PAPACY. - A term synonymous with the Roman Pontificate, used to indicate the permanent institution willed by Jesus Christ in the person of St. Peter and through him in those of his legitimate successors until the end of the ages, for the purpose of presiding over and governing the universal Church with full and supreme authority.
Whereas by the term "Church" is meant the whole body of all the faithful gathered under the government of the legitimate pastors, by "Papacy" is meant instead the supreme authority placed over the Church itself by divine mandate. To this authority, that is to the Papacy, belong indefectibility (v.) and infallibility (v.). By virtue of its universality, that is of the Primacy (v. PRIMATO DI S. PIETRO E DEL PAPA), the bishops of the whole world are subject to it, placed over the government of individual territories and nations, the mission territories and those equated with them because the Church of Christ must spread to them, and those religious institutes which, being exempt from diocesan authority, have the privilege of depending directly on the pontifical authority.
Directly connected with the Papacy are those organs that are necessary to it for the exercise of its mission, and they are, at the very center of Christendom, the Congregations (v.) and, at the periphery, the nunciatures, the delegations, the vicariates and the apostolic prefectures.
The history of the Papacy is entirely bound up with the history of the Church (v.), while always remembering that in the exercise of its powers there is manifested, according to the times and circumstances, a greater or lesser centralization, and direct interventions in the internal and external historical events of the Church occur more or less frequently and extensively according to the needs and possibilities for good that present themselves, without its fundamental rights having for this reason been able to be prescribed away or the claimed liberties of some particular nation having acquired juridical value. For individual pontiffs, see the entries concerning them.
Pio Paschini