further objected that if authority resides in the people, democracy would be of natural institution and therefore every other form of government would be illegitimate. To this difficulty SUÁREZ has already replied, observing that “this power, as it is immediately given by God to the community, according to the manner of speaking of jurists, can be said to be of natural right in a negative sense, not positive, or rather of natural right granting, not simply prescribing” (Defensio fidei, III, 6).
10. Limits of authority
The democratic theory on the original subject of authority is, according to SUÁREZ, necessary to understand the limits of public power, a subject around which moral and juridical speculation has been exercised at all times. The range of conceptions on this matter presents a double panorama: the first is occupied by absolutist theories, the other by those that assign limits to social authority.The absolutist conception may be said to be as old as human thought. Apart from oriental absolutism, supported by the concept that the sovereign was an omnipotent divinity—a concept later transferred to the Roman State—the formulation of the theory is already found in the Digest, which attributes to the will of the sovereign the value of law and defines his power as legibus solutus. The penetration of Christian thought temporarily corrected this false principle, which began to revive in the period of royal absolutism in the 16th and 17th centuries through the work of court theorists. Nevertheless, even in this period, conceptions do not succeed in totally detaching themselves from the medieval tradition, and the prince, although of divine election and conceived as supreme authority, recognizing no superior and legibus solutus, is at least subjected to divine law and the imperative of his conscience. Even BODIN, to whom the modern concept of sovereignty is erroneously attributed, assigned to the sovereign’s power limits in divine law, natural law, and international law.
It is necessary to arrive at the 18th century to find ourselves once again faced with an absolutist formulation of power. Starting from a purely naturalistic presupposition, HOBBES and ROUSSEAU configure power as unlimited. With them, through different processes, the State is transformed into absolute power, and sovereignty is totally freed from every moral and juridical bond. In the 19th century, then, in relation to juridical positivism, from which the two previous theorists had drawn their inspiration, although national sovereignty was substituted by that of the State, the absoluteness of power was not tempered. Positivism and idealism were in agreement in freeing the power of the State from any external or internal constraint.
Historicism and sociologism conceived the State as an entity in itself, with its own being and will, entirely distinct from the being and will of its components, and attributed to it an unlimited faculty of action, a despotic dominion over individuals, conceived as integral cells of the social organism. Idealism, in turn, through the triad SCHELLING, FICHTE, HEGEL and their followers, conferred upon the State the attributes of divinity, imagining it perfectly free, a law unto itself, an unlimited will.
With these doctrines, the principle of the absolute autonomy of sovereign power took root in juridical science. At present, the great majority of publicists conceive the power of the State as juridically unlimited, that is, not bound in its power of action by any norm, internal or external, that does not proceed from its own discretionary will, the autonomous source of all law.
Catholic doctrine is opposed to this pernicious dogma, which lends itself to the justification of every form of tyranny. While acknowledging that social authority is supreme in its own order, within which it recognizes no superior, it confines it within precise limits, determined by the law of nature, by the rights of the person, and by the end of society. Every visible entity carries within itself, along with its being, an immanent law by which it is governed, and this manifests the existence of an objective order to which all beings conform, obeying certain internal principles of action. Man does not escape this universal order, and he too carries a law of his own being, which, in accordance with his rationality, takes the form of a moral precept. Passing from the individual man to collective man, the gears of order multiply, but they do not cease to exist. Even the State, as a natural entity, receives a law of its own being, which governs the unfolding of its life: a law that it does not create, but finds already constituted and must recognize and observe. There thus exists an internal limit to its power.
This power finds another important restriction in the subjective rights of the human person. Man, as a person constituted in being independently of the State, is born with a complex of rights, which are as many faculties of action granted by nature for the attainment of his end. He does not enter society to be totally absorbed by it, and therefore he does not renounce, nor does he intend to renounce, his own rights, since if he were to renounce them he would annihilate himself as a person. Social authority then finds in the subjective right of the human person a natural value that it cannot deny, but must rather protect, in accordance with its specific mission.
