Annuario Pontificio
The Annuario Pontificio is the annual directory of the Holy See of the Catholic Church. It lists all officials of the Holy See's departments, it gives complete lists with contact information of the cardinals and Catholic bishops throughout the world, the dioceses, the departments of the Roman Curia, the Holy See's diplomatic missions abroad, the embassies accredited to the Holy See, the headquarters of religious institutes, certain academic institutions, other similar information. The index includes, along with all the names in the body of the book, those of all priests who have been granted the title of "Monsignor"; as the title suggests, the red-covered yearbook, compiled by the Central Statistics Office of the Church and published by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, is in Italian. The 2015 edition had more than 2,400 pages and cost €78. According to the Pontifical Yearbook of 2017, the number of Catholics in the world increased to 1,284,810,000 at the end of 2015. A yearbook of the Catholic Church was published, with some interruptions, from 1716 to 1859 by the Cracas printing firm in Rome, under the title Information for the Year...
From 1851, a department of the Holy See began producing a different publication called Hierarchy of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church Worldwide and in Every Rite, with historical notes, which took the title Annuario Pontificio in 1860, but ceased publication in 1870. This was the first yearbook published by the Holy See itself, but its compilation was entrusted to the newspaper Giornale di Roma; the publishers "Fratelli Monaldi" began in 1872 to produce their own yearbook entitled The Catholic Hierarchy and the Papal Household for the Year... with an appendix of other information concerning the Holy See. The Vatican Press took this over in 1885, it bore the indication "official publication" from 1899 to 1904, but this ceased when, giving the word "official" a more restricted sense, the Acta Sanctae Sedis, forerunner of the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, was declared the only "official" publication of the Holy See. In 1912, it resumed the title Annuario Pontificio. From 1912 to 1924, it included not only lists of names, but brief illustrative notes on departments of the Roman Curia and on certain posts within the papal court, a practice to which it returned in 1940.
For some years, beginning in 1898, the Maison de la Bonne Presse publishing house of Paris produced a similar yearbook in French called Annuaire Pontifical Catholique, not compiled by the Holy See. This contained much additional information, such as detailed historical articles on the Swiss Guards and the Papal Palace at the Vatican. According to the Annuario Pontificio 2012 the statistical data given in the yearbook regarding archdioceses and dioceses are furnished by the diocesan curias concerned and reflect the diocesan situation on 31 December of the year prior to the date on the yearbook, unless there is another indication; the data recorded are shown in the following order next to these abbreviations: Su – area in square kilometers of the diocesan territory pp – population of the diocese ct – number of Catholics pr – parishes and quasi-parishes ch – churches or mission stations sd – secular priests resident in the diocese dn – diocesan priests ordained during the year sr – religious priests resident in the diocese rn – religious priests ordained during the year dp – permanent deacons sm – seminarians taking courses of philosophy and theology rm – members of men's religious institutes rf – members of women's religious institutes ie – educational institutes ib – charitable institutes ba – baptisms Catholic Church by country History of the papacy Vatican Publishing House Martyrologium Romanum Editio Typica Altera Secretary of State, Annuario Pontificio 2018.
Vatican City: Vatican Publishing House. ISBN 978-88-266-0127-4
Slavery
Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property. A slave works without remuneration. Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, the word slavery may refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will. Scholars use the more generic terms such as unfree labour or forced labour to refer to such situations. However, under slavery in broader senses of the word, slaves may have some rights and protections according to laws or customs. Slavery existed in many cultures since the time before written history. A person could capture, or purchase. Slavery was legal in most societies at some time in the past, but is now outlawed in all recognized countries; the last country to abolish slavery was Mauritania in 2007. There are an estimated 40.3 million people worldwide subject to some form of modern slavery.
