1917 Code of Canon Law

[5] Papal attempts at codification of the scattered mass of canon law spanned the eight centuries since Gratian produced his Decretum c.

No complete collection of them had ever been published and they remained scattered through the ponderous volumes of the Bullaria, the Acta Sanctae Sedis, and other such compilations, which were accessible to only a few and for professional canonists themselves and formed an unwieldy mass of legal material.

Moreover, not a few ordinances, whether included in the "Corpus Juris" or of more recent date, appeared to be contradictory; some had been formally abrogated, others had become obsolete by long disuse; others, again, had ceased to be useful or applicable in the present condition of society.

[7] Already in the Council of Trent the wish had been expressed in the name of the King of Portugal that a commission of learned theologians be appointed to make a thorough study of the canonical constitutions binding under pain of mortal sin, define their exact meaning, see whether their obligation should not be restricted in certain cases, and clearly determine how far they were to be maintained and observed.

[7] In response to the request of the bishops at the First Vatican Council,[8] on 14 May 1904, with the motu proprio Arduum sane munus ("A Truly Arduous Task"), Pope Pius X set up a commission to begin reducing these diverse documents into a single code,[9] presenting the normative portion in the form of systematic short canons shorn of the preliminary considerations.

[10] In addition to the canon law experts brought to Rome to serve on the codification commission, all the Latin Church's bishops and superiors general of religious orders were periodically consulted via letter.

[11] Under the aegis of Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, with the help of Eugenio Pacelli (who later became Pope Pius XII),[12] the Commission for the Codification of Canon Law completed its work under Benedict XV, who promulgated the Code which became effective in 1918.

[17] On 15 September 1917, by the motu proprio Cum Iuris Canonici,[18] Pope Benedict XV made provision for a Pontifical Commission charged with interpreting the code and making any necessary modifications as later legislation was issued.

Translations were forbidden, partly to ensure that interpretive disputes among scholars and canonists concerning such a new type of code would be resolved in Latin itself and not in one of the many languages used in scholarship.