Marianna Bartold Keeping It Catholic Authority in the Church As it appeared in the July 1998 Seton Home Study Newsletter. KIC inadvertently left out a short but important line in that paragraph, and this website version now states exactly what appeared in the Seton July 1998 newsletter. All emphasises below are Keeping It Catholic's. We believe it reflects basic misunderstandings about authority in the Church. The first basic misunderstanding regards the nature of law and authority.
Temporal authority is always limited and never omnipotent.
Human authority is limited both by scope and by matter. The scope of this authority limits who might be subject to a law. For example, parents have a great deal of authority and can issue laws and edicts for their own family, but they have no similar authority to issue laws for other families or for communities as a whole. Similarly, a state government can issue laws for their own citizens, but cannot issue laws that bind the citizens of other states. Authority is also limited by matter, or what a law refers to.