LIBER DIURNUS ROMANORUM PONTIFICUM — II Decretum of the election of the Pope and the Professio of the newly elected in the different versions of the codices Vaticanus (f. 60°) and Ambrosianus (p. 132): the text of the V. probably refers to the election of Gregory II (715) and that of the A. probably refers to Leo III (795) — Archivio Vaticano and Biblioteca Ambrosiana.
On 23 July, the feast of St. Apollinaris, news of the discovery was sent to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, his illustrious friend.
Immediately, lively controversies arose around this now famous text. Having obtained permission from the abbot of S. Croce, Ilarione Rancati, Holstenius had a copy made, certainly intending a prompt publication. It was then rumored that this copy had been executed within a single night and “against the given word,” but A. Ratti definitively dispelled this legend.
Father Sirmond sent to Rome another recently discovered manuscript, which was kept in the Jesuit College of Clermont, and preparations were made for its edition. However, Holstenius was deterred by the concern that the condemnation of Pope Honorius expressed in the Professio fidei of the Pope might be exploited, if not properly understood, by the enemies of the Church. It was a time of polemical tension between France and the Pope, in which Gallican claims and papal infallibility were matters of political urgency. The authority attributed to the Formulary was undisputed: it was considered the official book of the papal Chancery and was thought to have been written in the 7th–8th centuries. Lacking a title, it was derived from the Collectio canonum of Deusdedit, which reported eleven formulae, three of which bore the indication “Ex libro Romanorum Pontificum qui dicitur (vocatur, appellatur) Diurnus.”
It seems that Holstenius hoped to publish it by 1650, according to a slip of paper in his own hand, on which he had prepared the title page: *Diurnus vite vetus formularium, quo S. Rom. Ecclesia ante annos M. utebatur. Lucas Holstenius edidit cum notis. Romae, typis Lud. Griniani, MDCL.* The approval of the censors was lacking, and at Holstenius’ death (2 February 1661) the work, largely printed, remained unfinished. Cardinal Barberini, his universal legatee, hastened to solicit permission for its printing. Father Giovanni Bona, a consultant to the Index, expressed his judgment (extra congregationem, i.e., without official character) that, since the announced notes had not been found and because the condemnation of Pope Honorius “pravis Haereticorum assertionibus fomentum impendit, praestat non divulgari opus.” The edition was thus suspended, not suppressed; the printed sheets were kept in a room of the Vatican Palace until 1685, when, with the missing title page and pp. 225–32 added, they were circulated with a false imprint: *L. D. R. P. ex antiquissimo codice ms. nunc primum in lucem editus studio Lucae Holstenii. Romae, typis Iosephi Vannacci, 1658.* A few years earlier, in 1680, the Jesuit Father Garnier had published the *L.D.R.P.* based on the Sirmond manuscript. The vicissitudes of this laborious edition and the suspicion that attended Garnier’s edition reveal the atmosphere of fear regarding political repercussions. In 1662, even the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris intervened to obtain from Msgr. Pierre de Marca, Archbishop of Toulouse and later of Paris, the few sheets that Holstenius had sent him two years earlier. Such prejudices persisted in part until the last decades of the past century, when the progress of historical criticism overcame unfounded sensitivities. The issue of Pope Honorius is no longer at the center of interest in the *L.D.R.P.*, but rather the wealth of valuable information it offers and its very nature: its internal formation, the date of composition, and its use.
II. MANUSCRIPTS
In 1889, a third ancient exemplar was discovered by Msgr. Antonio Ceriani, so that there are now three manuscripts on which the knowledge of the text is based: 1) Codex Vaticanus (=V), the oldest, attributed to the end of the 8th century or, more likely, the beginning of the 9th; it is the one discovered by Holstenius at S. Croce, where it remained until the end of the 18th century, later passing to the Vatican Archive. Following the fate of this archive, it was taken to Paris in 1810 and returned to Rome in 1815. It seems certain that, before coming to S. Croce, the codex belonged to the monastery of Nonantola. 2) Codex Claromontanus (=C), brought by Father Sirmond from Italy in 1608 and deposited in the College of Clermont, disappeared after 1746 with the sale of the library following the suppression of the Jesuits. It was considered lost; in 1937 it was donated to the Benedictine monastery of Egmond, in the Netherlands. It is attributed to the middle of the 9th century. 3) Codex Ambrosianus (=A), acquired for the Ambrosian Library by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1606, comes from Bobbio; it seems to correspond to the *Diurnus sancti Gregori liber* mentioned in a 10th-century catalogue of Bobbio.Six other manuscripts, copies made by scholars, date from the 17th and 18th centuries. In addition, eleven formulae are also transmitted through the Collectio Canonum of Deusdedit, dedicated in 1087 to Victor III (see the ed. by Wolf von Glanvell, Paderborn 1905, I. II, pp. 109–12; I. III, pp. 145–50; I. IV, p. 427); one formula is included in the Decretum Gratiani, c. 8, dist. XVI.
