Pope Francis’s Apostolic Constitution Pascite gregem Dei drew considerable attention for the pontiff’s wide-ranging reforms of Book VI of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, containing the Church’s penal law. Much of the attention focused on the Pope’s revision to the laws dealing with sexual abuse. Francis has spent much of his pontificate addressing the filth of sexual abuse in the Church and the Church’s response. The new Book VI represents another major step forward in addressing in a serious way the abuse crisis and its consequences. However, there was some attention devoted to the Pope’s general comments on a jurisprudence of penal law within the Church. These comments have a much wider applicability. Indeed, Pope Francis’s insightful connection between charity and the penal law goes to the very heart of human law in St. Thomas Aquinas’s concept.
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Ius & Iustitium, One Year On
June marks the one year anniversary of Ius & Iustitium. We started this blog because we recognized a growing dissatisfaction with the mainstream conservative legal movement in the United States, and we perceived a hunger for a better alternative. The blog went live two days after Bostock and two weeks before June Medical, two Supreme Court decisions that have rightfully shaken the faith in the conservative legal movement’s ability to deliver on its promises. But the Ius & Iustitium project goes deeper than that. What we propose is a fundamental re-thinking of jurisprudence that rejects the positivism and liberalism embedded in mainstream conservative legal thought and embraces the classical legal tradition.
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