For, as every other entity, public society too has a constitutional end, consisting in the common good of its members to be achieved through an ordered collaboration. Now the end, together with the goal toward which social action must of its nature tend, also marks the limits within which authority can demand from its subjects the performances necessary to achieve it, since this is not an abstract power but an authority that arises from the necessity of order in social life. It therefore remains essentially subordinate, in the exercise of its functions, to the fundamental exigencies expressed by the universal end. In this end to be attained in an orderly way, it finds its reason for being and within it too the exact scope of its competence.
At this supreme point of reference, the two freedoms are reconciled—freedoms rendered irreconcilable by the absolutist claim—from which can also be deduced the limitations of each within social life. Outside the scope of the State’s competence remain religious and supernatural values, with respect to which man retains full freedom, subject only to that religious and divine society which, by positive institution, has the office of providing for the religious life of humanity. For if the social good is a temporal and earthly good, the internal, supernatural, and eternal goods cannot fall within the scope of social authority. Private initiative must be respected by authority, just as freedom must respect the public good. The social good is an integrative good of the human person and of the family; where therefore man and the family suffice for themselves, authority cannot and must not interfere. On the other hand, the social good is a collective, public good and, as such, falls within the sphere of authority’s competence.
In social life, just as man must respect the rights of others, so too must authority respect the rights of the human person. The means by which the social end is achieved is collaboration, which cannot be obtained if the vital forces of society oppress and cancel one another out, as would happen if each were to tend to invade the rights of others, or if authority were to oppress the parts of the collective organism, stripping them of their rights. The duty of subjection to authority does not extend beyond the limits of the common good; if it does so, it ceases. The obligation of the individual is strictly commensurate with the end, just as the scope of the State’s power is also commensurate with it; the State acts illegally if it oversteps these boundaries. In such a case, its law is unjust, and an unjust law is not law but abuse.
The principles established are fruitful in practical applications, which it would be too lengthy to develop in detail; it is better to conclude with an overview of Catholic doctrine on authority. Authority is an original subjective right of the social body, imperiously demanded by the law of nature: it derives from God, by whom it is communicated to the people, who stably transfer it to the subject designated to exercise it; it is a supreme power, independent of every other power of the same order, and yet limited by natural law, by the rights of the person, and by the essential and internal end of the social organism.
AUTHORITY IN PEDAGOGY. —
I. The concept and the problem
The concept and the problem of authority also hold great importance in pedagogy.The schools and educational methods of antiquity were founded on authority, understood in most cases in a wholly extrinsic manner. The teacher was the little tyrant of the school: the plagosus Orbilius has passed into history as the embodiment of a type through the work of a pupil of genius, Horace, whom he must not have spared the rod. Men who pondered the problem of education glimpsed the difficulties of an education not founded on methods and presuppositions of this kind, but the school essentially did not change. Christian thought introduced into the pedagogical sphere a sounder and more
Fertile through the educator, illuminating the pupil with an awareness of his limits, his duties, and his responsibilities toward God, and vivifying him with the flame of charity. Yet the Christian pedagogical ideal, realized whenever sanctity was joined to teaching, though it undoubtedly modified educational practice and institutions, was not universally followed. Authority in the school, as elsewhere, continued to be understood in its external aspect as a power of arbitrary command, binding subjects—pupils and those being educated—with an indescribable *sic volo, sic iubeo*. Historical evolution, culminating in the Enlightenment, led to one of the most serious and significant crises of the principle of authority, with tendencies toward immediate applications in the political and social spheres. Pedagogical thought was strongly affected by this, giving rise to Rousseau’s pedagogical utopia, in which the teacher’s authority is, at least in certain respects, so reduced and diminished that it poses the critic with the problem of its possibility and consistency.
Modern pedagogical thought, to varying degrees but not without exceptions, is indebted to Rousseau. In nearly two centuries since the appearance of *Émile* (1762), strong and noble critiques and important integrations have not been lacking. Even Fröbel, so sensitive to Rousseau’s influence, ultimately recognized the rights of authority when he affirmed that “every true education, every true teaching, every true instruction, the authentic educator and teacher must at every moment, in all its demands and determinations, maintain a dual stance, aim at a dual end simultaneously: to give and to receive, to unite and to divide, to prescribe and to comply, to be active and passive, to determine and to liberate” (cf. *The Education of Man*, 13).
