Particular church
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A Particular Church, in Roman Catholic theology and canon law, is any of the individual constituent ecclesial communities in full communion with the Church of Rome that are part of the Catholic Church as a whole. These can be the local Churches mentioned in Canon 368 of the Code of Canon Law: "Particular Churches, in which and from which the one and only Catholic Church exists, are principally dioceses. Unless the contrary is clear, the following are equivalent to a diocese: a territorial prelature, a territorial abbacy, a vicariate apostolic, a prefecture apostolic and a permanently established apostolic administration" [1]. Or they can be aggregations of such local Churches that share a specific liturgical, theological and canonical tradition, namely, the western Latin Rite or Latin Church and the various Eastern Rites or Eastern Churches that the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Catholic Eastern Churches Orientalium Ecclesiarum, 2[2] called "particular Churches or rites" .
The importance in Catholic theology of communion with the Church of Rome is the reason why the Catholic Church as a whole, of which all the particular Churches, eastern or western, in full communion with Rome are considered part, is commonly designated Roman Catholic, a term also used, though never officially by the Catholic Church itself, to refer only to its Latin Rite.
The technical term "particular Church" thus has two distinct, though related, meanings. The 1983 Code of Canon Law, which is concerned with the Latin-Rite Church alone, uses the term "particular Church" only in the sense of "local Church", as in its Canon 373: "It is within the competence of the supreme authority alone to establish particular Churches; once they are lawfully established, the law itself gives them juridical personality."[3] For the other kind of "particular Church" it uses the unambiguous phrase "autonomous ritual Church" (in Latin Ecclesia ritualis sui iuris). The 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, which is instead concerned above all with particular Churches in this second meaning, has shortened this phrase to "autonomous Church" (in Latin, Ecclesia sui iuris), as in its canon 27: "A group of Christ’s faithful hierarchically linked in accordance with law and given express or tacit recognition by the supreme authority of the Church is in this Code called an autonomous Church."
Communion between particular Churches has existed since the Apostles: "Among these manifold particular expressions of the saving presence of the one Church of Christ, there are to be found, from the times of the Apostles on, those entities which are in themselves Churches (32: Cf. Ac 8:1, Ac 11:22, 1 Cor 1:2, 1 Cor 16:19, Gal 1:22, Rev 2, Rev 1:8, etc.), because, although they are particular, the universal Church becomes present in them with all its essential elements (33: Cf. PONTIFICAL BIBLICAL COMMISSION, Unité et diversité dans l'Eglise, Lib. Ed. Vaticana 1989, especially, pp. 14-28.)" (Communionis Notio, 7).
The Catholic Church as a whole is more than just the sum of the particular Churches ("dioceses" or "rites") within it: "The particular Churches, insofar as they are 'part of the one Church of Christ' (Second Vatican Council: Decree Christus Dominus, 6/c), have a special relationship of mutual interiority with the whole, that is, with the universal Church, because in every particular Church 'the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of Christ is truly present and active' (Second Vatican Council: Decree Christus Dominus, 11/a). For this reason, the universal Church cannot be conceived as the sum of the particular Churches, or as a federation of particular Churches. It is not the result of the communion of the Churches, but, in its essential mystery, it is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular Church" (Communionis Notio, 9).
Obviously, the phrase "particular Church" can be used also in a non-technical sense. If people speak of "their own particular Church", they are not necessarily giving the phrase the precise canonical and theological meaning considered here. And if the words "particular church" refer to a building and not to a body of Christians, the meaning is, of course, completely different.
