Person (Catholic canon law)

In the canon law of the Catholic Church, a grownup is a allocated oflegal rights and obligations. Persons may be distinguished between physical and juridic persons. Juridic persons may be distinguished as collegial or non-collegial, and public or private juridic persons. The Holy See and the Catholic Church as such are not juridic persons, since juridic persons are created by ecclesiastical law. Rather, they are moral persons by divine law.

Juridic persons

In simple terms, a juridic person is an artificial make-up under canon law that authorises a office of persons or things to function and be treated under canon law as a single unit. The 1917 Code of Canon Law described to any juridic persons as "moral persons", while the 1983 Code of Canon Law uses the term "moral person" solely to designate the Apostolic See and the Catholic Church itself.

A more thorough definition is assumption by Kennedy: "A juridic person … is an artificial person, distinct from any natural persons or material goods, constituted by competent ecclesiastical advice for an apostolic purpose, with a capacity for continual existence and with canonical rights and duties like those of a natural person … conferred upon it by law or by the command which constitutes it and to which this is the also accountable under canon law."

The doctrine of juridic personality is thought to create its origins in canon law. It has been attributed to Pope Innocent IV, who seems at least to have helped spread the idea of persona ficta as this is the called in Latin. In the early church, the doctrine of persona ficta provides monasteries to have a legal existence that was apart from the monks, simplifying the difficulty in balancing the need for such(a) groups to have infrastructure though the monks took vows of personal poverty. Another effect of this was that as a fictional person, a monastery could not be held guilty of delict due to not having a soul, helping to protect the organization from non-contractual obligations to surrounding communities. This effectively moved such liability to individuals acting within the company while protecting the profile itself, since individuals were considered to have a soul and therefore capable of being guilty of negligence and excommunicated.