Even in contemporary thought, the Rousseauian current has developed to the point of nourishing a decadent optimism, founded on the overvaluation of the spontaneity of education, which, if carried to its most logical conclusions, would render the work of the teacher and educator superfluous.
Meanwhile, in educational practice, while discipline was exalted in words, it was relaxed in fact, in dependence on the decline of moral values, one of the most characteristic aspects of our age. Authority, rigidly abstracted in excessive postures or denied and reduced to something too vague and evanescent, is at times both cause and effect of the obscured consciousness of moral values. The crisis of the school is today also a crisis of authority. This is so intimately connected to pedagogical activity that without it—and without the freedom that corresponds to it as its moral correlative and integrative term—pedagogical activity would not be possible.
The still budding spirituality of education must, so to speak, be attractive and directed toward an ever more complex, perfect, and secure process of inner formation. If the child were capable of achieving moral and cultural personality without any help, education and teaching would be superfluous, and so too would authority in its pedagogical aspect. Yet there is no one who reflects sufficiently and realizes how difficult it is, even with all the aids and refinements of wise education, to achieve personality. Exceptions do not make the rule, and moreover, if the educational process had not been initiated by someone, in some way, the marvelous achievements that make us forget their humble origins would not have been possible.
Undoubtedly, in every human conscience there is a spontaneous demand for personality, which cannot be attained without the development of intellectual and moral faculties. Yet in the orderly and harmonious development of these faculties, a thousand interior and exterior obstacles arise that cannot be overcome without effort and struggle. It is the authority of the teacher and educator that induces this effort and struggle, which, in the eyes of the educator, must be the living example of the ideal to be attained, the incarnation of a type of perfection. St. Thomas notes profoundly that in man there is a natural disposition to virtue; but since the perfect attainment of virtue is necessarily achieved through a certain discipline and since it is not easy to find a man capable of disciplining himself, it is necessary that this discipline come from elsewhere (*Summa Theologiae*, I-II, q. 95, a. 1). From this it does not follow that discipline must be imposed arbitrarily on one side and passively received and endured on the other.
1945. Moral authority
Authority is above all moral authority. Age, culture, the spirit of duty, sacrifice, and love, the strength of character must create for the educator an aura whose charm it is not easy to resist for those who cannot but recognize their inferiority in all the qualities they admire in the teacher. The human spirit naturally aspires to knowledge and goodness: the educator’s personality must demonstrate, to a high degree, the realization of both, which the child senses confusedly but strongly. In that universal aspiration lies the psychological source of authority, understood in its noblest sense and in its deepest efficacy.But “in puero homo”: in the child there is the man with all his aptitudes and deficiencies, his qualities and his defects. The weakness of active forces of reaction and action, of assimilation and selection, which characterizes the early stages of personality development, makes it easier for defects and deficiencies to take root in the sediment of habits and permits deviations and dispersions under the impulse of various factors. This renders the educator’s intervention indispensable, enabling him to employ all means suited to gathering the spiritual and physical energies of the pupil, to stimulate and support them. Thus we arrive at the second aspect of authority. When irrationality arises and breaks forth in the conscience and life of the child and the man, mere moral authority is not enough, for it is susceptible to being renounced, even against the inner conviction of conscience. The teacher’s authority must be capable of employing all those means, even external ones, which, without offending human dignity or Christian charity, are suitable for curbing irrational impulses that have given rise to caprice or transgression, to bring the pupil back to himself, and to restore him to full possession and industrious use of reason. The educator’s wisdom will consist in carefully choosing, determining, and preparing these means, grading them in relation to the pupil’s psychology, the circumstances, and particular cases. Admonition and reproof, for example, admit of gradations, variations, and nuances: they can be gentle and restrained, barely hinted at almost in passing and concealed within praise that highlights other positive qualities of the pupil different from those in which a constant or temporary deficiency is noted, or recall happier moments and more brilliantly overcome tests; they can also rise to a high pitch of intensity without ever degenerating into vulgarity or harshness. A single discordant note is enough to compromise educational efficacy.
The educator must possess the sensitivity of the artist and the skillful delicacy of the surgeon operating with a light touch on delicate organs. Indeed, since adolescence, the most critical age of the pupil, often has its wounds, these must be barely touched, more often than not with a swift stroke, if the educational action is to be effective.
