Pope: Canon lawyers must love justice, charity, truth

By Devin Watkins

“Love—caritas—is an extraordinary force that impels people to courageously and generously engage in the field of justice and peace. It is a force that originates in God, eternal Love, and absolute Truth.”

Pope Francis opened his address to participants in a formation course organized by the Tribunal of the Roman Rota with those words from Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical.

The mission of the Roman Rota, the Church’s highest appellate court, as well as each of the Church’s lower tribunals, can be described as a “ministry of justice and charity in truth,” said the Pope.

Canon lawyers, he added, are called to love justice, charity, and truth, which are so closely intertwined that if one is lacking all three lose authenticity.

“Neither justice without charity nor charity without justice,” he said. “Charity without justice is not true charity.”

Justice involves seeking the good of the entire community and must be tempered by mercy, “for justice can only be understood in the light of love.”

“Never forget,” urged the Pope, “that those who come to you seeking the exercise of your ecclesial office must always encounter the face of our Mother, the Holy Church, who tenderly loves all her children.”

Love, he noted, teaches canon lawyers to cultivate their “legal sensitivity” so that they may recognize “what constitutes a true right of the person within the Church.”

Pope Francis went on to invite everyone to overcome fear of justice, since it can undermine charity due to its root in a mistaken concept of justice as a merely punitive exercise.

Justice, he said, “is a distinctly altruistic virtue that seeks the good of the other,” which links it closely with charity and mercy.

“Charity does not nullify justice, nor does it relativize rights,” he said. “In the name of love, we cannot neglect what is a duty of justice.”

As an example, he noted, the current norms on matrimonial cases cannot be compromised in pursuit of speed, since “mercy does not abolish justice.”

Charity and justice, said the Pope, work harmoniously together when they find their basis in truth.

In conclusion, Pope Francis invited canon lawyers to embrace hope, as the Church looks to the upcoming 2025 Jubilee of Hope, which begins on December 24.

“Let us allow ourselves to be drawn by hope and make it contagious for those who desire it,” he said, citing the Jubilee Bull of Indiction. “May our lives proclaim: ‘Hope in the Lord, be strong, let your heart take courage, and hope in the Lord’.”