RECEPTIVE REFERENCE. – There is a receptive reference whenever a legislative provision of the State or of the Church adopts as its own, that is, receives, one or more legislative norms of another State; or, with regard to relations between State and Church, a norm or a body of legislative norms belonging respectively to the Church or to the State. The law thus received in its material form becomes proper to that State or to the Church, that is, to a perfect society which, precisely by virtue of the receptive reference, supplies that material with the formal and binding element and thereby transforms it into a law proper to the State or to the Church.
The receptive reference differs from the formal reference, in which a given 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, and only as the premise of certain juridical effects.
The receptive reference that canon law may and generally does make canonization (v.).
The receptive reference may be limited to a body of laws enacted before a certain date. In such a case, laws subsequently approved have no relevance whatsoever for the State in whose legislative system the reception takes place. That is, certain norms continue to have force in the receiving State, even though they may have been repealed or also amended in the legislation from which they were borrowed. A typical case is provided by the legislation of Vatican City, which received a great many Italian laws and codes in force on 7 June 1929. Today, many of those laws are no longer in force in Italy (the Zanardelli Penal Code; the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1913; the Commercial Code; the Code of Civil Procedure; and even the Civil Code of 1865), while continuing to have force in Vatican City.
At times, and indeed more frequently, the receptive reference is, so to speak, open-ended; that is, the law in force at the time in which the disputed juridical relationship arises is applied, rather than a specific law, body of laws, or system of laws fixed at a particular point 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. Here a distinction must be made: if the law referred to receptively regulates the juridical institution de quo agitur (as is most frequently the case) and only, in special cases (because of the subjects’ citizenship or 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 beyond II.
If, on the other hand, the law referred to receptively (as is conceivable in the abstract, even though extremely rare in practice) does not regulate that institution at all, but adopts ex integro, through a receptive reference of its own, a law of another State (or of the Church), it is to this law that, by the obvious necessity of the case, recourse must be had. What is received in every case is the law, not the jurisprudential interpretation of the law, even when uniform and consistent (such as that accepted by the courts of the State to which the received law belongs), unless, under a legislative or customary norm of that State, jurisprudential interpretation acquires, within that State itself, the force and efficacy of law.
The receptive reference, and in particular canonization, can never be integral or blind. The Church and the State, by the obvious requirements of logic and morality, establish certain limitations, derived from natural law, from a contrary provision of public order or public interest, and from so-called good morals (cf. cited can. 1529 and art. 31 of the so-called preliminary provisions to the Italian Civil Code).