When, for reasons extraneous to his role or because of the improper interference of another authority, the educator finds himself unable to employ those corrective means whose efficacy he recognizes and whose necessity and appropriateness he feels in all conscience, he is divested of his authority, and his work, his educational mission, is rendered largely sterile and ineffective.
Yet in every case, even when he reproves, the educator’s voice must be the expression of the profound conscience of the one being educated, so that the latter feels that, in resisting it, he places himself in ever-deeper conflict with himself. Here lies the root of the reconciliation of authority with freedom—the only solution to the problem that has, through the shifting or rigidification of terms, fatigued and continues to fatigue the minds of philosophers and pedagogues.
Authority cannot and must not be founded upon morally extrinsic elements: authority is not acquired by mounting a podium. Its many external factors must be enlivened by its intrinsic constitutive elements. To enjoy the indispensable authority for his function, the teacher must be able to rely on adequate moral and cultural preparation. Only then can authority find its natural point of fusion with the freedom of the learner. Authority can harmonize with freedom only when it is capable of eliciting the inner recognition of the child’s conscience, even if the outward attitude may contingently fail to correspond. When there is, on one side, inner assent to authority and, on the other, a lack of practical recognition of it, this does not constitute a failure of authority but rather a crisis of the guilty conscience.
With every means and every device that love and wisdom can suggest, the educator will strive to lift the pupil’s spirit from the painful state of that crisis. When every attempt, inspired by vigilant and loving educational wisdom, should irremediably fail, this could only be attributed to the ineradicable freedom of the one being educated. It is well to recall here that even freedom, understood in its highest and noblest sense as emancipation from the dark powers of evil, has its root in an irreplaceable act of choice—a prerogative of man as a moral person.
Now, in the one being educated, the educator can and must safeguard and preserve conscience from interior and exterior suggestions and stimulate the attainment of moral freedom, but he cannot will for one who absolutely refuses to will. When the will is weak and prone to succumb—perhaps amid inner struggle and reluctance—to corrupting influences, it is the educator’s duty to protect it even against itself, or, to be more precise, against its weaknesses and failings, without, however, so stifling or weakening it that the higher conquest of moral life— the fairest flower and the ripest fruit of freedom—is cut off at its root.
On the practical level, the educator must take into account age, a concrete reality with which it is impossible not to reckon, whatever the pretensions of activist pedagogy, which has gone so far as to deny or diminish its importance. In early childhood, when all faculties are in bud and spiritual development follows its antelucan trajectory, authority has a very broad sphere of action, which gradually narrows in later stages, without the educational activity thereby renouncing the efficacy of a spiritual penetration that must deepen even as it loses extension.
It is impossible to leave the child completely free from the earliest age, as Kant claimed in the footsteps of Rousseau, for the child is not capable of exercising freedom within the bounds of an enlightened autonomy, which can only arise from the development of reason and experience. Yet the adolescent, whose intelligence is opening to ever-wider horizons, does not require the same rigid restraint; rather, he needs a strong yet wise guidance, one that seeks to awaken within him the voice of reason and the strength of will.
1946. Authority and Didactics
Of paramount importance in the ethical sphere of education, authority is no less significant in the more specifically didactic sphere of instruction. There will never be a true teacher who does not inspire in students the trust and conviction that he is the sure and faithful guide of their intelligence along the path of truth. Naturally, such sentiments aroused in the minds of pupils must have, so to speak, an objective foundation in the teacher’s real preparation and suitability; otherwise, they would be the fragile fruit and precarious result of poses and histrionic attitudes, amounting to a deception perpetrated against the trusting inexperience of children and youth.Knowledge must be, as it is whenever it is truly realized, a conquest; in this process of conquest, the teacher cannot substitute himself for the pupil but can and must lovingly guide him. Yet illusions fall away for those who would reduce the teacher’s role to a mere provision of extrinsic aids, reserving for the child the freedom to create science. It is absurd to suppose that the child, confronted with the infinite complexity of nature or with materials more or less easily selected and arranged, could retrace the path traveled by humanity over centuries and millennia of civilization and create or recreate science.