The most common form of modern slave trade is referred to as human trafficking. In other areas, slavery continues through practices such as debt bondage, the most widespread form of slavery today, domestic servants kept in captivity, certain adoptions in which children are forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, forced marriage; the English word slave comes from Old French sclave, from the Medieval Latin sclavus, from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος, which, in turn, comes from the ethnonym Slav, because in some early Medieval wars many Slavs were captured and enslaved. An older interpretation connected it to the Greek verb skyleúo'to strip a slain enemy'. There is a dispute among historians about whether terms such as unfree labourer or enslaved person, rather than "slave", should be used when describing the victims of slavery. According to those proposing a change in terminology, including Andi Cumbo-Floyd, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language. Other historians prefer slave because the term is familiar and shorter, or because it reflects the inhumanity of slavery, with "person" implying a degree of autonomy that slavery does not allow for.
Indenture, otherwise known as bonded labour or debt bondage, is a form of unfree labour under which a person pledges himself or herself against a loan. The services required to repay the debt, their duration, may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their progenitors' debt, it is the most widespread form of slavery today. Debt bondage is most prevalent in South Asia. Chattel slavery called traditional slavery, is so named because people are treated as the chattel of the owner and are bought and sold as commodities. Under the chattel slave system, slave status was imposed on children of the enslaved at birth. Although it dominated many different societies throughout human history, this form of slavery has been formally abolished and is rare today; when it can be said to survive, it is not upheld by the legal system of any internationally recognized government. "Slavery" has been used to refer to a legal state of dependency to somebody else.
For example, in Persia, the situations and lives of such slaves could be better than those of common citizens. Forced labour, or unfree labour, is sometimes used to refer to when an individual is forced to work against their own will, under threat of violence or other punishment, but the generic term unfree labour is used to describe chattel slavery, as well as any other situation in which a person is obliged to work against their own will and a person's ability to work productively is under the complete control of another person; this may include institutions not classified as slavery, such as serfdom and penal labour. While some unfree labourers, such as serfs, have substantive, de jure legal or traditional rights, they have no ability to terminate the arrangements under which they work, are subject to forms of coercion and restrictions on their activities and movement outside their place of work. Human trafficking involves women and children forced into prostitution and is the fastest growing form of forced labour, with Thailand, India and Mexico having been identified as leading hotspots of commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Examples of sexual slavery in military contexts, include detention in "rape camps" or "comfort stations," "comfort women", forced "marriages" to soldiers and other practices involving the treatment of women or men as chattel and, as such, violations of the peremptory norm prohibiting slavery. In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in current conflicts. More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labor sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty such as in restaveks in Haiti. Forced marriages or early marriages are considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Sacred prostitution is where girls and women are pledged to priests or those of higher castes, such as the practice of Devadasi in South Asia or fetish slaves in West Africa. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a national average of 69% of marriages in
Liber Pontificalis
The Liber Pontificalis is a book of biographies of popes from Saint Peter until the 15th century. The original publication of the Liber Pontificalis stopped with Pope Adrian II or Pope Stephen V, but it was supplemented in a different style until Pope Eugene IV and Pope Pius II. Although quoted uncritically from the 8th to 18th century, the Liber Pontificalis has undergone intense modern scholarly scrutiny; the work of the French priest Louis Duchesne, of others has highlighted some of the underlying redactional motivations of different sections, though such interests are so disparate and varied as to render improbable one popularizer's claim that it is an "unofficial instrument of pontifical propaganda."The title Liber Pontificalis goes back to the 12th century, although it only became current in the 15th century, the canonical title of the work since the edition of Duchesne in the 19th century. In the earliest extant manuscripts it is referred to as Liber episcopalis in quo continentur acta beatorum pontificum Urbis Romae and the Gesta or Chronica pontificum.
