The Language Games of Canon Law: Strategic Ambiguity Between Law and Religion

The continental tradition of modern positive law, with its attempt to formulate clear legal rules, tends to be suspicious of ambiguity and struggles with the productive power of the untranslatable. Opaque kernels that inevitably remain in laws seem risky and call for disambiguation—through legislation, the courts, or administration. Yet despite this struggle against ambiguity, laws, as texts made of language, not only remain essentially ambiguous, but often require ambiguity when regulating for plural groups. In global legal orders, such as Roman Catholic canon law, we can observe that ambiguity is used strategically to allow for the inclusion of plural legal cultures. Adding to this, canon law fosters its opaqueness by meandering between secular and religious language games, thus playing with the semantic surplus of religion for the sake of cultivating ambiguity. This ambiguity management is itself ambiguous. It is inclusive, allowing plural communities to exist under the roof of Catholicism, but it is also open to the authorities’ arbitrary decisions undermining legal certainty as a core value of modern law.