Reality is more modest than certain pedagogical myths, but even when reduced to its natural limits, it leaves ample room for spontaneity, freedom, and the activity of the learner. The teacher must accompany the pupil step by step in the progressive acquisition of knowledge, for every step, however infinitesimal, would never be taken without the personal and irreplaceable exertion of intelligence and will; thus, knowledge remains a conquest that can be promoted and stimulated but not mechanically determined by the teacher. It is well to remember that pedagogical action is a spiritual action, from soul to soul. The teacher’s authority and the pupil’s freedom cannot be conceived as material forces destined by nature to clash, repel, or diverge of themselves, so that their reconciliation occurs only as the result of a third force that subjugates and binds them together or through a practical expedient, a clever contrivance that forces them to draw near and coincide.
Authority and freedom, even in the pedagogical realm, are made to integrate in reciprocal harmony. The problem of their reconciliation is practically resolved in that communion of souls which is the necessary condition for the fruitfulness of teaching and education. Nothing is harder than an intimate fusion of souls when the conditions for it are lacking or unmet; the initiative to promote it effectively rests with the teacher’s authority, to which wisdom and love give wings and power of penetration.
The communion of souls in the worship of truth and goodness must not, however, be understood in an idealistic sense, as activist pedagogy naturally does. It is, without doubt, the shared humanity that lives in teacher and pupil which permits the encounter of two intelligences—one developed and mature, the other still in formation—but one cannot reduce common human nature to a concrete reality, a single spirit, or an act that resolves every educational process in its own making. This conception, which has been widely criticized elsewhere, dissolves the very possibility of pedagogical activity by denying the concrete personality of teacher and pupil, irreducible even in the throb of love in which the shared humanity of both vibrates and expands.
The communion of souls, of which we have spoken, is not a fact arising from an immanent necessity, but rather an achievement which, in any case, does not destroy the personal spirituality of the teacher and the pupil, but rather requires it as a condition. The difficulties arising from the monadistic conception of Leibniz cannot serve as a pretext for abandoning the distinction between teacher and pupil to empiricism, while, on the other hand, the eternal becoming of the act, which also implies—and no less so—an eternal unmaking, has nothing in common with the concrete educational process.
The argument would not be exhausted if we did not mention that the authority of the educator is the natural means through which the idea and respect for all other forms of authority penetrate and take root in the consciousness of the one being educated. The educa-
To this kind of crimes, whose principal characteristics we have sought to summarize thus far, belong the following criminal figures:
I. DISOBEDIENCE TO THE POPE OR TO ONE’S OWN ORDINARY
Canon 2331, §1 punishes anyone, cleric or layperson, who is guilty of pertinacious disobedience to the Roman Pontiff or to his own Ordinary. It matters little whether the order to which the subject fails to comply is positive (to do) or negative (not to do), provided it appears substantially and formally legitimate—that is, issued by the competent superior within the limits of his discretionary power and in the prescribed forms, so as to create in the recipient a juridical obligation to obey II. This is, as is clear, an omission-based crime, which can be consummated through an action whenever a prohibition is disregarded or something other than what was commanded is done. The subjective element consists of malice; indeed, of that more cunning kind of malice which consists in pertinacity, i.e., the obstinate will to contravene the law. The disobedient party is subject to indeterminate penalties (not excluding censures), which must be imposed by the judge according to the gravity of the case.II. CONSPIRACY
A simple criminal agreement between two or more persons does not ordinarily fall within the category of punishable actions, even as an attempt; but when such an agreement has as its object any aggression against public authorities, all penal legislations, for evident reasons of political order, treat it as a distinct crime. This criterion is reflected in canon 2331, §2, which threatens the application of severe penalties at the discretion of the judge or superior (and, for clerics, the loss of dignities, benefices, and offices they may hold, and, for religious, the deprivation of active and passive voice and office) against those who “conspire against the authority of the Roman Pontiff or his legate through their own ordinary or against their legitimate mandates.”To constitute the crime, it is not necessary to have the formation of a true and proper association; it is sufficient that there be a *pactum sceleris*, accompanied by at least a general disposition of means to achieve the purpose. The Code does not specify what actions the conspirators must intend to perform; but it is clear that the legislator’s intention is to refer to all those acts that may be directed toward diminishing the authority of the Pope, his legate, or the ordinary. The crime, which necessarily presupposes the cooperation of multiple persons (so that all participants are to be considered co-authors under canon 2209, §2), is by its nature a continuing offense and does not admit of a culpable hypothesis.
