Sanções penais na Igreja

Abstract

The Church, as a society founded on the communion of faith, sacraments, and discipline, has the right to impose penal sanctions on its delinquent churchgoers. The conception, structure and collection of its own internal laws, the so called canons, undergo alterations in the course of the history of that society and the evolution of its costumes. Collections of laws abound, but only in the XX century, in 1917, there came into existence the first Code of Canon Law (Codex Iuris Canonici - CIC), followed by the currently one, the 1983 CIC. These issues, along with the nature, fundamentals and purposes of the penal sanctions, are the intent of this article, which also includes the different types of canonical penalties and their imposition.