III. THE TEXT
The collection is composed of documents and parts of documents reduced to formulae by the suppression of dates and the substitution of proper names with the pronoun *ille*; only a few escape this rule by retaining proper names. The number and order of the formulae are not the same in the three manuscripts: codex V contains 99 formulae, though incomplete at the end; codex C contains 100, of which 92 are common to V and 8 are new; codex A contains 106 (117 in the ed. by Ratti, since formula I of codex V bears nn. I–XII), of which the last three are not included in the other manuscripts.All three codices begin with a series of examples relating to the manner of expressing *superstitio* and *superstitio* in letters addressed by the pope to various persons. The following formulae up to the thirtieth are also in the same order in the three codices; the remaining formulae are in a different order. In codex V, texts of related subject matter are repeated at intervals, while in codices A and C there is a more orderly distribution of subjects, justly considered proof of a later redaction; the order of C is not entirely known, but seems broadly to agree with that of A. In citations, it is common practice to refer to the numbering of the ed. by Sickel, which follows the order of codex V, adding at the end eight formulae from codex C (from the ed. by Garnier).
IV. DATE OF THE COLLECTION AND DATE OF THE INDIVIDUAL FORMULAE
The *terminus post quem* for the formation of the collection is clearly given by the age of the manuscripts; that is, for the redaction of codex V, the end of the 8th century or the beginning of the 9th; for the redaction of codices C and A, respectively the first half and the beginning of the second half of the same century. The other *terminus post quem* is derived from the text itself, which attributes the most recent formula to the year 795.Far more complex and, in many respects, more important is the dating of the individual formulae, since they do not belong to the same period. A good portion certainly dates back to St. Gregory the Great (Peitz), and perhaps some are even earlier, such as formulae 73 and 85, which Peitz traces back to the beginning of the 5th century; formula 87 refers to the restoration of the monastery of St. Stephen at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, carried out under Gregory II (715–31); many mention the Emperor with reference to the Empire before Charlemagne, and the Exarch of Italy, who ceased to exist in 751; formula 93 mentions Queen Cynegild with reference to the years 787–88.
It is therefore certain that the *L.D.R.P.* does not represent the historical conditions of a given moment, but is composed of documents from different times, some of which were no longer current at the moment when the manuscripts were copied.
NATURE OF THE WORK
Until the studies of Th. Sickel, there had been no doubts about the unitary character of the collection, which was considered the work of an unknown compiler. Sickel recognized in it a later formation in three stages: Collectio I (formulas 1-63 of ms. V), the oldest nucleus formed ca. 625; Appendix I (formulas 64-81), added at the end of the 7th century; Collectio II (formulas 82-99), from the time of Adrian I, and Appendix II (formulas 100-107), added shortly after the year 800, at the same time when an unknown compiler gave a new order to the four parts (edition of mss. C and A). The question of its formation is linked to the more important one of the book’s value: whether it was official or private.
As early as 1680, Fr. Fr. Marchesi (Clypeus fortium..., Rome 1680, p. 276) denied that the L.D.R.P. was composed in the papal Chancery for its own use, though without solid arguments; more incisively, Cardinal Pitra (Analecta novissima, I [1885], pp. 103-105) observed that the subjects are too few compared to those dealt with by popes in their letters; moreover, “more than half of the formulas concern episcopal chancelleries, models for writing to the pope, for correspondence between bishops, for drafting chapter acts, episcopal and monastic acts regarding an oratory, a baptistery, a reliquary, for a foundation, an oblatus, etc.” In reality, 15 formulas are from non-papal documents.
