CONSULTORS OF THE SACRED CONGREGATIONS. - Each Sacred Congregation, for the study of questions of greater importance, has a body of consultors: prelates, religious, and exceptionally also laymen, from whom it requests reasoned votes or opinions. The consultors are appointed by the Supreme Pontiff by means of a note signed by the Cardinal Secretary of State, on the proposal of the cardinal prefect or secretary of the respective Congregation. Such an appointment is in itself for life. The consultors normally must reside in the curia. To them belongs and upon them weighs a great part of the business of the Congregations; many of their votes have had very great scientific-canonistic and practical importance. They do not, in general, receive any monetary compensation. Some are consultors by right: in fact the CIC establishes, for example, that the consultors of the Sacred Congregation Consistorial are the assessor of the Holy Office, the secretary of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs and the secretary of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries; the assessor of the Holy Office in turn is a consultor of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries (CIC cann. 248 § 2 and 256 § 2).
In general the consultors write their votes and send them without appearing in person (sometimes, however, they take part in the congress or even in the plenary meeting of the Congregation): for the Holy Office, on the other hand, only the « qualificators » do so, while the consultors instead gather every Monday in the so-called « consulta », preparing the matter that will then serve for the meeting of the cardinals that will take place on the following Wednesday and on which the assessor reports to the pope in the weekly audience of Thursday. The consultors of the Sacred Congregation of Rites are distinguished according to the three sections to which they belong; the theological consultors (I section) give their written vote and participate in the Congregations antepreparatory, preparatory, and general before the pope, for the handling of causes of beatification and canonization; the liturgical consultors (II section) are called to give their opinion, case by case, in particular liturgical questions; the historical consultors (III section) give their written vote and participate in the plenary sessions of the Historical Section, in the historical causes of beatification and canonization, and also give their opinion, case by case, on individual questions of a critical-historical, hagiographic and liturgical character.