. hello. on behalf of the archdiocese of san francisco welcome to mosaic. the catholic church is an ancient institution with a long and rich history. which encapsulates centuries of human experience. it is also a universal institution with members in every corner of the globe and every culture and language group but it's particular in in local institution and church of your neighborhood, your parish, the heart of your local community. in that parish churchch is where you worship and your religious life is lived and kept the important records of your baptism, confirmation, marriage and other sacraments. but how does this ancient

institution express its long experience of human life? and how does the far-flung membership express a unity of mm r ce of the faith? today we talk with an expert in the church's code of law for the governance and mission. this is called cannon law. and you may be surprised to learn ace was, it's a deep, rich important come pew lation of century of norms and standards could be contained in a single volume. and introduction to the volume says its purse purpose to contribute to good order and enhanced free dom among god's people. so the common task on earth may be carried out more effectively. stay with us as we meet rob graphico a cannon lawyer the voice chancellor of the archdiocese and with him learn more about church law and its contribution to the good order and our enhanced freedom for the faithful. [ cell phone rings ]

>> yeah, i'm watching it too. i see them every day. >> the curtains, they're always drawn in this place. >> i know. >> that guy, it seems like he's in charge of them. i don't know, i don't feel very good about this. >> we have to report this. >> yes, absolutely.

. hello, and welcome to mosaic with us. today, my guest robert wgraffeo i will call you rob. >> yes. >> and he works with the archdiocese of the san francisco. and you are a cannon lawyer. you will tell us what that means. you are also the voice chancellor of the archdiocese. and manager of the tribunal.

so, first let's talk about being a cannon lawyer. tells us what that mean what cannon law is and how one becomes an expert in it. >> so, cannon law is the catholic church's body of internal law. it's different from american law. often teems i tell people i'm cannon lawyer they have no familiarity with the cath like church or the term and think it's one of the branches of law for which someone goes to an american law school. and i have to correct them a little bit and tell them it's like a foreign body of law. like. >> interesting. >> for the law from another country my thought people associated instantly with the church the church law but you say no. >> some may have that connection, and they may make the connection but other never heard cannon law and there are people who don't have the understanding or heard of term. so, you know, it's the church's internal body of law. you know, to be a cannon lawyer is to have studied that in a cannon law school and get a degree in it.

that he one place in the united states where you can do that that's at catholic university of america in washington, d.c. >> one place. >> one place in the united states. >> and who certifies your knowledge and your peckster. expertise. >> the professors common a keen hencive examination and successful completion of course and major thesis. there is no postgraduate test like bar exam like a american lawyer but the faculty of the school of cannon law that certifies your competence to practice cannon law. >> and the overall arching authority for such a school is the vatican in some ways? >> it's the vatican. the vatican is the holy sea we call it more is they set criteria for the curriculum and that was actually revised not too long ago maybe a little more than 10 years ago to make it more rigorous because it needs to be shorter period of time to get the first cannon law degree which is a jcl and

get a docket rit which is a jcd so they overtholed curriculum and lengthened it out a little bit and made it a little more difficult and rig krause to get that degree. >> interesting. a special branch of learningyou probably don't have to do it in latten but in your vernacular. >> the lectures are in the vernacular he got mine in eng lesh but you take latten classes because the text of the law is in latin. and all translations really are supposed to be a secondary way of reading the law. you are supposed to. this is the expectation you read it in the latin. don't quiz me on that. and then secondary in the vernacular. so, yes. you have is to study latten a little bit. >> i said in my intro this body of knowledge could be contained in the single volume. i have it right here and think this is in here is the latin text. and english text. so the latin text is half of

the book is not that copious. there's not that much. >> right. now, i have to correct conone thing. most of the church's law is in that volume but there are other sours of law including new law that was made after that 1983 code of cannon law was prom gated. the pope made a lot of new law which they have not printed new volumes or did new revisions of the code. so through constitutions and to give you one example of an apostolic constitution pope john paul ii set forth law governs papal election. what happens when the papacy is vacant and how the church is governed until a new pope is elect. the proceeds to be followed for election of the pope. and that's not in the code of cannon law. that's part of the broader what we call it church law but it's

not in the code. but the code is supposed to be the most essential law in a single volume that you can find browsed through this volume it's an english translation with the latin, be i don't find it onobscure or difficult particularly. aid thing you could browse through and learn something right? >> that's true. yes. and the translators in english, the cannon law of america put a useful table of contents. >> yeah. >> and they put a very useful index in it. and so, not just the average layman but a cannon lawyer finds great use in making reference to the table of contents and index. >> when you become a cannon lawyer what is the crore path? how do you use that skill? >> most end up work. for thence tuesdayal church institutionalture sur churr -- institutional church for diocese. traditionally most were priest and most of them are but after vatican ii when things changed

