EPISCOPAL AUDIENTIA. – A term used in late Roman legal sources to designate the bishop’s tribunal and the jurisdiction recognized as his to resolve disputes brought before him.
The episcopal tribunal did not, of course, derive its power from secular authority, nor did it arise from the aforementioned recognition, since the bishop’s judicial power came from divine right: already St Paul urged Christians to bring their disputes before the Ordinaries rather than resort to secular tribunals; and the Fathers of the Church abundantly attest to the actual exercise of judicial power by bishops from the earliest age.
Imperial recognition, however, had the effect of clothing the bishop’s judicial pronouncement with authority in relation to the organization of the State, by granting civil efficacy to the bishop’s decisions. This recognition and the consequent insertion of the episcopal tribunal among the judicial organs of Rome are due, as is well known, to the emperor Constantine, who in a constitution of the 4th century (Cod. Theod. 1.27.1), whose authenticity has been debated, defined the scope of the bishop’s jurisdiction and the relationship of the episcopal tribunal to the ordinary tribunals of the empire. In it Constantine laid down rules for three distinct cases: for a judgment that, having been begun before a secular magistrate, had been abandoned by the parties in order to resort to the bishop’s tribunal; for a judgment concluded by the bishop with a sentence; and finally for the judgment in the stage of execution, that is, in the case of a sentence of the bishop that had to be rendered enforceable by the opposing imperial judge.
It seems, moreover, that the jurisdiction of the bishop, as set out in the Constantinian enactment, remained rather in the nature of arbitration than of true and proper judgment—
in this it would not have been unlike the competence of the Jewish ethnarch, whose decisions were executed by the ordinary secular judge.
With the bishop’s jurisdiction there was also recognized the faculty of applying in his judgments the lex Christiana. This likewise opened the way for the bishop to employ in judgment canonical equity, or to introduce his jurisprudence practically into the civil order, to the advantage of the moral evolution of Roman legal forms.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the bishop’s jurisdiction expanded, but it was through the notorious forgery of Benedict the Levite (v.) that an attempt was made to sever the bishop’s jurisdiction, on the secular plane, from any dependence on civil authority.
Subsequently its fate varied according to the political regime locally assumed and the unequal attitude of secular authorities.