Privacy Rights

Rev dear Rev: What do the Eastern Peoples teach us about privacy in canon 23 of the Eastern Oriental Codex - is there anything different to note from the Western Codex of canon 220?

There is a huge world of difference between the 1983 Codex and the 1990s Codex. The privacy law of 1983 depicted privacy as a fundamental right of the people, and intruders and invaders as enemies of the people, and it was a right that was depicted as preserving personal space and personal integrity and personal histories of intimacy - all this emanating from an intriguing little-known discussion of privacy rights and the histories of intimacy of clergy in the debates at the formation of the Second Vatican Council some time before in the 1960s. Lots of cases then arose after the 1983 western law of a rights-based kind of jurisprudence, chiefly at the Rota and then the Signatura. Many of these cases touched on the clerical right to a good reputation after one famously notorious case in which members of a youth movement spread rumours about the clergy at their local oratorio during the ministry of Carlo Martini in Milano. These youth movements were reprobated by the bishops and continue to be still living under a cloud. So in this rights-based regime of 1983, privacy was inscribed as a right, a simple fundamental one predating any other prerogative of an institute or diocese. By 1990 in the oriental side of the Church, a side that governs Ukraine, after many many cases of privacy violation in the newspapers concerning the right to a good reputation, William and Harry for instance, a signal was sent to the courts above in Rome that for the right to work, it has to be inscribed in the positive law of a diocese. Hence the use of the expression, nec ius ullius personae, in the more emphatic oriental canon at 23. So a difference has been observed and is now more visible. Less a right in the old 1983 codex and now more of a law binding all in the 1990 oriental codex.