a little bit, there were more maybe religious sisters who went to study cannon law and became cannon lawyers. >> that's interesting. >> and work. at local diocese and lay peep not religious also increasingly is more involved in the various you know aspects of the church's ministry would go onto study cannon law and they would, find jobs with the local diocese and a lot of them in the tribunals. >> you mentioned tribunal, youare called manager of the tribunal and archdiocese of san francisco has a tribunal and it's a what is it a. little bit of a scary word. >> right. >> men in block black, junks, judges, decrees, what does a tribunal does. >> it is essentially a court, you know. the word tribunal is more formal and traditional than saying court. but believe it or not, as fancy as the word sound we don't have an actual formal courtroom in our office setting. we have a typical office setting but carry out you

judicial processs. there are some little paperwork administrative process that is we do as well. but, the core of the troy biewnal's work. is the most common thing we do is marriage annulity trials stow people looking for declaration of nullity of the marriage would bring a case. we call that person the petitioner and the person they were married to is the respondent and we might conduct a trial with evidence and testimony. >> we will talk about that in another segment we will take a brief break. we will come back and talk more with rob grapho about church law and church governing.

. >>lcome ck to mosaic and our discussion with rob w atore

and you're a lawyer in the field. there's an important piece of church discipline church procedure that i hinted at in my inproduction which is the keeping of records. and it's interesting because there's contrast between the universal church millions of adherence and local church on the corner where your particular life is encased. if your ancestors did genealogical research they went back to europe and went to the village and found the priest and they got the records from whatever the 16th century. so, you told me that record keeping is a important part of the church's function and of the cannon lawyer's specialty. >> yeah. well, the church keeps very detailed and lengthy records on sacraments especially. and we are concerned about the

records not primarily for genealogical reasons but for the purpose of the living. and they still are a value beyond the person's life. but especially while they are living we want to know what the status is in the church. so we keep records for baptism. and for confermation. and okay. for marriage. holy orders if the man is or tanned a deacon or priest, or beyond that bishop those things are recorded. when someone dies and has a funeral that's. >> reporter: as well. whether they were attended to by a priest before their death. that's record. these are important things to understand a person's status in the church. and the most important ones are baptism and confirmation and holy orders because those are the three sacraments that leave a permanent mark on the soul. >> yeah as we have aseingthat y

toe see we know a status they were initiated as catholic or ordained into the ordained ministry. >> again, these records are entered and kept in your parish. >> that's right. >> you know, if we can i want to run one slide here to show you a news story and if you can see this there he a happy looking dominican pastor in san francisco. and look at the more or less tattered look volumes off on the desk. the story from march is a safe a large safe the size of a refrigerator was stolen from st. dominic's church late one night. trucked away, and broken open. thieves why after gift cards that the church gives out to the homeless and poor. but someone found these volumes in a dumpster and phoned the church about them. so tell us what we are looking at. what's that pile of books. >> these are essentially what

your registers lock like particularly old ones because i understand these volumes go back some of the volumes go back to the foundation of that parish in the 19th century. so, but this is effectively what they lock like. some are newer than others. and, when a sacrament happens like a baptism or confirmation, or a marriage, a handwritten record of that is going to be put in the registers with pen on paper and the ink sinking into the page and stink stick around for over a hundred years that's the idea in when we think about storage information technology and so on, hay all kinds of ways to do it and the first response is can't you go digital on that? and what's the answer to that? >> well, the short answer is we are told no. and that's what i tell parishes that ask me that question. i got done doing a round of presentations in each of the three counties in this archdiocese on sacramento registers and that question

came up in each of the threepresidentials. what about the -- presentations. what about the dig it will future the holy sea wouldn't allow it but there are reasons for that. and one of those, and i heard this even from people who are not you know, from the vatican but people with a technology background and understanding that versions of things change. softwares change and hardwares change and everybody knows we have gone from keeping pouter information on magnetic tape to then a large floppy disk be a small floppy disk a c-d for a cdrom operateings systems and pcs and mcintosh changed so you wond how the information that's recorded at one time will be able to be accessible digitally 50 years down the road with all the s lo these e the narks catastrophic situation,

being wiped out. >> yeah. >> where as with hard books, you have to burn those things. you have to have a fire that would consume a parish office where they are kept which in a safe which would to some ebb tent not totally fireproof them but delay their consumption by fire. the fire department will have a little more time or be stolen. >> it's interesting to consider. you go by a parish church and they are having a catholic mass and something. but inside the parish there's a large fire prove major safe that's keeping the spiritual records of people for hundreds of years. >> right. >> that's pretty amazing. that's a duty of the pastor to take care of that. >> that's right. we expect the state and the county to safeguard our birth records and our civil marriage records. we wouldn't want them to treat them casually. and so we want for us catholics who have our sacraments reported we want parish and pastor of the parishes to take the same kind of care with the sacramental records because they are so important in our

status. >> that's great. we will take a break now. we will come back and talk further about the tribunal and the sacrament of marriage.