During the Middle Ages, Saint Jerome was considered the author of all the biographies up until those of Pope Damasus I, based on an apocryphal letter between Saint Jerome and Pope Damasus published as a preface to the Medieval manuscripts. The attribution originated with Rabanus Maurus and is repeated by Martin of Opava, who extended the work into the 13th century. Other sources attribute the early work to Hegesippus and Irenaeus, having been continued by Eusebius of Caesarea. In the 16th century, Onofrio Panvinio attributed the biographies after Damasus until Pope Nicholas I to Anastasius Bibliothecarius; the modern interpretation, following that of Louis Duchesne, is that the Liber Pontificalis was and unsystematically compiled, that the authorship is impossible to determine, with a few exceptions. Duchesne and others have viewed the beginning of the Liber Pontificalis up until the biographies of Pope Felix III as the work of a single author, a contemporary of Pope Anastasius II, relying on Catalogus Liberianus, which in turn draws from the papal catalogue of Hippolytus of Rome, the Leonine Catalogue, no longer extant.
Most scholars believe the Liber Pontificalis was first compiled in the 6th century. Because of the use of the vestiarium, the records of the papal treasury, some have hypothesized that the author of the early Liber Pontificalis was a clerk of the papal treasury. Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire summarised the scholarly consensus as being that the Liber Pontificalis was composed by "apostolic librarians and notaries of the viiith and ixth centuries" with only the most recent portion being composed by Anastasius. Duchesne and others believe that the author of the first addition to the Liber Pontificalis was a contemporary of Pope Silverius, that the author of another addition was a contemporary of Pope Conon, with popes being added individually and during their reigns or shortly after their deaths; the Liber Pontificalis only contained the names of the bishops of Rome and the durations of their pontificates. As enlarged in the 6th century, each biography consists of: the birth name of the pope and that of his father, place of birth, profession before elevation, length of pontificate, historical notes of varying thoroughness, major theological pronouncements and decrees, administrative milestones, date of death, place of burial, the duration of the ensuing sede vacante.
Pope Adrian II is the last pope for which there are extant manuscripts of the original Liber Pontificalis: the biographies of Pope John VIII, Pope Marinus I, Pope Adrian III are missing and the biography of Pope Stephen V is incomplete. From Stephen V through the 10th and 11th centuries, the historical notes are abbreviated with only the pope's origin and reign duration, it was only in the 12th century that the Liber Pontificalis was systematically continued, although papal biographies exist in the interim period in other sources. Duchesne refers to the 12th century work by Petrus Guillermi in 1142 at the monastery of St. Gilles as the Liber Pontificalis of Petrus Guillermi. Guillermi's version is copied from other works with small additions or excisions from the papal biographies of Pandulf, nephew of Hugo of Alatri, which in turn was copied verbatim from the original Liber Pontificalis from other sources until Pope Honorius II, with contemporary information from Pope Paschal II to Pope Urban II.
Duchesne attributes all biographies from Pope Gregory VII to Urban II to Pandulf, while earlier historians like Giesebrecht and Watterich attributed the biographies of Gregory VII, Victor III, Urban II to Petrus Pisanus, the subsequent biographies to Pandulf. These biographies until those of Pope Martin IV are extant only as revised by Petrus Guillermi in the manuscripts of the monastery of
Excommunication
Excommunication is an institutional act of religious censure used to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or to restrict certain rights within it, in particular receiving of the sacraments. The term is historically used to refer to excommunications from the Catholic Church, but it is used more to refer to similar types of institutional religious exclusionary practices and shunning among other religious groups. For instance, many Protestant denominations, such as the Lutheran Churches, have similar practices of excusing congregants from church communities, while Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as the Churches of Christ, use the term "disfellowship" to refer to their form of excommunication; the Amish have been known to excommunicate members that were either seen or known for breaking rules, or questioning the church. The word excommunication means putting a specific group out of communion. In some denominations, excommunication includes spiritual condemnation of the group.
