Local Responses to Legal Transplants

Taking into account the local responses to global legislation, Chap. 7 discusses whether the church’s current framework for the inculturation of global canon law is sufficient with respect to the law and its effectiveness and with respect to the local churches and their needs. Lawmaking is both widely non-transparent and non-participatory. Its lack of diversity supports the creation of culturally insensitive rules. The law is implemented in the local churches through imposed reception. As a result, transplants of global law are often perceived as irritants in the local churches and met with different forms of non-acceptance, ranging from rejection to indifference. Yet even irritants can find acceptance when they undergo local reconstruction, which attributes them with a local meaning. With regard to canon law, in any case, it is challenging that the local appropriation of transplanted rules is inhibited by various factors. One factor is that interpretation is limited by the canonical rules of interpretation, which prescribe to the interpreters a certain methodology of how to make sense of a rule. Another factor is that rules that do not make sense often become subject to dispensation, rather than being submitted to a deeper analysis of how their meaning could be restored.