Decretals Sentence Examples

In his fourteenth year Pico went to Bologna, where he studied for two years, and was much occupied with the Decretals.

It was certainly known to Pope Adrian in 778, and was inserted in the false decretals towards the middle of the next century.

He permitted free study of the Aristotelian writings, and issued (1234), through his chaplain, Raymond of Pennaforte, an important new compilation of decretals which he prescribed in the bull Rex pacificus should be the standard text-book in canon law at the universities of Bologna and Paris.

The documents comprise imperial edicts, rescripts, &c., liturgies, acts of councils, decretals and letters of bishops, references in contemporary heathen writings, and above all the works of the Church Fathers.

Just as he considered himself entitled to appoint to all ecclesiastical offices, so also he invested the emperor with his empire and kings with their kingdoms. Not only did he despatch his decretals to the universities to form the basis of the teaching of the canon law and of the decisions founded upon it, but he considered himself empowered to annul civil laws.

Eugenius certainly owed his success merely to the political necessities of the emperor of the East, and his union was forthwith destroyed owing to its repudiation by oriental Christendom; yet at the same time his decretals of union were not devoid of importance, for in them the pope reaffirmed the scholastic doctrine regarding the sacraments as a dogma of the Church, and he spoke as the supreme head of all Christendom.

In these the tendency of the Syllabus towards obscurantism and papal despotism, and its incompatibility with modern thought, were clearly pointed out; and the evidence against papal infallibility, resting, as the Letters asserted, on the False Decretals, and accepted without controversy in an age of ignorance, was ably marshalled for the guidance of the council.

The popes were asked to give decisions, and in answer to those demands drew up their first decretals.

It is only after the False Decretals that we meet with the idea that a bishop cannot be deposed and his place filled without the consent of the pope.

The Fathers of the Church had repeated times without number that the priesthood stands above even the supreme secular authority; the Bible was full of stories most aptly illustrating this theory; nobody questioned that, within the Church, the pope was the Vicar of Christ, and that, as such, his powers were unlimited; as proof positive could be cited councils and decretals - whether authentic or spurious; at any rate all authorized by long usage and taken as received authorities.

It propagated doctrines in favour of the power of the Holy See, established the superiority of the popes over the councils, and gave legal force to their decretals.

It became" the starting point of the most momentous and gigantic of medieval forgeries, the Isidorian Decretals," where it stands at the head of the pontifical letters, extended to more than twice its original length."This extension perhaps occurred during the 5th century.

He was a member of the council of Basel, and dedicated to the assembled fathers a work entitled De concordantia Catholica, in which he maintained the superiority of councils over popes, and assailed the genuineness of the False Decretals and the Donation of Constantine.

It then became necessary to examine the papal claims. He set himself to study the Decretals, and to his amazement and indignation he found that they were full of frauds.

Valla by one vigorous effort destroyed the False Decretals and exposed the Donation of Constantine to ridicule, paving the way for the polemic carried on against the dubious pretensions of the papal throne by scholars of the Reformation.

He then turned his attention to a group of documents relating to ecclesiastical history in the Carolingian period and bearing on the question of false decretals, and produced Les Chartes de St-Calais (1887) and Les Actes de l'eveche du Mans (1894).

In the middle of the 9th century there appeared in Gaul the collection of false decretals commonly known as the PseudoIsidorian Decretals.

In 1610 appeared his History of Ecclesiastical Benefices, " in which," says Ricci, "he purged the church of the defilement introduced by spurious decretals."

Similarly, it has become customary to give the name of canons to the texts inserted in certain canonical complications such as the Decretum of Gratian, while the name of chapters is given to the analogous quotations from the Books of the Decretals.

The local law was founded on usage and on the papal letters called decretals.

As was natural this collection received successive additions as further decretals appeared.

Finally, the second part of the Hispana contains the papal decretals, as in the collection of Dionysius.

From the middle of the 9th century this collection was to become even more celebrated; for, as we know, it served as the basis for the famous collection of the False Decretals.

From the same source and at the same date came two other forged documents - firstly, a collection of Capitularies, in three books, ascribed to a certain Benedict (Benedictus Levita), 2 a deacon of the church of Mainz; this collection, in which authentic documents find very little place, stands with regard to civil legislation exactly in the position of the False Decretals with regard to canon law.

For a study of the historical questions connected with the famous False Decretals, see the article Decretals (False); here we have only to consider them with reference to the place they occupy in the formation of ecclesiastical law.

In spite of some hesitation, with regard rather to the official character than to the historical authenticity of the letters attributed to the popes of the earlier centuries, the False Decretals were accepted with confidence, together with the authentic texts which served as a passport for them.

The False Decretals did not greatly modify nor corrupt the Canon Law, but they contributed much to accelerate its progress towards unity.

Towards the end of the 11th century, under the 1 The collection of the False Decretals has been published with a long critical introduction by P. Hinschius, Decretales PseudoIsidorianae et capitula Angilramni (Leipzig, 1863).

The disciples of Gratian, in glossing or commenting on the Decretum, turned to the papal decretals, as they appeared, for information and the determination of doubtful points.

But we must not forget that these compilations were intended by their authors to complete the Decretum of Gratian; in them were included the decretals called extravagantes, i.e.

