Medieval Canon Law by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000631494
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

6 St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “De consideratione ad Eugenium Papam,” 1.3.4–1.4.5, in Bernard’s Opera, eds. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais (Rome, 1957–1977), 3:397–399. For the translation, see J. D. Anderson and E. T. Kennan, Five Books on Consideration: Advice to the Pope (Kalamazoo, 1976), 29–30.

Despite entreaties such as these, late-twelfth-century popes continued to contend with a rising tide of litigation. They secured a measure of relief by appointing ever-greater numbers of men with legal training to the College of Cardinals and relying increasingly upon the advice of the cardinals who assisted them in hearing cases in what came to be called the Roman consistory. The consistory replaced the old synod of the Roman clergy, which under Gregory VII (d. 1085) had become primarily a court of justice. In the new judicial structure, the pope met daily with the cardinals and other advisers. There the whole group heard arguments and appeals, which the pope then decided in consultation with the cardinals. The consistory was thus a judicial body in which the cardinals sifted through the arguments and issues that litigants raised and advised the pope about his options in disposing of the matter before them. This arrangement shifted the burden of the preliminary analysis of disputes from the pope to the cardinals, but still left the final determination of each case in the pope’s hands. Although the consistory eased the burden of the pope’s personal involvement in the judicial processes, it still required a massive commitment of papal time. Other papal business—political, diplomatic, financial, and religious—urgently demanded attention.

Judicial offices developed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to distribute the papacy’s workload. The Audientia litterarum contradictarum screened the issuance of papal mandates and regulated the activities of the proctors who represented clients and managed their business at the curia.7 The Referendarii signaturae evolved from a group of clerks in the papal consistory who prepared documents for the pope’s signature to one that drafted replies to petitions and determined which appellate cases were sufficiently important or meritorious to warrant the pope’s personal attention. By the late Middle Ages, it would morph into the Signatura iustitiae, the highest-ranking papal appellate court.8 The pope’s chief fiscal officer, the chamberlain (camerarius) who oversaw the financial office of the camera, appointed a hearing officer (auditor) to adjudicate disputes that arose out of financial operations and eventually to deal also with disciplinary problems among members of the papal curia.9

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