CIRCONCISI. — Heretics of the thirteenth century, so called from their practice of the Jewish rite of circumcision. They are designated by this term in the list of heretical sects proscribed by the constitution of Frederick II, issued at Rome on 22 November 1220 and at Ravenna on 22 February 1232, in which the Passagini are not mentioned; in the imperial edicts against the heretics, promulgated in various places in the years 1238–39 and subsequently incorporated into the bulls of various pontiffs, they are listed before the Passagini; in the lists of other pontifical documents only the latter appear, whose doctrines are refuted in various manuals for the anti-heretical controversy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
A Summa breviata (ed. Douais, pp. 63–64) refutes Passaginos et Circumcisos together as proponents of the obligatory character of the laws of the Old Testament, of observance of the Sabbath, and of circumcision. These convergences of condemnations and errors lead historians to identify the C. with the Passagini, regarding the two terms as synonymous. On their doctrines V. PATARINI; among other things, they reject Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist as useless ecclesiastical institutions. But a recently discovered anti-heretical Summa, from the first half of the thirteenth century, reports in a separate short chapter against the C. that they require the literal observance of circumcision and of the Sacraments of the ancient Law, on a par with the Sacraments of the new Law. The acceptance, therefore, of the latter would distinguish the C. from the Passagini; bearing in mind the doctrinal fluidity of the medieval sects, it is probable that the C. were a faction of the Passagini; unlike the latter, they would not have been opposed to the economy of the New Testament; rather, like the ancient Judaizing Christians, they required observance of the Mosaic law, especially circumcision, together with Christian Sacraments and precepts. The author of this Summa, who may well have been the well-known Dominican inquisitor s. Pietro Martire (v.), recalls having refuted, with the text Col. 2, 11–12, the circumcised Alberto Bustignano, at Bergamo. He regards this sect as one of the most hostile to the Catholic faith.