JURIDICISM. – A charge levelled by the Slavophiles against the Catholic Church, which they claim has substituted the efficacy of external law for the grace of mutual love and the gifts bestowed by the Holy Spirit, through which it sustains its unity in a purely earthly, external, and artificial manner. This juridicism of Catholicism 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 level this accusation were the Protestants, who opposed ecclesiastical hierarchy and favoured 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, are not attacking the existence of law in the Church, but rather the abuse that Catholicism would make of it, which manifests itself in a threefold excess: in the secularisation 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 members equally, but only the bishops and the Pope.
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A. S. Khomiakov, *L'Église latine et le protestantisme du point de vue de l'Église d'Orient*, Lausanne 1871;
E. Kolemine, *L'Église de Rome*, Khomiakov, Madrid 1912;
M. Gordillo, *L'Università degli Studi di Roma*, 1927, pp. 87–96. Maurizio Gordillo