Capitulare

CAPITULARE. - This is the technical term for those juridical provisions which, articulated into capitula, had their particular manifestation under Frankish rule. They are not originally true and proper laws, inasmuch as, according to the Germanic concept, the sole organ capable of forming laws was the assembly. The c. are instead originally ordinances or decrees (also called praeceptiones, decretiones) which, with the evolution of royal power at the expense of popular power, came to have a value of their own, alongside or above the Frankish law itself, especially when the sovereign resolved the formal difficulty by submitting those ordinances to the mere approval of the assembly.

Among the tasks that the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire assigned to the Frankish sovereigns, the predominant one was that of the tuitio ecclesiae, given the religious character of the new imperial institution.

The exercise of this task led the sovereign to occupy himself progressively with the provision of ecclesiastical offices, the discipline of the clergy and even dogmatic and matters of faith, as is evident from a whole series of c., in which it is easy to discern the growing intrusion of imperial power into the ecclesiastical field. Among these c., those that particularly concerned the regulation of the Church and ecclesiastical matters received the specific appellation of capitularia ecclesiastica, being kept separate from the other c. that concerned the ordering of civil matters and that were therefore called capitularia mundana. A third type of c., which regulated at one and the same time civil and ecclesiastical matters, was called capitularia mixta.

With the extension of the Frankish conquest under Charlemagne and his successors there followed a greater diffusion of the Catholic religion in the new countries subjected to the empire, a broadening of the ecclesiastical powers assumed by the emperor and a more extensive application of the ecclesiastical c.

To understand well this intrusion of civil power into the ecclesiastical field, however, one must bear in mind the fact of the merging of the political functions of the bishop with his religious ones, first through the relationship of immunity and then through that of vassalage. When imperial policy believed it could place better reliance on ecclesiastical dignities than on lay ones for the administration of public affairs, granting ecclesiastics a broad exercise of civil powers in the name of the emperor, the office of an ecclesiastical nature came to be so closely joined with the public one that the emperor believed he could not regulate the latter without also bridling and directing the former.

But even by another path ecclesiastics came into a position of subjection to imperial power when they were designated as missi dominici in those embassies, sent periodically into the vast territories of the empire as organs of control and judgment over the peripheral administrations. There is more: the contamination of the two orders, the ecclesiastical and the civil, also came about through the fact of the assemblies. In this connection one must bear in mind that the very organization of the Church in the various places came to be absorbed and in part identified with the political organizations. Thus councils were often the same assemblies of the State directed by the sovereign or by his representatives, and the enactments of such assemblies also dealt with matters concerning the faith and the discipline of the clergy. From this point of view the conciliar canons therefore came to represent for that era and those regions often a further concrete encroachment of the lay element in the administration and in the life of the Church and of ecclesiastical matters. However, that interference of the highest laity in religious matters which was tolerated at the outset in the spirit of a presumed dependence of the sovereign on the central authority of the Church and for a better increase of the religious faith and of the internal discipline of ecclesiastics, and which was also in part favored by the very ambitious and autonomy-seeking aims of local ecclesiastical currents, in the long run, given the scant sense of measure of the political authority, met with reaction in the hierarchy of the Church, and there came to be constituted a whole movement that would have its culmination in the restoring policy of Hildebrand, tending to free the ecclesiastical hierarchy from the meshes of the feudal political order.

There would be first the separation or, better put, the independent conception of the two offices with which ecclesiastics were invested, that of a religious nature and that of a civil one, and just as consecration to the episcopate and the provision of a Church would be maintained as the absolute competence of the ecclesiastical side, so the conferral of any civil powers on an ecclesiastic could be granted subordinately but separately. It is known how already a c. of 818-19 of Louis the Pious, responding to this new direction, seemed to leave the election of the bishop free to the ecclesiastical side (MGH, Capitularia, 1, p. 275). But soon imperial legislation under Lothair returned to the rigid Carolingian organization. Indeed Lothair even demanded, with the Constitutio romana of 824, that the consecration of the pontiff could not take place unless he had sworn the prescribed oath in the presence of the imperial envoys (MGH, Capitularia, I, p. 322).

With the strengthening of the ecclesiastics, especially in Italy, one sees how they quite often became arbiters of the election of political leaders. Thus Guy of Spoleto owed his imperial election to the oath to preserve ecclesiastical prerogatives according to the formula: «Sanctam romanam ecclesiam ex corde se diligere et exaltare et ecclesiastica iura in ordinibus observare... se velle, Deo teste, professus est...» (MGH, Capitularia, II, n. 222).

A special authority must be recognized for a series of Capitularia ecclesiastica, because they were received and arranged in the Lombarda, which had for a long time a particular application in Italy and to which the religious authorities themselves refer in the resolution of disputes even between ecclesiastics. In the Lombarda the provisions to which allusion is made are included in Book III and are arranged more precisely under various titles (tit. I, De episcopis et clericis; tit. II, Quando liceat alterius clericum accipere vel non; tit. III, De decimis; tit. VIII, Quando liceat rectoribus ecclesiarum acta antecessorum suorum rescindere; tit. IX, De pontificibus). The most notable of these provisions are indicated summarily.

In tit. I a group of c. going back to Charlemagne is gathered. In cap. 1 there is mention of a synod in which bishops, abbots and viri illustres are assembled together with the emperor, and in which it is decided that suffragans remain subject to the metropolitans secundum canones, who also have over them a power of correction. It is further established that monasteries live according to the rules and that abbesses reside without interruption in the monastery (cap. 3). To bishops is recognized the power (secundum canones) over priests and clerics infra eorum parrechiam (cap. 4). The exemption of clerics from civil jurisdiction is declared (cap. 11), the irrevocability of the monastic state (cap. 11), and the perpetuity of the destination of consecrated places is sanctioned (cap. 13). The bishop's own jurisdiction in disputes between clerics is laid down (cap. 14). Also interesting is a c. of King Pepin (cap. 17) on the power of the bishop (pontifex) to order his own church and to compel clerics canonico ordine vivere, with the threat si quis pontifex clericos suos canonico ordine distringere noluerit, anathema sit.

Notable too is cap. 36 of the same title, which declares Roman law to be proper to the ecclesiastical order.

Worthy of mention are two Chapters of Pepin in tit. II, where the bishop is forbidden to receive the the cleric and the priest of other dioceses without dimissory letters. In tit. VIII, noteworthy are a chapter of Lothair (ch. 2) concerning the rescindability of penalties assumed by predecessors in ecclesiastical precariae and a chapter of King Charles (ch. 4) on the division of ecclesiastical tithes into four parts: one to the bishop, a second to the clerics, a third to the poor, and the fourth for the fabric of the Church.

Antonio Rota

LITURGY

In medieval liturgical language, the term c. referred both to the Ordo containing the prescriptions for the celebration of the liturgical offices, and to the antiphonary, and especially to the index of the pericopes of Holy Scripture to be read at Mass. At first these were indicated by marginal annotations on the biblical codices of the Old and New Testaments themselves; but later (certainly already in the 7th century) the indications relating both to the Epistles and to the Gospels, arranged according to the order of the "Temporale" and the "Sanctorale", were collected into separate codices, called precisely c., or comes, lectionarium, etc. There existed c. for the Epistles alone, "c. epistolarum", or for the Gospels alone, "c. evangeliorum", or for both combined into one organic whole.

To avoid confusion, the individual c. will be treated under the entries EPISTOLARIO; EVANGELIARIO; cf. also COMES; LEEIONARIO. *