EPISCOPAL AUDIENCE. - Term used in late Roman legal sources to designate the bishop's tribunal and the jurisdiction recognized to him to settle disputes brought before him.
The episcopal tribunal naturally did not derive its power from secular authority, nor, on the other hand, did it come into being with the aforementioned recognition, since the bishop's jurisdictional power came to him from divine right: already St. Paul invited Christians to bring their disputes before the Ordinaries rather than have recourse to the cognizance of secular tribunals; and the Fathers of the Church amply attest the actual exercise of judicial power held by bishops from the earliest era.
The imperial recognition nevertheless had the effect of clothing the bishop's judicial pronouncement with authority before the organization of the State, attributing civil effect 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, fixed the scope of the bishop's jurisdiction, and the relations of the episcopal tribunal with the ordinary tribunals of the Empire; in it Constantine lays down rules for three distinct hypotheses: for the trial which, begun before the secular magistrate, had been abandoned by the parties in order to approach the bishop's tribunal; for the bishop's trial concluded with a sentence; and finally for the trial in the execution stage, that is, in the case of a sentence of the bishop that had to be given enforceability by the appropriate index of the Empire.
It seems, moreover, that the bishop's jurisdiction was maintained, in the Constantinian provision, rather in the character of arbitration than of a true and proper trial; in this it would not have been dissimilar from the competence of the Jewish ethnarch, whose decisions were given execution by the ordinary secular judge.
With the bishop's jurisdiction there was also recognized in him the faculty of applying the lex Christiana in his judgments. This also brought with it the possibility for the bishop to use aequitas canonica in the trial, or led to the practical introduction of his jurisprudence 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 well-known forgery of Benedict 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 a different fate depending on the political regime adopted locally and the unequal attitude of the secular authorities.
Bibliography5 works
Antonio Iota