Provocation to disobedience is equated, for penal purposes, with conspiracy—that is, the act of whoever incites subjects in any way to disobey the Pope, the papal legate, or their own Ordinary.
III. APPEAL TO A GENERAL COUNCIL
The error of the so-called conciliar theory, which advocates the superiority of the ecumenical council over the Pope (v. COUNCIL, ECUMENICAL), and the consequent abuse that arose between the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century of appealing to the Council against the provisions of the Holy See, compelled the popes repeatedly—from Pius II (Constitution *Sacrabilis*, 18 January 1459) to Julius II (Constitution *Suecepti regiminis*, 1 July 1509), from Gregory XIII (bull *Coenae*, 1583) to Pius IX (Constitution *Apostolicae Sedis*, 12 October 1869)—to consider and punish in the severest manner this form of open rebellion, which was once called “a sacrilege against the primacy of the Roman Pontiff” and which is now addressed by canon 2332 of the *Codex Iuris Canonici*.The crime can be committed not only by natural persons of any state, rank, or condition—including ruling princes, bishops, and cardinals—but also by collegial moral persons; and it consists in appealing in any form to a general council, present or future, against the laws, decrees, and mandates of the reigning Pope. It is not necessary that the appellant intend specifically to injure the supreme authority of the Church; it suffices that he be conscious and willing to turn to the Council as an entity superior to the Pope. The offender becomes “suspected of heresy” and is struck by a *latae sententiae* excommunication, reserved in a special way to the Apostolic See. If the offender is a moral person, the penalty is that of interdict, likewise reserved in a special way to the Apostolic See.
IV. VIOLATION OF LETTERS AND ACTS OF THE HOLY SEE
This crime—which has its origin in the legal abuses of the *regium placet* and the appeal *tamquam ab abusu*, repeatedly and energetically combated by the Church over the centuries (v. PLACET; *ABUSO*)—can be consummated in three different ways, to which correspond as many criminal hypotheses (canon 2333). The first consists in resorting to secular power with the specific intent of preventing, i.e., rendering ineffective, letters and acts of any kind emanating from the Apostolic See or its legates; the second in directly or indirectly prohibiting the promulgation or execution of such letters and acts; the third in causing personal harm or incurring grave fear in anyone for a reason connected with the aforementioned letters or acts. It is debated in doctrine whether, for the perfection of the crime in the first case, the actual occurrence of the impediment is required; it seems to us that the negative opinion is preferable, as it better accords with the letter and spirit of the law. The penalty to which the guilty party is subject is a *latae sententiae* excommunication, reserved in a special way to the Apostolic See.V. MEASURES CONTRARY TO THE RIGHTS OR LIBERTY OF THE CHURCH
Civil authorities can be held responsible for this crime in the exercise of their legislative and administrative functions. Canon 2334, in fact, states—almost verbatim the content of ancient decretals (cf., e.g., c. 49 and 53, X, *de sententia excommunicationis*, V, 39; c. 5, *de immunitate ecclesiarum*, etc., III, 23, in VI)—that “those who enact laws, mandates, or decrees against the liberty or rights of the Church are punished with a *latae sententiae* excommunication specially reserved to the Apostolic See.” Here, the breadth maintained by the law in defining the materiality of the crime is evident.Without the need for further exemplification, it is clear that all those who voluntarily cooperate in the formation of the incriminated measure fall under the sanction of the canon. If the measure is a law, the crime is consummated at the moment of its promulgation; hence, to determine the moment of consummation, one must consider, case by case, the mode of promulgation in force in the state where the crime is committed.