The studies of Th. von Sickel and the authority of his edition lent new credence to the older theory: on the assumption that the formulas of certain papal documents (especially those on papal elections, including the Professio fidei) could only interest the papal Curia, it was taken for granted that the L.D.R.P. had been written and actually used in the Chancery of the popes; and since ms. V (then the only surviving one) was in Carolingian minuscule script, given its antiquity, the theory of the Roman origin of this script thus arose. It was, however, a hypothesis based on another hypothesis.
Sickel’s theory on the origin and nature of the L.D.R.P. was considered definitive until, between 1936 and 1939, a series of new studies subjected many aspects of the question to revision. The discovery of ms. A and then the finding of ms. C altered the state of the manuscript tradition, both being of monastic origin; the presumption that it must have had a chancery origin fell away. The new studies have not resolved all the questions, but some points can now be considered certain. Santifaller established that only 6 or 7 formularies were actually used as models in drafting papal privileges from the 9th to the 11th century: too few to consider the L.D.R.P. an official formulary. Fr. Peitz insisted on considering the L.D.R.P. as an official book of the Chancery, which had undergone successive developments within the Chancery itself, but he admitted that the three manuscripts represented a literary tradition of it, i.e., they were not the actual codices used, but copies of them. Fr. Mohler observed that the confusion lay already in the title, because the only source is Deusdedit, who cites a Liber Romanorum Pontificum, where the addition *qui dicitur Diurnus* derives from the erroneous monastic tradition of a supposed *Diurnum B. Gregorii*: he therefore considered it a private collection, similar to other famous ones that arose between the 6th and 7th centuries, such as the Leonine Sacramentary.
It seems certain that the L.D.R.P. is a private collection compiled for canonistic interest, perhaps for use in a school, and thus copied and studied in monasteries and subject to additions and reworkings. It is certainly of Italian origin; it cannot be ruled out that it was composed in Rome, but it does not constitute the formulary of the papal Chancery. In any case, there is no doubt about the historical authenticity of the individual texts of which it is composed.
EDITIONS
The first edition, prepared by L. Holste and left unfinished at his death, was later published with the false date of 1658; it has been described above. It reproduces ms. V, partly using C. The second edition was based on ms. C: I. Garnierius, *L.D.R.P. ex antiquissimo codice ms. nunc primum in lucem editus* (Paris 1680). In 1687, J. Mabillon published in the *Museum Italicum* (I, II, p. 32 ff.) the *Libri Diurni R. P. Supplementum* with 8 formulas from ms. V to supplement the edition of Fr. Garnier. All the subsequent editions, lacking scientific value with respect to the text because derived from the previous ones, are:
EVANGELIZATION
In the territory of Liberia there were few Catholics, who were spiritually abandoned. The Second Council of Baltimore in 1833 took concern for them. Ten years later, three priests offered to go to Liberia: namely, Msgr. Barron, Fr. Kelly, and the lay catechist Pindar; but this first attempt failed, and Liberia was again abandoned for forty years, until in 1884 the Fathers of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit were sent there. Masonic and Protestant opposition forced them to close the church and school.
In 1903, when the mission was erected as an apostolic prefecture, another attempt was made, also unsuccessful, by the Montfortians; finally, the task was entrusted to the Fathers of the African Missions of Lyon (1906), who are still working there. The first apostolic prefect was Fr. Kyne; the mission developed under the prefect and then apostolic vicar Msgr. Ogé. Despite Protestant predominance, the apostolate has not been unfruitful: the most responsive populations are the Kru tribes (the station at Sasstown dates to 1912, that at Grand Cess to 1916); other stations were founded in recent times: Monrovia in 1921, Rassa in 1929, and Cape Palmas in 1930; further inland: Saniquelle in 1932 and Gbangba in 1933. The mission faced no small number of serious difficulties: the war of 1914-18 threatened to strangle it; the epidemic of 1918 scattered the Christians, who were promptly aided by the missionaries; then came open Protestant hostility, which demanded the removal of the Catholic missionaries. Despite everything, the mission progressed. In 1934, the prefecture was elevated to an apostolic vicariate. On 5 Feb. 1950, the vicariate was divided into the apostolic prefecture of Cape Palmas.