EPISCOPALIS AUDIENTIA. – A term used in the later Roman legal sources to designate the bishop’s tribunal and the jurisdiction recognized to him to resolve disputes brought before him.
The episcopal tribunal did not, naturally, derive its power from secular authority, nor, on the other hand, did it arise with the aforementioned recognition, since the bishop’s jurisdictional power came from divine law: already St. Paul invited Christians to bring their disputes before the Ordinaries rather than resort to the cognizance of secular tribunals; and the Fathers of the Church abundantly attest to the effective exercise of judicial power by bishops from the earliest period.
Imperial recognition nevertheless had the effect of investing episcopal judicial decisions with authority in relation to the organization of the State, attributing civil efficacy to the bishop’s decisions. This recognition, and the consequent insertion of the episcopal tribunal among the Roman judicial organs, is due, as is well known, to the emperor Constantine, who, by a constitution of 318 (Cod. Theod., 1, 27, 1), whose authenticity has been debated, established the scope of the bishop’s jurisdiction and the relations between the episcopal tribunals and the ordinary tribunals of the Empire; in it Constantine lays down rules for three distinct hypotheses: for a trial which, having begun before the secular magistrate, had been abandoned by the parties in order to have recourse to the bishop’s tribunal; for the bishop’s trial concluded by a sentence; and finally for the trial at the stage of execution, that is, in the case of a sentence of the bishop which had to be furnished with executory force by the appropriate index of the Empire.
It seems, moreover, that the bishop’s jurisdiction, under the Constantinian provision, was maintained rather in the nature of arbitration than of a true and proper judgment, and in
this it would not have differed from the competence of the Jewish ethnarch, whose decisions were enforced by the ordinary secular judge.
Along with the bishop’s jurisdiction, the faculty was also recognized for him to apply the lex Christiana in his judgments. This likewise made it possible for the bishop to employ aequitas canonica in the trial, or practically to introduce his jurisprudence into the civil order, to the benefit 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 Benedetto Levita (v.), that an attempt was made to free the bishop’s jurisdiction, on the secular plane, from any dependence on civil authority.
Subsequently, it had different fortunes according to the political regime locally adopted and the divergent attitude of the secular authorities.