Decennio

Q: Dr dear Dr: What was the eventual purpose of yet another Codex, in the Eastern Code of 1990, when it was first promulgated?

Well, it did not escape the notice of the ever-vigilant Jesuit professors in Rome, the Codex writers themselves, that in the 10 or so years after the 1983 Codex was first promulgated and produced for the westerners, that the western codex was strictly interpreted by zealots in many diocesan curias, all of whom to a man and a woman, took up the codex like the way they took up the civil codes, and imposed their civil mindsets on the Christian flocks, ignoring such things as the priority of fundamental canons of fundamental rights for instance. But the new codex then also fell into the hands of a new wing of conservative right-wingers who had not been through the Council that produced the individual canons, so that per accidens and without intending it, the WC began to be used for the same purposes as the persecution, agreeing with the persecutors of the Christians all over North America, that is Canada and USA and Mexico and Belize. So these right-wingers played into the hands of the very persecutors they were trying to avoid and ignore, chiefly through their over-strict interpretations of the canons of the codex, routinely re-routed by religious who did not have a saecularitas mindset and could not offer the wisdom of the Church to more modern generations in its overall more prudent general laxity. As Fr Ken the Buddhist icon of a new Buddhist-Christian Synthesis used to say - “secularism has been getting some bad press lately.” So these conservatives actually agreed with the persecutors of holy mother Church de facto, like the very vocal and wide-swinging persecutors of holy mother Russia, playing into their hands with glee, as was revealed in my Dialogue with Anglican lawyers in the 1990s, so after about 10 years, it was nigh time for a more soft-cell Codex from the East which would correct some of these zealots for civilist imposition on the poor long- suffering clergy, but not before many were dismissed throughout the 1990s and retired early, poor chappies, by well-meaning but over legalistic vicariate secretaries and deanery pacmen. So unintentionally of course, chiefly through their blindness to things broader than church, these conservatives played right into the hands of an ongoing persecution that was already rich with immortality as we say in the Cistercian wings of the mystical. Innocent, naive, civilist, but wholly blind to the damage they were causing, blind guides leading blindly. Hence the much more compassionate 1992 Eastern Codex.