Vatican to publish documents associated with abandoned ‘Fundamental Law of the Church’
January 05, 2026
» Continue to this story on L'Osservatore Romano (Italian)
CWN Editor's Note: A Vatican official announced that the Vatican publishing house will soon publish a volume of all of the documents associated with the Lex Fundamentalis Ecclesiae [Fundamental Law of the Church], an authoritative text on the common Western and Eastern legal heritage of the Church. The project was initiated by Pope St. Paul VI and abandoned by Pope St. John Paul II.
“The idea was presented to St. Paul VI by Cardinal Döpfner, bishop of Munich and subsequently president of the German Episcopal Conference, supported by the founder of the Institute of Canon Law in Munich, Klaus Mörsdorf,” Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, wrote in a lengthy article in the January 3 edition of the Vatican newspaper. “Subsequently, the work to update the Latin Code and that for the new Fundamental Law progressed in parallel for years, followed shortly afterwards, at a later stage, by the work for the Eastern codification.”
Nine drafts were considered until December 1981, when St. John Paul, according to Bishop Arrieta, “decided to postpone the eventual publication of the Fundamental Law, fearing possible risks in the ecumenical field and wanting to avoid the ambiguous signal that the Church intended to adapt itself in this way to the constitutionalism of secular societies.” Nonetheless, the drafts influenced the eventual Code of Canon Law (1983) and Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches (1990).
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