Ecclesiastical letter

Ecclesiastical letters are publications or announcements of the organs of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority, e.g. the synods, but more particularly of pope and bishops, addressed to the faithful in the form of letters.

The popes began early to issue canon laws as well for the entire Church as for individuals, in the form of letters which popes sent either on their own initiative or when application was made to them by synods, bishops or individual Christians.

Apart from the Epistles of the Apostle Peter, the first example of this is the Letter of Pope Clement I (90–99) to the Corinthians, in whose community there was grave dissension. Only a few papal letters of the first three Christian centuries have been preserved in whole or part, or are known from the works of ecclesiastical writers. Among them are three letters by Pope Cornelius. From the moment the Church was recognized by the Roman State and could freely spread, the number of papal letters increased.

The popes called these letters with reference to their legal character, decreta, statuta, decretalia constituta, even when the letters were often hortatory in form. Or the letters were called sententiæ, i. e. opinions; præcepta; auctoritates. On the other hand, more general letters, especially those of dogmatic importance, were also called at times tomi; indiculi; commonitoria; epistolae tractoriæ, or simply tractatoriæ.

If the matter were important, the popes issued the letters not by their sole authority, but with the advice of the Roman presbyters or of a synod. Although these names indicate sufficiently the legal character of the papal letters, the popes repeatedly required from the persons to whom they wrote that these should bring the letter in question to the notice of others. In order to secure such knowledge of the papal laws, several copies of the papal letters were occasionally made and dispatched at the same time.

Following the example of the Roman emperors, the popes soon established archives (scrinium) in which copies of their letters were placed as memorials for further use, and as proofs of authenticity. The first mention of papal archives is found in the Acts of a synod held about 370 under Pope Damasus I. Pope Zosimus also makes mention in 419 of the archives. Nevertheless, forged papal letters appeared even earlier than this. But by far the greater number of the papal letters of the first millennium have been lost.

As befitted their legal importance, the papal letters were also soon incorporated in the collections of canon law. The first to collect the epistles of the popes in a systematic and comprehensive manner was the monk Dionysius Exiguus, at the beginning of the sixth century. In this way the papal letters took rank with the canons of the synods as of equal value and of equal obligation. The example of Dionysius was followed afterwards by almost all compilers of the canons, such as Anselm of Lucca.

With the development of the papal primacy in the Middle Ages the papal letters grew enormously in number. The popes, following the earlier custom, insisted that their rescripts, issued for individual cases, should be observed in all analogous ones. According to the teaching of the canonists, above all of Gratian, every papal letter of general character was authoritative for the entire Church without further notification. Decrees (decreta) was the name given especially to general ordinances issued with the advice of the cardinals. On the other hand, ordinances issued for individual cases were called rescripta. Thus a (papal) constitution was always understood to be a papal ordinance which regulated ecclesiastical conditions of a general character judicially, in a durable manner and form, for all time; but by a rescript was understood a papal ordinance issued at the petition of an individual that decided a lawsuit or granted a favour.