Excommunication may involve banishment and shaming, depending on the group, the offense that caused excommunication, or the rules or norms of the religious community. The grave act is revoked in response to sincere penance, which may be manifested through public recantation, sometimes through the Sacrament of Confession, piety or through mortification of the flesh. Within the Catholic Church, there are differences between the discipline of the majority Latin Church regarding excommunication and that of the Eastern Catholic Churches. In Latin Catholic canon law, excommunication is a applied censure and thus a "medicinal penalty" intended to invite the person to change behaviour or attitude and return to full communion, it is not an "expiatory penalty" designed to make satisfaction for the wrong done, much less a "vindictive penalty" designed to punish: "excommunication, the gravest penalty of all and the most frequent, is always medicinal", is "not at all vindictive". Excommunication can be either latae ferendae sententiae.
According to Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki, "excommunication does not expel the person from the Catholic Church, but forbids the excommunicated person from engaging in certain activities..." These activities are listed in Canon 1331 §1, prohibit the individual from any ministerial participation in celebrating the sacrifice of the Eucharist or any other ceremonies of worship. Under current Catholic canon law, excommunicates remain bound by ecclesiastical obligations such as attending Mass though they are barred from receiving the Eucharist and from taking an active part in the liturgy. "Excommunicates lose rights, such as the right to the sacraments, but they are still bound to the obligations of the law. They are urged to retain a relationship with the Church, as the goal is to encourage them to repent and return to active participation in its life; these are the only effects for those. For instance, a priest may not refuse Communion publicly to those who are under an automatic excommunication, as long as it has not been declared to have been incurred by them if the priest knows that they have incurred it.
On the other hand, if the priest knows that excommunication has been imposed on someone or that an automatic excommunication has been declared, he is forbidden to administer Holy Communion to that person.. In the Catholic Church, excommunication is resolved by a declaration of repentance, profession of the Creed and an Act of Faith, or renewal of obedience by the excommunicated person and the lifting of the censure by a priest or bishop empowered to do this. "The absolution can be in the internal forum only, or in the external forum, depending on whether scandal would be given if a person were absolved and yet publicly considered unrepentant." Since excommunication excludes from reception of the sacraments, absolution from excommunication is required before absolution can be given from the sin that led to the censure. In many cases, the whole process takes place on a single occasion in the privacy of the confessional. For some more serious wrongdoings, absolution from excommunication is reserved to a bishop, another ordinary, or the Pope.
These can delegate a priest to act on their behalf. Interdict is a censure similar to excommunication, it too excludes from ministerial functions in public worship and from reception of the sacraments, but not from the exercise of governance. In the Eastern Catholic Churches, excommunications is imposed only by decree, never incurred automatically by latae sententiae excommunication. A distinction is made between major excommunication; those on whom minor excommunication has been imposed are excluded from receiving the Eucharist and can be excluded from participating in the Divine Liturgy. They can be excluded from entering a church when divine worship is being celebrated there; the decree of excommunication must indicate the precise effect of the excommunication and, if required, its duration. Those under major excommunication
Christian martyrs
A Christian martyr is a person, killed because of their testimony of Jesus. In years of the early church, this occurred through stoning, burning at the stake or other forms of torture and capital punishment; the word "martyr" comes from the Koine word μάρτυς, mártys, which means "witness" or "testimony". At first, the term applied to Apostles. Once Christians started to undergo persecution, the term came to be applied to those who suffered hardships for their faith, it was restricted to those, killed for their faith. The early Christian period before Constantine I was the "Age of martyrs". Early Christians venerated martyrs as powerful intercessors, their utterances were treasured as inspired by the Holy Spirit." The use of the word μάρτυς in non-biblical Greek was in a legal context. It was used for a person; the martyr, when used in a non-legal context, may signify a proclamation that the speaker believes to be truthful. The term was used by Aristotle for observations, but for ethical judgments and expressions of moral conviction that can not be empirically observed.
