By Fr. Roy Cimagala
TO determine the true spirit and intent of our laws, we should go to Christ. That’s because he is the original and final lawgiver. We should be wary when we would just make and interpret laws, whether the natural, moral or purely human laws, according to our own understanding of things alone.
We are reminded of this point when in the gospel some disciples of John the Baptist asked Christ why John’s disciples fast and those of Christ did not. That’s when Christ said, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.” (cfr. Mt 9,14-15)
We have to understand that any human law should always be a dynamic one, always in the process of refining, polishing and enriching itself. It should never be considered as static, or irreformable, unenrichable.
A lot of discernment is needed here. Prudence requires it. And the common good, which the law should always serve, can often present competing interests that need to be resolved as fairly as possible. That’s because human conditions and circumstances can vary a lot.
We have to remember that charity, truth, justice and mercy, which our laws should embody, have aspects that can be mysterious and that will always demand new requirements from us.
Yes, we obviously have to be governed by the rule of law. Without the law, we can only expect disorder and chaos, and all the forms of injustice. But we need to distinguish between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and know how to understand and apply the law properly.
Ideally, both the letter and the spirit of a certain law should be in perfect harmony. But that is hardly the case in real life. The problem, of course, is that the articulation of the law is conditioned and limited by our human powers that cannot fully capture the richness of human life, considering its spiritual and supernatural character that will always involve the intangibles and mysteries and the like.
That is the reason why we can go beyond but not against a particular law, when such law cannot fully express the concrete conditions of a particular case.
But, first of all, we have to understand that all our laws should be based on what is known as the natural law that in the end is a participation in the divine eternal law of God, our Creator and the first and ultimate lawgiver. And that part of natural law that is specific to man is called the natural moral law that would recognize, as its first principle, God as our Creator and source and end of all laws.
A legal system not clearly based on this fundamental principle about laws would already be a system that is defective ‘ab initio.’ A legal system that is based only on some human consensus or on some ideology would put the spirit of the law in full subservience to the letter of that law.
But even if our legal system recognizes God as the source and end of all laws, it is still highly characterized by our human condition. Thus, the articulation of the law in its letter has to be constantly animated by the spirit of that law that in the end is the spirit of God.
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
