ACTA APOSTOLICAE SEDIS. — Official bulletin (Commentarium officiale) of the Holy See, prepared by the Secretariat of State, printed by the Vatican Press and published by the Vatican Bookshop; it is issued in installments at varying intervals (approximately twelve a year), which are assembled into annual volumes and provided with indexes. Each installment contains the acts of the Supreme Pontiff (encyclicals, constitutions, motu proprio, briefs, chirographs, letters, allocutions); then the acts of the Sacred Congregations (decrees, instructions, resolutions, appointments), of the tribunals (lists of decisions, citations, and the like), of the pontifical commissions and of the offices of the Roman Curia; finally, it reports on the audiences granted by the Pope to heads of state and their representatives, on the granting of honors or decorations, and on the deaths of cardinals and bishops. It published the text of the CIC (vol. II, part II, 28 June 1917). Since 1929 it has carried, in Italian, a Supplement for the laws and provisions of Vatican City. In citing the title of the periodical, the abbreviation AAS is often used.
The publication of pontifical laws in the AAS constitutes the necessary condition for those laws to enter into force. Canon 9 of the CIC in fact provides that they enter into force three months after the date of the issue in which they are published, unless by their nature they are to enter into force immediately, or a different period has been established.
For several centuries there were no well-defined norms concerning the promulgation and publication of pontifical laws, and therefore, as circumstances required, their dissemination was ensured by transmitting the text to metropolitans or bishops, or also (especially in the case of certain authentic collections of decrees) by sending it to certain universities, until it became customary (from the 15th century), with some examples dating back as far as the 13th century, to post pontifical constitutions in certain places in Rome, considering such posting to constitute legal publication.
Pius X, accepting the proposals made by the commission for the compilation of the CIC, established in 1908 the official periodical of the Holy See and decreed that the text of the pontifical acts, as well as those of the various dicasteries of the Roman Curia, should be published in it, and that such publication should have legal force as the promulgation of the acts themselves (constitution Promulgandi, of 28 September 1908, published at the beginning of the first issue dated 1 January 1909).
With the creation of the new periodical — for whose editing and administration a special regulation was issued on 5 January 1910 (cf. AAS, 2 [1910], p. 37) — publication of the Acta Sanctae Sedis (v.) ceased. Pio Ciprotti