VI. OBSTRUCTION OF THE EXERCISE OF ECCLESIASTICAL JURISDICTION
Whoever, byCivil authority, whether directly or indirectly, impedes the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved in a special manner to the Apostolic See, and, if a cleric or religious, is additionally subject to particular vindictive penalties. This is the combined effect of canons 2334, n. 2 and 2336, which substantially confirms the legislative practice that has developed over many centuries, from the Decretals of Gregory IX and Boniface VIII (cf., e.g., c. 1, X, de officio et potestate iudici delegati, I, 28 and c. 4, de immunitate ecclesiarum etc., III, 23 in VI) to the Apostolic Constitution *Sedis* of Pius IX.
By ecclesiastical jurisdiction is meant, naturally, that “public power of a Superior, granted by Christ or by the Church through canonical mission, to govern the baptized for the sake of eternal salvation,” which is usually divided into legislative, judicial, and executive, and which may be either of the internal or external forum, ordinary or delegated, proper or vicarious, contentious or voluntary (v. GIURISDIZIONE); but it is doubtful whether the protection of the penal norm extends also to merely administrative acts.
Any actual impediment to the exercise of such jurisdiction, brought about by recourse to secular authority, constitutes the objective element of the offense; this offense, unlike the preceding ones, is material and admits of attempt in the double aspect of the incomplete attempt and the frustrated attempt. It must be held that punishable impediment exists not only when the superior is placed in the impossibility of performing a legitimate jurisdictional act, but also when he is forced to revoke an act already performed or to exercise the power of jurisdiction in a manner contrary to his will.
VII. ENROLLMENT IN FREEMASONRY AND OTHER SECTS
It is self-evident that no perfect society—and much less the Church—can tolerate within its ranks the existence of sects or associations that aim to undermine its foundations and subvert its institutions. This is the reason that moved the ecclesiastical legislator to combat, from their very inception, secret societies in general and Freemasonry in particular (v. MASSONERIA), considering membership in them as a grave offense against the powers of the Church (cf. the constitution *In eminenti* of Clement XII, 28 Apr. 1738; the constitution *Providas* of Benedict XIV, 18 May 1751; the encyclical *Qui pluribus* of Pius IX, 9 Nov. 1846, etc.).According to the Code of Canon Law (can. 2335), the mere act of enrolling (nomen dare) in Freemasonry or other similar associations conspiring against the Church or against legitimate civil authorities is sufficient to constitute the offense, regardless of any further criminal actions that the members may commit. Nor should it be surprising that with these provisions ecclesiastical law extends its protection to the organs of state authority, if one considers, in addition to the Apostle’s warning: “There is no power but from God... Therefore he who resists the power resists the ordinance of God” (Rom. 13:1–2), the constant teaching of Catholic morality, according to which “to reject obedience and to stir up sedition through the force of the multitude is a crime of lese-majesty, not only human but also divine” (Leo XIII, encyclical *Immortale Dei*, 10 Nov. 1885, § 11).
To determine a priori which associations are to be equated with Freemasonry for the purposes of the canon in question is not easy, nor perhaps even possible. Authors usually resort to examples of debatable clarity and limited efficacy; it suffices here to note that subversive societies are not to be confused with “non-Catholic sects,” membership in which is provided for and punished as a distinct offense by can. 2314, § 1 (v. APOSTASIA; ERESIA), and to leave, for the rest, to the prudent discretion of the judge or superior to decide in individual cases whether a given association, whether political or cultural, must be considered, by reason of its statutes, purpose, and activity, similar or akin to Freemasonry.
The offense is committed with dolus if the guilty party acts with the knowledge and will to give his name to a sect; but the possibility of culpa cannot be excluded, which may occur, for example, if someone enrolls in an association without exercising due diligence in investigating its nature and purpose. The penalties are the same as those provided for the offense in the preceding number, with the sole difference that the excommunication is reserved simply, and not in a special manner, to the Apostolic See.
