Juridicism

JURIDICISM. - A charge leveled by the Slavophiles against the Catholic Church, alleging that it has replaced the grace of mutual love and the gifts bestowed by the Holy Spirit with the external efficacy of law, by means of which it sustains its unity in a purely earthly, external and artificial manner. Catholic juridism has become a commonplace in the writings of the separated Easterners against Rome. It is found in the anti-Catholic resolutions of the "inter-Orthodox" congress of Moscow (8-19 July 1948) and in the most recent books of the Monophysites, when they treat of the doctrine on the Church.

The first to launch this accusation were the Protestants, opposed to the ecclesiastical hierarchy and favorable to the concept of an invisible Church. The Easterners, who admit the visibility of the Church and regard the hierarchy as one of its essential elements, when they accuse Catholics of juridism, do not combat the existence of law in the Church, but rather the abuse that Catholicism would make of it and that would manifest itself in a threefold excess: in the secularization of ecclesiastical law under the influence of Roman law; in the exaggeration of the effects of law, elevated thus to the principle of the Church's unity; and in the arbitrary limitation of the subject of law, which does not embrace all the members equally, but only the bishops and the Pope.

Maurizio Gordillo