CANONIZATION OF LAWS. - For certain matters the Church, rather than directly formulating its own juridical norms, establishes that the very norms which, on that matter, have been or will be issued by the legislators of the various States shall hold as norms of canon law: the norms issued by the State, insofar as they thus come to form part of the Church's legal order, are called, by an expression that is by now traditional, canonized civil norms (or laws).
Naturally, for the Church to be able to do this, the matters must be ones with which the laws of the State deal: and indeed we see that in the CIC the canonization of civil laws occurs almost exclusively with regard to contracts (cf. cann. 33 § 2, 1529, 1926 and 1930) and prescription (cf. can. 1508), matters for which, therefore, the Church's legislation is not uniform, but varies from State to State.
The reason why the Church has recourse to this indirect procedure in establishing certain norms is above all the expediency that in certain matters the canonical norms be identical or nearly identical to the civil ones, and furthermore be in conformity with the requirements deriving from the character of the various peoples and from the different circumstances of place and time.
It is obvious, however, that just as the Church cannot issue laws contrary to divine law, so civil norms can have the force of canonical norms only insofar as they do not conflict with divine law: such a reservation is sometimes explicitly formulated by the Church when it canonizes civil laws, but it must be understood even when it is not expressed. And furthermore, just as the Church, by the very fact of canonizing civil laws, does not thereby lose the power to issue laws on that same matter, should it wish to regulate it entirely with norms formulated by itself, so too, in canonizing civil laws, it can derogate from them at some point with its own norms, which therefore, in the Church's legal order, will prevail over the corresponding civil norms: we see indeed, for example, that although, as has been said, the civil laws are canonized in matters of contracts and prescription, the Church has nevertheless established various norms concerning contracts made by ecclesiastical bodies, and concerning prescription in ecclesiastical matters; which norms derogate from the civil laws, which will therefore be applicable in such matters only if and insofar as, besides not being contrary to divine law, they are also compatible with those norms issued by the Church.
It should be noted that there are also cases in which the ecclesiastical legislator refers to the laws of the State without this amounting to canonization; this happens, for example, when a canonical norm mentions juridical institutions in such a way as to presuppose the norms of the respective State's legal order (cf. cann. 600 n. 3, 1613 § 1, etc.); or makes given juridical situations depend on the state of the State's juridical norms (cf. cann. 547 § 2, 581 § 1, 1513 § 2, etc.); or finally refers to the civil law in order to declare that it, and not the law of the Church, must govern given relationships (cf. cann. 1016, 1813 § 2, 2198).
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