VIII. SEDITIOUS ACTS IN PARISHES
For all areas regulated and the peaceful functioning of the organs entrusted with the care of souls, the Code provides two distinct figures of offense. The first (can. 2337, § 1, which has a precedent in the decree *Maxima cura*, 20 Aug. 1910, can. 18, § 1) consists in the act of the parish priest who, with the specific intent of impeding the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction (as, for example, to avoid a transfer or to escape punishment), convenes a crowd, promotes public subscriptions, or otherwise incites the people to rebellion; the second (can. 2337, § 2) consists in the act of a priest who in any way incites the multitude to impede the canonical taking of possession of a parish by the parish priest or the legally appointed economic vicar (v. PARROCO; VICARIO PARROCCHIALE). The punishment of both offenses is left to the judgment of the Ordinary, who is empowered, if necessary, to impose even the penalty of suspension.IX. CONTEMPT AND NON-COMPLIANCE WITH CENSURES
In can. 2338 four distinct penal provisions are grouped together, which share the common intent of safeguarding, through the prestige of ecclesiastical authority, the remedial and exemplary effect of medicinal penalties (v. CENSURA); these figures of offense were largely foreseen by the Council of Trent (sess. XXV, c. 3, de ref.) and in various provisions of the Apostolic Constitution *Apostolicae Sedis*.1) A priest who, without the requisite faculty, presumes to absolve someone from a latae sententiae excommunication reserved in a special or most special manner to the Apostolic See (v. ASSOLUZIONE) incurs in turn the excommunication reserved simply to the same Apostolic See (can. 2338, § 1). It is clear that for the offense to be committed the absolution must be real, not merely simulated (the latter being dealt with by can. 2322). The subjective element, as the word “praesumentes” indicates, consists in full dolus.
2) The same penalty is incurred by anyone who assists or favors an excommunicated person who is to be avoided on account of the offense for which he was excommunicated (can. 2338, § 2. For the notion of “vitandus,” V. SCOMUNICA). For the rest, it suffices here to note that the assistance or favor must be rendered after the offense has been consummated; if it were rendered or promised beforehand, instead of this particular figure of offense there would be a form of criminal conspiracy.
3) Clerics who knowingly and willingly communicate in sacred things with an excommunicated person who is to be avoided, thereby actively involving him in liturgical functions, likewise incur the excommunication reserved simply to the Apostolic See.
4) Those who, in places under interdict, knowingly celebrate or cause to be celebrated the divine offices incur a personal interdict forbidding them from entering a church (v. INTERDETTO), to remain in force until, in the judgment of the superior whose sentence was violated, they have given suitable satisfaction. The same penalty—which it is not clear whether should be considered medicinal or vindictive—is provided for anyone who admits a cleric who is excommunicated, interdicted, or suspended by a condemnatory or declaratory sentence to celebrate the divine offices forbidden to him by law (can. 2338, § 3).
X. ILLEGITIMATE ECCLESIASTICAL BURIAL
To ensure respect for the norms that deprive certain categories of persons of the privilege of receiving Christian burial, can. 2339 sets forth two criminal hypotheses. The first concerns those who, by exercising their authority or resorting to violence, impose ecclesiastical burial upon infidels, apostates, heretics, or notoriously known schismatics, or upon those excommunicated or interdicted by a declaratory or condemnatory sentence. This incurs the penalty of excommunication latae sententiae, not reserved to anyone. The second pertains to those who willingly provide burial to the aforementioned persons, and is punished by interdict from entering the church, reserved to the Ordinary.
It is debated whether ecclesiastical burial here refers merely to the simple interment of the corpse, or to the full complex of acts and rites mentioned in can. 1204. The first opinion, followed by a great number of both ancient and modern authors, may be considered the more probable. (For further details V. SEPOLTURA ECCLESIASTICA).
XI. OBSTINACY IN CENSURES
One who, while under a censure, shows no signs of repentance but maliciously persists in contumacy, thereby manifesting culpable contempt for the coercive power of the Church. This is the foundation of the provisions of can. 2340, by virtue of which: a) an excommunicated person (whether cleric or lay, tolerated or vitandus) who allows a year to pass without making any attempt to obtain absolution becomes “suspected of heresy,” and thus, under certain conditions, liable to the penalties established against heretics (v. ERESIA); b) a cleric who perseveres for six months under the censure of suspension must be gravely admonished (v. AMMONIZIONE); and if, after a month from the admonition, he does not desist from his contumacy, he is deprived of any benefices and offices he may possess. These are crimes of omission, which in the first case are consummated upon the completion of a year from the moment the subject had knowledge of the incurred excommunication, and in the second case as soon as a month has passed from the canonical admonition.