There are several examples where Plato uses the term to signify "witness to truth", including in Laws. The Greek word martyr signifies a "witness" who testifies to a fact he has knowledge about from personal observation, it is in this sense that the term first appears in the Book of Acts, in reference to the Apostles as "witnesses" of all that they had observed in the public life of Christ. In Acts 1:22, Peter, in his address to the Apostles and disciples regarding the election of a successor to Judas, employs the term with this meaning: "Wherefore, of these men who have accompanied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus came in and went out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us, one of these must be made witness with us of his resurrection"; the Apostles, from the beginning, faced grave dangers until almost all suffered death for their convictions. Thus, within the lifetime of the Apostles, the term martyrs came to be used in the sense of a witness who at any time might be called upon to deny what he testified to, under penalty of death.
From this stage the transition was easy to the ordinary meaning of the term, as used since in Christian literature: a martyr, or witness of Christ, is a person who suffers death rather than denies his faith. St. John, at the end of the first century, employs the word with this meaning. A distinction between martyrs and confessors is traceable to the latter part of the second century: those only were martyrs who had suffered the extreme penalty, whereas the title of confessors was given to Christians who had shown their willingness to die for their belief, by bravely enduring imprisonment or torture, but were not put to death, yet the term martyr was still sometimes applied during the third century to persons still living, as, for instance, by Cyprian who gave the title of martyrs to a number of bishops and laymen condemned to penal servitude in the mines. Religious martyrdom is considered one of the more significant contributions of Second Temple Judaism to western civilization, it is believed that the concept of voluntary death for God developed out of the conflict between King Antiochus Epiphanes IV and the Jewish people.
1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees recount numerous martyrdoms suffered by Jews resisting the Hellenizing of their Seleucid overlords, being executed for such crimes as observing the Sabbath, circumcising their children or refusing to eat pork or meat sacrificed to foreign gods. With few exceptions, this assumption has lasted from the early Christian period to this day, accepted both by Jews and Christians. According to Daniel Boyarin, there are "two major theses with regard to the origins of Christian martyrology, which as the Frend thesis and the Bowersock thesis". Boyarin characterizes W. H. C. Frend's view of martyrdom as having originated in "Judaism" and Christian martyrdom as a continuation of that practice. Frend argues that the Christian concept of martyrdom can only be understood as springing from Jewish roots. Frend characterizes Judaism as "a religion of martyrdom” and that it was this “Jewish psychology of martyrdom” that inspired Christian martyrdom. Frend writes, "In the first two centuries C.
E. there was a living pagan tradition of self-sacrifice for a cause, a preparedness if necessary to defy an unjust ruler, that existed alongside the developing Christian concept of martyrdom inherited from Judaism."In contrast to Frend's hypothesis, Boyarin describes G. W. Bowersock's view of Christian martyrology as being unrelated to the Jewish practice, being instead "a practice that grew up in an Roman cultural environment and was borrowed by Jews". Bowersock argues that the Christian tradition of martyrdom came from the urban culture of the Roman Empire in Asia Minor: Martyrdom was... solidly anchored in the civic life of the Graeco-Roman world of the Roman empire. It ran its course in the great urban spaces of the agora and the amphitheater, the principal settings for public discourse and for public spectacle, it depended upon the urban rituals of the imperial cult and the interrogation protocols of local and provincial magistrates. The prisons and brothels of the cities gave further opportunities for the display of the martyr’s faith.
Boyarin points out that, despite their apparent opposition to each other, both of these arguments are based on the assumption that Judaism and Christianity were two separate and distinct religions. He challenges that assumption and argues that "making of martyrdom was at least in part and parcel of the process of the making of Judaism and Christianity as distinct enti
Muratorian fragment
The Muratorian fragment known as the Muratorian Canon or Canon Muratori, is a copy of the oldest known list of most of the books of the New Testament. The fragment, consisting of 85 lines, is a 7th-century Latin manuscript bound in a 7th or 8th century codex from the library of Columbanus's monastery at Bobbio Abbey. Both the degraded condition of the manuscript and the poor Latin in which it was written have made it difficult to translate; the beginning of the fragment is missing, it ends abruptly. The fragment consists of all that remains of a section of a list of all the works that were accepted as canonical by the churches known to its original compiler, it was discovered in the Ambrosian Library in Milan by Father Ludovico Antonio Muratori, the most famous Italian historian of his generation, published in 1740. The definitive formation of the New Testament canon did not occur until 367, when bishop Athanasius of Alexandria in his annual Easter letter composed the list, still recognised today as the canon of 27 books.
