INSTRUCTIONS OF THE SACRED CONGREGATIONS. — The Roman Congregations (v.) are invested with a threefold power: legislative (which, at least in a broad sense, cannot be denied them), doctrinal, and administrative. Their decisions bear the generic name of decrees, which, according to the case, have specific names: praecepta, rescripts, and declarations, decisions, or resolutions, general or particular decrees, and so on.
An instruction, in itself, indicates a merely declarative norm, which requires, more than literal observance, the following of a particular directive. In other words, it provides those to whom the norm is directed with a rule by which they may and should govern themselves, without thereby constituting for them a universal or particular law.
The purpose of these instructions is well indicated by Benedict XV in the motu proprio of 16 Sept. 1917 *Cum iuris*: “The ordinary duty [of the Sacred Congregations] will be to ensure that the prescriptions of the Code are religiously observed and, if necessary, to issue instructions which render these prescriptions clearer and more effective and which appear almost as a commentary upon them” (*AAS*, 9 [1917], p. 483). The aim of the instructions is thus reduced to fixing the interpretation of the law and ensuring its observance in particulars.
The interpretation is given not because the law is doubtful (this, in the case of the canons of the *Codex Iuris Canonici*, would pertain to the Pontifical Commission for Authentic Interpretation), but to give the law greater efficacy and to almost supplement it with more detailed elucidations than the bare and skeletal text of the law could provide.
Instructions, however, cannot derogate from the law which they are meant to complement in the aforesaid manner, and if any provisions of an instruction do not accord with the law itself, the latter, even if anterior, is to be preferred. Instructions take effect immediately, without any *vacatio legis*, since they are not laws but supplements to the law. Hence, when the law ceases to be in force, the instructions also lose their validity, for the accessory follows the principal. Instructions contain not only matters of counsel but also of precept, when this is evident from the tenor of the words or when instructions recall to mind prescriptions of universal or particular divine and ecclesiastical law.
Numerous are the instructions issued after the promulgation of the *Codex Iuris Canonici*, such as the *Instructio* of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office on ecumenical admonition, 20 Dec. 1949 (*AAS*, 82 [1950], p. 142); the *Instructiones* of the Sacred Congregation of Religious, 3 Nov. 1921, on the second year of novitiate (*ibid.*, 13 [1921], p. 539 ff.) and of 6 Feb. 1924 on papal enclosure (*ibid.*, 16 [1924], p. 96 ff.); the *Instructiones* of the Sacred Congregation of the Sacraments, 4 July 1921, on the proof of free status and the denunciation of a contracted marriage (*ibid.*, 13 [1921], p. 348 ff.), that of 27 March 1929 on the celebration of the Holy Mass and the distribution of Holy Communion (*ibid.*, 21 [1929], p. 631 ff.), and that of 10 July
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