“Voluntary and Unlawful Abandonment of the Sacred Ministry” in the Light of the Revised Provisions of Canon Penal Law in the 1983 Code of Canon Law

The article aims to familiarize the reader with the legislative actions of the Pope. It is noteworthy that since the promulgation of the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC/83), no other amendment has been made to penal law that would be comparable in scale. Based on an analysis of Canon 1392 of the CIC, which was carried out to show the positive effects of the amendment, the article describes in detail the issue of interest. The author’s aim is to show the abandonment of the sacred ministry as an offence. Accordingly, key concepts are explained, and an analysis of the subject and object dimensions of the offence is carried out. Furthermore, in the last part of the study, criminal sanctions and actions of the ecclesiastical authority are presented. Various research methods have been used to create the narrative, including the dogmatic-legal method, the historical-legal method, the philological method, the analytical method, and the synthetic method.