The first and most important is the work of Bernard, provost and afterwards bishop of Pavia, namely, the Breviarium extravagantium, compiled about 1190; it included the decretals from Alexander III.

The of Pavia, important feature of the book is the arrangement "Brevi- of the decretals or sections of decretals in five books, ariuon.

This was the Compilatio tertia; for soon after, Joannes Galensis (John of Wales) collected the decretals published between the collection of Bernard of Pavia and the pontificate of Innocent III.; and this, though of later date, became known as the Compilatio secunda.

The result of all these supplements to Gratian's work, apart from the inconvenience caused by their being so scattered, was the accumulation of a mass of material almost as considerable as the Decretum itself, from which they Decretals Y tended to split off and form an independent whole, ixGregory embodying as they did the latest state of the law.

Raymond adopts Bernard of Pavia's division into five books and into titles; in each title he arranges the decretals in chronological order, cutting out those which merely repeat one another and the less germane parts of those which he preserves; but these partes decisae, indicated by the words " et infra " or " et j," are none the less very useful and have been printed in recent editions.

Raymond does not attempt any original work; to the texts already included in the Quinque compilationes, he adds only nine decretals of Innocent III.

The reason for this is that in most cases the decretals did not formulate any law, but were merely solutions of particular cases, given as models; to arrive at the abstract law it was necessary to examine the solution in each case with regard to the circumstances and thus formulate a rule; this was the work of the canonists.

The abstract law was to be found rather in the Summae of the canonists than in the decretals.

It follows the order of the decretals.

The collection included the decrees of the council of Trent, and a number of pontifical constitutions, arranged in the order of the titles of the decretals.

Such a discovery as that which showed that the False Decretals, on which so much of the power of the papacy rested, were mere 9th-century forgeries struck deep at the roots of the whole traditional relation between church and state.

This collection, indeed, comprises at least as many canons of councils as decretals, and the decretals contained in it are not all forgeries.

It is an amplification and interpolation, by means of spurious decretals, of the canonical collection in use in the Church of Spain in the 8th century, all the documents in which are perfectly authentic.

In the third part the author continues the series of decretals which he had interrupted at the council of Nicaea.

The name of Isidore usurped by the author at first led to the supposition that the False Decretals originated in Spain; this opinion no longer meets with any support; it is enough Nation= to point out that there is no Spanish manuscript of the ality of collection, at least until the 13th century.

In the 16th the coiiec= century the Protestants, who wished to represent the forgeries in the light of an attempt in favour of the papacy, ascribed the origin of the False Decretals to Rome, but neither the manuscript tradition nor the facts confirm this view, which is nowadays entirely abandoned.

Everybody is agreed in placing the origin of the False Decretals within the Frankish empire.

In favour of Mainz, especial stress was laid on the fact that it was the country of Benedictus Levita, the compiler of the False Capitularies, to which the False Decretals are closely related.

Though we cannot admit that the False Decretals were composed in order to enforce the rights of the papacy, we may at least consider whether the popes did not make use of th e False Decretals to support their rights.

One thing only is established, and this may be said to have been the real effect of the False Decretals, namely, the powerful impulse which they gave in the Frankish territories to the movement towards centralization round the see of Rome, and the legal obstacles which they opposed to unjust proceedings against the bishops.

At the head of the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals stand five letters attributed to St. Clement.

According to the medieval canon law, based on the decretals, and codified in the 13th century in the Corpus juris canonici, by which the earlier powers of metropolitans had been greatly curtailed, the powers of the archbishop consisted in the right (i) to confirm and consecrate suffragan bishops; (2) to summon and preside over provincial synods; (3) to superintend the suffragans and visit their dioceses, as well as to censure and punish bishops in the interests of discipline, the right of deprivation, however, being reserved to the pope; (4) to act as a court of appeal from the diocesan courts; (5) to exercise the jus devolutionis, i.e.

This design was gained the upper hand beyond the Alps and the realized in the celebrated forgery known as the " False Decretals " (see Decretals).

The Decretum forbade their alienation to lay proprietors, denounced excommunication against those who refused to pay, and based the right of the Church upon scriptural precedents.6 The decretals contained provisions as to what was and what was not tithable property, as to those privileged from payment, as to sale or hypothecation to laymen, as to priority over state taxes, &c. 7 Various questions which arose later were settled by Boniface VIII.

The importance assigned by these decretals to the bishops and the provincial councils, as well as to the direct intervention of the Holy See, tended to curtail the rights of the metropolitans, of which Hincmar was so jealous.

The second part consists of 36 causae (cases proposed for solution), subdivided into quaestiones (the several questions raised by the case), under each of which are arranged the various canones (canons, decretals, &c.) bearing on the question.

In 1253 he sent a further list of the first words (principia) of the complementary constitutions and decretals; but the result was practically nil and the popes gave up this system of successive additions.

But as the collection of authentic decretals does not begin till Siricius (385), the pseudo-Isidore first forges thirty letters, which he attributes to the popes from Silvester to Damasus; after this he includes the authentic decretals, with the intermixture of thirty-five apocryphal ones, generally given under the name of those popes who were not represented in the authentic collection, but sometimes also under the names of the others, for example, Damasus, St Leo, Vigilius and St Gregory; with one or two exceptions he does not interpolate genuine decretals.