Canon 844 effectively summarises and replaces the Secretariat’s Instruction on this matter (1972) and the subsequent clarificatory Note (1973). These earlier documents (reprinted, for example, in Flannery’s Vatican II, pp 554-563) retain their value as an aid to interpretation and also in view of the Instruction’s synthesis of the doctrinal position from which this discipline springs. The text of the canon follows in Latin and in English.