However, it would take several more centuries of debates until agreement on Athanasius' canon had been reached within all of Christendom. The text of the list itself is traditionally dated to about 170 because its author refers to Pius I, bishop of Rome, as recent:But Hermas wrote The Shepherd "most in our time", in the city of Rome, while bishop Pius, his brother, was occupying the chair of the church of the city of Rome, and therefore it ought indeed to be read. The document contains a list of the books of the New Testament, a similar list concerning the Old Testament having preceded it, it is in barbarous Latin, translated from original Greek—the language prevailing in Christian Rome until c. 200. A few scholars have dated it as late as the 4th century, but their arguments have not won widespread acceptance in the scholarly community. For more detail, see the article in the Anchor Bible Dictionary. Bruce Metzger has advocated the traditional dating; the unidentified author accepts four Gospels, the last two of which are Luke and John, but the names of the first two at the beginning of the list are missing.
Scholars find it likely that the missing two gospels are Matthew and Mark, although this remains uncertain. Accepted by the author are the "Acts of all Apostles" and 13 of the Pauline Epistles; the author considers spurious the letters claiming to have Paul as author that are ostensibly addressed to the Laodiceans and to the Alexandrians. Of these he says they are "forged in Paul's name to the heresy of Marcion." Of the General epistles, the author accepts the Epistle of Jude and says that two epistles "bearing the name of John are counted in the catholic church". It is clear that the author assumed that the author of the Gospel of John was the same as the author of the First Epistle of John, for in the middle of discussing the Gospel of John he says "what marvel is it that John brings forward these several things so in his epistles saying in his own person, "What we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears, our hands have handled that have we written,", a quotation from the First Epistle of John.
It is not clear whether the other epistle in question is 2 3 John. Another indication that the author identified the Gospel writer John with two epistles bearing John's name is that when he addresses the epistles of John, he writes, "the Epistle of Jude indeed, the two belonging to the above mentioned John." In other words, he thinks that these letters were written by the John whom he has discussed, namely John the gospel writer. He gives no indication that he considers the John of the Apocalypse to be a different John from the author of the Gospel of John. Indeed, by calling the author of the Apocalypse of John the "predecessor" of Paul, who, he assumes, wrote to seven churches before Paul wrote to seven churches, he most has in mind the gospel writer, since he assumes that the writer of the Gospel of John was an eyewitness disciple who knew Jesus, thus preceded Paul who joined the church only a few years after Jesus' death. In addition to receiving the Apocalypse of John into the church canon, the author remarks that they receive the Apocalypse of Peter, although "some of us will not allow the latter to be read in church".
However, it is not certain whether this refers to the Greek Apocalypse of Peter or the quite different Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, the latter of which, unlike the former, was Gnostic. The author includes the Book of Wisdom, "written by the friends of Solomon in his honour" in the canon. According to The Catholic Encyclopaedia, lines of the Muratorian fragment are preserved in "some other manuscripts", including codices of Paul's Epistles at the abbey of Monte Cassino. Metzger, Bruce M. 1987. The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin and Significance. ISBN 0-19-826954-4 Jonathan J. Armstrong, "Victorinus of Pettau as the Author of the Canon Muratori," Vigiliae Christianae, 62,1, pp 1–34. Anchor Bible Dictionary Bruce, F. F; the Canon of Scripture. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988. Verheyden, J. "The Canon Muratori: A Matter of dispute," Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, The Biblic
