Page:Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils.djvu/3



This book was not written for specialists. Such an undertaking, covering the first eighteen general councils, is beyond the mental and physical resources of a single lifetime, nor could it be compressed within the covers of a single volume. Indeed, a study of any one of the great outstanding councils, based on documentary sources and built up with the aid of printed and unprinted material, giving at the same time the historical background of its decrees, would require the better part of a single working career. Its purpose is to make readily available to the clergy, students, and educated laity, in one volume and in an English dress, the disciplinary decrees enacted by the Church in her general councils up to and exclusive of the Council of Trent. So far as the writer is aware, it is the first time that a work of this kind has been undertaken in any language. Outside the large collections of Labbe and Cossart, Hardouin, Mansi, and others, which are available mostly in university and large public libraries only, we have, of course, the nine volume Conciliengeschichte of Bishop Hefele, recently translated into French and augmented by the Benedictine H. Leclercq (18 volumes). Hefele's history is still the standard work on the councils. For the ordinary private library, however, and for the classes of readers concerned, it is too large a work. It covers not only the general councils but also national and provincial councils and diocesan synods up to the sixteenth century, and embraces history of dogma, canon law, liturgy, ecclesiastical history and discipline, and political history. It has furthermore the disadvantage of being in a foreign language. The present work, therefore, is intended to supply a want, a want indeed so long felt that no apology is needed in the attempt to meet it.

Needless to say, the task was by no means an easy one, for in some respects it meant the breaking of new ground. Decrees were not always easy to translate and to interpret. That I have everywhere succeeded in doing so correctly, is a claim which I am not conceited enough to make. The commentaries on the decrees required an extraordinary amount of reading and study. They give the why and wherefore of the decrees, the historical background, without which many would be unintelligible to readers of today. For, after all, the full scope and import of a conciliar decision, whether of a dogmatic or disciplinary nature, can be grasped only when studied in the light of the conditions and forces that produced it. Unfortunately, from an historical viewpoint some of the