GIURIDISMO. - A charge brought by the Slavophiles against the Catholic Church, which is alleged to have substituted for the grace of mutual love and for the gifts bestowed by the Holy Spirit the external efficacy of law, by means of which it maintains its unity in a purely earthly, external, and artificial manner. Catholic juridicism 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 deal with the doctrine concerning the Church.
The first to level this accusation were the Protestants, opposed to ecclesiastical hierarchy and favourable to the concept of an invisible Church. The Easterners, who admit the visibility of the Church and regard hierarchy as one of its essential elements, when they accuse Catholics of juridicism, do not attack the existence of law in the Church, but rather the abuse allegedly made of it by Catholicism, which 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, thus elevated to the principle of the unity of the Church; and in the arbitrary limitation of the subject of law, which does not equally embrace all members, but only the bishops and the Pope.