decretal's Usage Examples:

To this rich collection the author, who assumes the name of Isidore, the saintly bishop of Seville, added a good number of apocryphal documents already existing, as well as a series of letters ascribed to the popes of the earliest centuries, from Clement to Silvester and Damasus inclusive, thus filling up the gap before the decretal of Siricius, which is the first genuine one in the collection.

Although we find Siricius a year later writing to the African Church on this same subject in tones rather of persuasion than of command, yet the beginning of compulsory sacerdotal celibacy in the Western Church may be conveniently dated from his decretal of A.D.

The famous decretal of Siricius (385) not only enjoined strict celibacy on bishops, priests and deacons, but insisted on the instant separation of those who had already married, and prescribed the punishment of expulsion for disobedience (Siric. Ep. i.

This, as Wolsey saw, was quite inadequate for the purpose in view; and he again instructed Gardiner, while thanking the pope for the commission actually granted, to press him once more by very urgent pleas, to send the desired decretal on, even if the latter was only to be shown to the king and himself and then destroyed.

Several of the decretal letters of Siricius are extant, in which, at the request of certain groups of Western bishops, he sets forth the rules of ecclesiastical discipline.

He brought with him a secret document, the Decretal, which defined the law and left the legates to decide the question of fact; but this important letter was to be shown only to Henry and Wolsey.

A decretal of Innocent III.

the similar decretal of Alexander III.

4 It is met with in a Decretal of Innocent III.'

Having failed to satisfy the king, he left England on the 26th of October 1529, after his baggage had been searched at Dover to find the Decretal, which, however, had been burnt.