CHAPTER II
ON THE POWER OF MAKING LAWS
I. No body of men could live together in peace without being subject to a supreme authority whose function it is to look after the common weal by defending the rights of all, repressing and punishing crime, and taking measures in the common interest which are beyond the power of private enterprise. God, from whom all power is derived, has willed that there should be a separate supreme spiritual authority to look after the spiritual welfare of mankind, and another to look after its temporal welfare. As Leo XIII teaches, in his Constitution Immortale Dei, November i, 1885: " The Almighty, therefore, has appointed the charge of the human race between two powers, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human things. Each in its kind is supreme, each has fixed limits within which it is contained, limits which are defined by the nature and special object of the province of each, so that there is, we may say, an orbit traced out within which the action of each is brought into play by its own native right. . . . One of the two has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life; the other the everlasting joys of heaven. Whatever, therefore, in things human is of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgement of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority. Jesus Christ has himself given command that what is Caesar's is to be rendered to Caesar, and that whatever belongs to God is to be rendered to God."
The spiritual and the civil power use their authority to make laws, and in this chapter we propose briefly to indicate those who have legislative authority in the Catholic Church.
2. The power of making laws resides in the supreme authority in the Church, and in any person or body of men to whom the power has been communicated.
(a) The Pope, by the primacy of jurisdiction which he receives from God, is the supreme lawgiver in the Church.
