§ 13. Church Legislation

The fundamental laws of the Church are contained in Holy Scripture and Tradition. These laws, as we have seen, did not set forth in detail everything that concerned every particular side of church life; rather it was necessary, by a special labor, to derive this from them, and to establish precisely, and to fix by positive ordinance, what the constitution of the Church should be, so as to correspond to the fundamental law expressed for it in Holy Scripture and Tradition; what the administration of the Church should be, according to the goal and the means of the Church; what are the rights and duties of the members of the Church, according to their various positions in the Church—in a word, it was necessary, in keeping with the fundamental laws laid down at the very founding of the Church, to issue and establish particular laws which would secure good order in the Church on every side and guarantee to her the attainment of her goal in the world. That need the Church herself had to satisfy, by that authority which her own Founder had given her, exercising it according to the precepts which are fundamentally contained in Holy Scripture and Tradition. The authority of the Church is concentrated in the council of the elders of the Church (Matt. 18:17-20). The conciliar authority of the Church had, then, the task of accomplishing what was needed for the all-round ordering of the Church. In carrying this out there developed that church legislation (ἡ ἐκκλησιαστικὴ νομοθεσία, legislatio ecclesiastica) whose precepts, after Holy Scripture and Tradition, constitute the chief source of church law.

The highest legislative authority in the Church is exercised by the ecumenical council. After it, that legislative authority, within precisely determined canonical limits, is exercised by regional councils, which gather periodically, or as needed, in one or another local church. Finally, in the name of the conciliar authority, and within the limits which that authority expressly and precisely prescribes, legislative authority may also be exercised by bishops for the churches entrusted to them. A separate account of the legislative authority of the Church belongs to the systematic treatment of the science of church law, and there, in its proper place, we shall speak of it in detail.

The precepts and ordinances of the legislative authority of the Church are variously named in the sources of law, according to the source from which they proceed, according to the subject with which they deal, according to the form in which they were issued, and so forth. The most common term for precepts concerning church administration is κανών.[1] In the basic canonical collection, besides the canons issued by councils, there are several epistles of individual Fathers of the Church, which by their content are entitled “canonical epistles” (κανονικαὶ ἐπιστολαί);[2] and likewise, on the corresponding questions, ἐρωτήσεις, which those concerned put forward, the answers were called κανονικαὶ ἀποκρίσεις;[3] and to the canonical […]