This article is a tribute to and a concise presentation of the scholarly, didactic, and social-organizational activity of Professor Elżbieta Szczot (1965–2024), a long-time staff member of the Faculty of Law, Canon Law and Administration at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. She was an outstanding expert in the field of law, especially canon law, as well as a respected teacher and mentor to many generations of students. The text highlights the key areas of her research interests – from the law of the holy sacraments and the protection of marriage and the family, to issues related to European integration and the specific policies of the European Union. In her pursuit of academic truth, Professor Szczot harmonized faith and reason, remaining until the end a hardworking and humble person. Despite her illness, she did not cease her scientific activity. She passed away on March 10, 2024, in Warsaw, after a long and serious illness.

he dialogue between revealed Faith and Reason, i.e. between Theology and Philosophy, was initiated by St. Paul the Apostle, the one to whom the Lord’s revelation on his way to Damascus was granted. This is how Saul’s conversion to faith started. (Acts 9:3–20) This dialogue was made possible by the fact that the Apostle to the Gentiles had both a theological training with a rabbinic formation, and good familiarity with ancient Greek philosophy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the one whom God called the “chosen vessel” to bear the name of the Lord before “the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel” (Acts 9:15) was also privileged to have his first debates with the pagan philosophers of his time. From the pages of this work – with their theological, philosophical and juridical content – the reader will be able to see that a dialogue between theology and philosophy cannot be conducted from the perspective of one of the two, that is from the perspective of religious faith or reason, but only through a syntony, that is through a joint concentration of the efforts of the servants of the two fields to discover and make explicit the revealed Truth. Some theologians and philosophers through their works on the dialogue between Theology and Philosophy have remained in the history of theological and philosophical culture as names of reference. Pope John Paul II has a special place among these theologians and philosophers. He managed to offer us a Theology of the dialogue between Faith and Reason through his pragmatic approach to enhancing the dialogue between Theology and Philosophy and through the statements in the texts of his papal Apostolic Exhortation, Encyclicals, Messages, etc. As a leading exponent of the approach to the renewal of the dialogue between Theology and Philosophy, the Roman Pontiff also contributed to the awareness of the urgent need to reconcile the two fields of theology and philosophy. It enables us to understand and express the Truth both through faith and through the contribution of reason, as the text of his Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio amply confirms.

The concept of God’s law is rooted in theology and canon law. However, the content expressed by this concept is very extensive. In addition, this concept is replaced by many others indicating the proper content for them. Therefore, the usefulness of the concept of divine law remains questionable. The author of the study expresses the opinion that the concept of law and the reality expressed by it are not adequate to properly grasp the meaning of the concept of God’s law. The consideration of law in God’s law should be carried out in the symbiosis of faith and reason, the acceptance of God’s will and its expression in the appropriate way of realizing the ecclesiastical form of the Christian religion.

The paper examines the relationship between law and rationality from multiple perspectives. As early as the Middle Ages, the canonist Gratian attempted to reconcile conflicting legal provisions using rational criteria in his monumental work. The humanist legal theorist Hugo Grotius referred to the ancient codifications of Roman law issued by Emperor Justinian as “written reason.” Grotius also identified “the dictate of right reason” within natural law. Civil law codifications of the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning with the Napoleonic Code, drew upon both Roman and natural law, aspiring once again to perfect rationality. The Catholic Church joined this endeavor by organizing canonical material into the first Code of Canon Law, promulgated in 1917. The ecclesiastical legislator further adopted Justinian’s division of matters into persons, things, and actions. The current Code of Canon Law also operates with rationality, exemplified by its requirement that a custom must be “reasonable.” What contravenes natural law is deemed irrational, for example the ecclesiastical legislator establishes the impediment of consanguinity as a norm of natural divine law. As an example of irrational law, the article highlights the Slovak legislator’s requirement that a petition for the recognition of a new church or religious society by the state must be accompanied by more than 50,000 signatures. It is evident that no unregistered religious society could meet this requirement, nor could the majority of churches already recognized by the state.

When Pope Benedict XVI crowned with allocution the ministry of Shepherd and Judge in 2013, the final memento so close to his heart, he referred to those who “saveguard truth and justice” — and he did it in a general way, without personal emphasis (somewhat understandably). Only Pope Francis was able, in his first address to the Roman Rota, to show implicitly the genius of his Predecessor’s judicial ministry as Cooperator Veritatis. These circumstances gave rise to a scholarly reflection on the magisterial output of Pope Joseph Ratzinger in question. The primary source giving a comprehensive (and essentially complete) insight into Benedict XVI’s idea of exercising the office of the Church’s supreme judge is a collection of addresses to the Roman Rota from 2006 to 2013. It is in this collection that the very core of the ecclesial ministry at the service of justice can be successfully identified — the ministry whose nature is well reflected by the combination of the formulas: pastor bonus and iustus iudex — according to the personalistic paradigm: in the Church justice and the administration of justice are animated by love (caritas). A methodical study of segments of this original doctrine — through the prism of the principle of sentire cum Ecclesia and the accompanying postulate of harmonization vetera et nova — made it possible to accomplish the research task outlined in the title, namely, an attempt to identify the signum specificum of Benedict XVI’s judicial Petrine ministry.

Referring to the encyclical of John Paul II Fides et ratio, the article addresses the problem of truth in its legal dimension. That is, what is truth for law? What truth does law serve? In other words, does truth that law aims at correspond to the real and natural order of things, i.e. is it possible to reach the absolute truth by means of speculations and legal constructs? On the contrary, even the most existential experiences, such as ‘life’ and ‘death’, will not agree with the truth as a result of certain legal actions, creating a different nature and reality. The analysis carried out showed that law uses a specific category of truth, i.e. a formal and procedural truth which does not necessarily correspond to the absolute truth about which Pope John Paul II writes in his encyclical. If this specific, formal and procedural legal truth is subordinated to the implementation of the guiding principle of achieving the absolute truth, then such a situation should not raise concern. It will be worse if law starts to deviate from the pursuit of absolute truth, succumbing only to some ad hoc, pragmatic criteria based on erroneous beliefs that everything should be subordinated to technology and the will of the majority because fundamental standards common to all people do not exist or cannot be indicated.

A review of a valuable monograph describing the question of deacon, priest and bishop ordinations granted without the consent of the totalitarian communist power clandestinely in Czechoslovakia and other countries under the influence of the Soviet Union, as well as in some other countries (Austria, Federal Republic of Germany). On the basis of a detailed analysis of canon law regarding the sacrament of ordination and a description of the situation of the Catholic Church in Czechoslovakia in the period 1948-1989, it presents and comments on the extraordinary faculties for the situation of non-freedom and the manner of their implementation. In the last chapter he describes the difficult and still unfinished solution of the involvement of secretly ordained clerics in public ministry.