TheDecretals

TheDecretals, commonly referred to as the Decretals or Liber Extra, are a 13th-century collection of papal decrees that formed the first comprehensive codification of canon law for the Catholic Church. They are part of the broader Corpus Juris Canonici.

Commissioned by Pope Gregory IX around 1231 and completed in 1234, the Decretals were compiled under the direction of Raymond of Penafort, a prominent Dominican canonist. The collection drew on earlier decretals and papal letters, organizing them by subject to facilitate legal practice and ecclesiastical governance.

The Decretals became a central reference for church law across medieval and early modern Europe, covering areas such as church discipline, sacramental regulation, clerical governance, and relations with secular authorities. It is distinct from Gratian's Decretum, which provided the earlier legal framework upon which the Decretals built.

In subsequent decades and centuries, related decretal collections were added, including the Liber Sextus (1298) and the Clementines (1317). Together with Gratian’s Decretum, these works formed the Corpus Juris Canonici, ultimately published in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII as the official medieval code of canon law.

The Decretals influenced later canon law and were foundational for the Catholic legal tradition; they continued to be authoritative until the 20th century, when new codifications, starting with the 1917 Code of Canon Law and later the 1983 Code of Canon Law, superseded them in routine application. The term TheDecretals can also be used to refer generally to collections of papal decretals.