Content
In terms of content, the bull is simply the format in which a decree of the Pope appears. Any subject may be treated in a bull, and many were and are, including statutory decrees, episcopal appointments, dispensations, excommunications, apostolic constitutions, canonizations and convocations. The bull was the exclusive letter format from the Vatican until the fourteenth century, when the papal brief began to appear. The brief is the less formal form of papal communication and is authenticated with a wax impression (now a red ink impression) of the Ring of the Fisherman. There has never been an exact distinction of usage between a bull and a brief, but nowadays most letters, including encyclicals, are issued as briefs.
Read more about this topic: Papal Bull
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“To impose celibacy on such a large body as the clergy of the Catholic Church is not to forbid it to have wives but to order it to be content with the wives of others.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“Women are angels, wooing;
Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.
That she beloved knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungained more than it is.
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungained, beseech.
Then though my heart’s content firm love doth bear,
Nothing of that shall from mine eyes appear.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)