RECEPTIVE REFERENCE. — Receptive reference occurs whenever a law of the State or of the Church adopts, i.e., receives, one or more legislative norms from another State; or, in regard to relations between State and Church, a norm or a body of legislative norms respectively of the Church or of the State. The law, thus received in its materiality, becomes the law of that State or of the Church, that is, of a perfect society, which, precisely by virtue of the receptive reference, supplies that matter with the formal and binding element and thereby transforms it into the law proper of the State or of the Church.
Receptive reference is distinguished from formal reference, in which a given law of the Church or of the State refers to another law of another perfect juridical society, but without adopting it, without receiving it, but merely as a presupposition of certain legal effects.
Receptive reference, which canon law can and usually does make to civil norms, is called canonization (v.).
Receptive reference may be limited to a body of laws issued before a certain date. In such a case, laws subsequently enacted have no relevance for the State in whose legislative system the reception occurs. That is to say, certain norms continue to be in force in the receiving State which may have been abrogated or even modified in the legislation from which they were taken. A typical case is that of the legislation of the City of Vatican, which has received many Italian laws and codes in force on 7 June 1929. Now many of those laws are no longer in force in Italy (Zanardelli Penal Code; Code of Criminal Procedure of 1913; Commercial Code; Code of Civil Procedure; and even the Civil Code of 1865), yet they continue to be in force in the Vatican.
Less frequently, and indeed more often, receptive reference is, so to speak, in blank; that is, the law in force at the time when the legal relationship in question arises is applied, not a given law, or body, or system of laws crystallized in time.
It may happen that the law of the State to which receptive reference is made refers in turn to the law of another State. Here a distinction must be made: if the law of the receptive reference regulates the legal institution in question (as is most often the case) and only in special cases (for reasons of the citizenship of the subjects or of the territoriality of the legal relationship) refers to the law of another State, the law to which the first reference is made must be applied, and no further.
If, on the other hand, the law of the receptive reference (as, in the abstract, is conceivable though in practice most rare) does not regulate that institution at all but adopts in its entirety, by way of receptive reference, a law of another State (or of the Church), it is to this law that recourse must necessarily be had. In any case, it is the law itself that is received, not the jurisprudential interpretation, even if uniform and constant (as accepted by the courts of the State to which the received law belongs), unless, by legislative or customary norm of that State, the jurisprudential interpretation acquires in that State itself the force and efficacy of law.
Receptive reference, and in particular canonization, can never be integral or blind. The Church and the State, for the obvious necessity of logic and morality, impose certain limitations, derived from natural law, from contrary provisions of public order or of public interest, and from so-called public morals (cf. cited can. 1529 and art. 31 of the so-called preliminary provisions to the Italian Civil Code).