RECEPTION (RECEPTIVE REFERRAL). - There is r. r. [reception] whenever a provision of law of the State or of the Church adopts as its own, that is, receives, one or more legislative norms of another State; or, as regards 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 property of that State or of the Church, that is, of a perfect society which, by virtue precisely of the r. r., supplies that matter with the formal and binding element and transforms it, accordingly, into a law proper to the State or to the Church.
R. r. is distinguished from formal reference, in which a determined law of the Church or of the State does indeed refer to another law of another perfect juridical society, but without making it its own, without receiving it, but only as a presupposition of determined juridical effects.
The r. r., which canon law can and customarily does make to civil-law norms, is called canonization (v.).
The r. r. can be limited to a body of laws issued before a certain date. In that case, the laws subsequently approved have no relevance whatsoever for the State in whose legislative system the reception occurs. That is, certain norms continue to have force in the recipient State, which may have been abrogated or even modified in the legislation from which they were borrowed. A typical case is that offered by the legislation of Vatican City, which received a great many Italian laws and codes in force as of 7 June 1929. Now many of those laws are no longer in force in Italy (the Zanardelli Penal Code; the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1913; the Commercial Code; the Code of Civil Procedure; and the Civil Code of 1865 itself), while continuing to have force in the Vatican.
Sometimes, and indeed more frequently, the r. r. is, so to speak, in blank; that is, the law in force at the time in which the juridical relationship at issue is situated applies, not a determined law, or body, or system of laws crystallized in time.
It may happen that the law of the State to which the receptive reference is made itself refers to the law of another State. And here a distinction must be drawn: if the law of the receptive reference governs the juridical institution de quo agitur (as is the more frequent case) and only in special cases (for reasons of the citizenship of the subjects or of the territoriality of the juridical relationship) refers to the law of another State, the law to which the first reference is made must be applied and one must not go further.
If, on the other hand, the law of the receptive reference (as, in the abstract, is conceivable even though in practice extremely rare) does not at all govern that institution but adopts ex integro, with a reference that is in turn receptive, a law of another State (or of the Church), it is to this law that, by obvious necessity of things, one must have recourse. In every case what is received is the law, not the jurisprudential interpretation, even if uniform and constant, of the law (such as is adopted 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.
The r. r., and in particular canonization, can never be integral or blind. The Church and the State lay down, by obvious necessity of logic and of morals, certain limitations, derived from natural law, from contrary provisions of public order or of public interest and so-called good morals (cf. the cited can. 1529 and art. 31 of the so-called preliminary provisions to the Italian Civil Code).
Bibliography
Corrado Bernardini