. hello, a welcome back. we are talkino a cannon lawyer cannon law and many use. there's important part of

cannon law, as i understand, the law of t matrimony right? >> yes. >> and you are the manager of the tribunal of the archdiocese and the tribunal is connected with adjudications of matrimony in certain ways. can you explain what that is all about. >> as i think i made mention of before, people will sometimes bring their marriage cases these are people who are divorced, and they want to clarify their status in the church and whether they in fact had a valid marriage or not. and they especially want to know if not because they want to know whether they have the possibility of having a future marriage in the church with someone else. okay we don't do dissolutions of sacramento marriages. we don't do divorces either. we do trials and it requires evidence and testimony to make a determination of whether a marriage was null from the moment of the wedding when the consent of the bride and groom

was exchanged. >> i think most laymen are familiar with the term annulment. we hear it a lot. there are civil annulments in civil law and marriage can be declared null and void. but in church law, it's something special. so, you said you have a trial. what is on trial in the trial? an adersarial proceeding in some way? >> well, believe it or not we don't use that term but the code does have they call it the contentious process so there is -- it presumes that the respondent okay, could be opposed to what the petitioner is seek a declaration of nullity. that's not the case every time. sometimes the respondent agrees namely a declaration of nullity of the marriage, or could be totally indifferent and not participate in the process. >> the goal seeking a definition of judgment of nullity is to be able to marry

again or simply to toe clare that this marriage declare that this maine was not a valid catholic marriage. >> it's the latter. people want to know that. whether just for their own poz mind to confirm what they feel like they knew or became clear to them as time went on. but it's also the former as well. people have the practical thing of wanting to marry in the church in the future but in order to do that that doesn't follow on the church approving of a divorce. but, declaring the marriage never exentereisted from the beginning and that's a difficult thing to wrap your mind around because if you lived some number of years together and children born of the marriage to then say that the marriage didn't exist at least in cannon law, according to the criteria what the church expects to make a marriage valid from the beginning, it. >> it exist as a civil manche to use the major to use

marriage but not sacramental. >> we are not at all sitting in judgment whether something was civilly it's separate. it's according to our intern cannon law and whether the marriage was valid in the law. >> so you must deal with people that are difficult time of their life they are there adversaries or agreed, a marriage has been broken and you are dealing with determining investigating the genesis and deciding on its sacramento quality. >> yes. >> that's difficult work. >> right. >> and you are dealing with people i say cannon law governs the tribunal work. doesn't cannon law govern preparation for marriage. >> it does. cannon law mandates that before anyone gets married develop to go through a process of marriage preparation. wove a marriage and family life office in the archdiocese of san francisco, which assists the parishes and the pastors and the people in the parishes

that do marriage preparation with couples and helps to support them and so, yes, we -- you know so i coordinate with our marriage and family life director and he ask questions about cannon law and i am not involved directly in the major preparation but i am aware of it and understand it has foundations. >> it seems to me it's a very careful are -- the body of law preparation and judgments of nullity it's a delicate investigation into people's most inner lives it seems to me. must be -- is it difficult work.? >> it is. my role beyond being the try boundal manager that oversees day to day operation i am the defender of the bond so that's the official that i am in the trial. so the defender of the bond's role is look for the rriageond thdges are the on objective and come to decision at the end. and the petitioner may have an

invalid. but, no matter which aingeel you are coming at it from defender of the bond or judge or even an advocate, it's difficult because you are dealing with the very sensitive areas of people's lives. >> what i like is that the couples who have divorced or broken up are not lft alone without resources. the church is saying we have a forum to explore your marriage and your sacrament so let's -- wove a couple minutes i want you to tell us whether a catholic should be studying up on cannon law. let me ride run a slide you recommended. this is website rob was telling me he -- of course the vatican has the complete cannon law on the website and is consulted there. but this particular younty lobbing website cannon

law.ninja is very interesting and searchable. you can search for whatever question is puzzling you. so resource for both professional and armchair cannonist. so rob, with a minute left, can you tell us what you think catholics should take away and what their attitude towards cannon law should be. >> cannon law is not something to be seen only as -- through a negative lens telling you no thou shall not. it gives order to the church and the ministries and all the various careisms and i pulled out from john paul ii introduction to the 1938 code of cannon law a little interesting quote in which he said. >> make it quickly. >> a close so it's not meant to be a substitute for faith, grace and charity in the life of church but rather to create an order for those things for the growth in the echeeseial society and in the individual. so, people should not be afraid

of it. they can search it out on the website and get their volume and lock up things that interest you and do a word search. >> thanks for being here and joining us on this episode of mosaic. be your best self... . it's your time... . own it... take off in 3... 2... .aww it's time to get more. lower fares. better service. sweeter rewards. alaska airlines.

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