The home of the Common Magisterial Document Data Repository curated by the Catholic Engineering Task Force within the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation.
The Common Magisterial Document Data Repository (CMDDR) provides a canonicalized list of identifiers for Magisterial documents or Papal documents, speeches, homilies, etc. of the Catholic Church, along with semantic distinctions between the types of documents / speeches.
The term magisterium is based on the Latin word for “teacher” (magister). In contemporary Catholic usage, it has several meanings.
- the teaching authority which Christ has given to the Church. Here the term refers to the authority itself, not those who exercise it. This usage appears in statements like, “The Church exercises its magisterium when it authoritatively proclaims Christ’s teachings.”
- those who exercise this teaching authority. Here the term refers to the Pope and the bishops teaching in union with him. Collectively, they are referred to as the “Magisterium,” as in “the Magisterium has infallibly taught that God is a Trinity.”
- a particular body of teachings that have been authoritatively proclaimed. This usage appears in statements like, “Humanae Vitae belongs to the magisterium of St. Paul VI.”
For the purposes of this data repository, we will be taking into account the third meaning, in reference to the body of teachings.
An earlier draft of this repository used a single table that assigned a fixed Magisterial Type and Infallibility to each document genre. That approach cannot be made correct, because in Catholic theology authority attaches to a teaching act, not to a document genre. Francis A. Sullivan, in Creative Fidelity: Weighing and Interpreting Documents of the Magisterium (1996), makes the point directly about councils: “not every statement made by an ecumenical council will express … a ‘solemn judgment’ … the theologian must be familiar with the criteria by which to distinguish dogmatic definitions from the other kinds of statements found in conciliar decrees.” The same document may contain teaching at several levels — e.g. Lumen Gentium is a Dogmatic Constitution that defined no new dogma, while Evangelium Vitae is an Encyclical whose three central moral judgments are taught by the ordinary and universal magisterium.
We therefore split the model into two tables:
- Genre Registry — properties that are knowable from the act itself (issuer, genre, scope) and the presumptive and maximum authority the genre can carry. This is the canonical taxonomy of document / speech types, and preserves the original registry purpose of the repository.
- Statement Assessments — the authority actually exercised in a specific paragraph or section, which must be discerned by prudential application to the text. Infallibility and definitiveness live here, never in the Genre Registry.
How to read these tables. A row in the Genre Registry gives a genre’s default register and its ceiling (the highest authority its issuer could exercise through it). The real weight of any given passage is read from the Statement Assessments, which override the genre default at their locus and can never exceed the genre’s ceiling. Most documents (homilies, audiences, prayers, most motu proprios) carry no definitive statements at all and are fully described by the Genre Registry alone.
| Register | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Extraordinary | A solemn judgment / definition — an ecumenical council or a pope speaking ex cathedra defining a doctrine. Rare; per canon law nothing counts as defined “unless this is manifestly the case.” |
| Ordinary Universal | The bishops dispersed throughout the world, in union with the pope, concurring that a teaching is to be held definitively. This mode is itself capable of infallibility without a solemn definition. |
| Authentic Ordinary | The day-to-day, non-definitive teaching of the pope or bishops. Authoritative and calls for religiosum obsequium, but reformable. Admits many internal degrees. |
Why a ceiling can sit below its issuer’s capacity. A pope can define, yet most papal genres are capped at Authentic Ordinary, and two genres of the same diplomatic family split — Apostolic Letter reaches Ordinary Universal while Letter does not. The gap is a claim about the instrument, not about the issuer. A papal document does not itself exercise the ordinary and universal magisterium, which belongs to the bishops dispersed throughout the world in union with the pope; what it does is attest that such teaching exists and is to be held definitively (Evangelium Vitae 62: taught “by the ordinary and universal Magisterium”). An attestation of definitive teaching is a solemn act, and the Holy See does not make it through unsealed occasional correspondence: the formality of the instrument is what earns the higher ceiling. This is a defended editorial position, not a record of what popes have so far happened to do. Should a plain letter ever be found attesting definitive teaching, the answer is to raise that genre’s ceiling — a reviewable change to Table 1 — rather than to absorb the document as an exception; invariant 1 (ceiling bound) then keeps doing real work. The same reasoning applies to every genre capped below its issuer’s capacity; the discussion is recorded in #13.
Registry of document / speech types. Default register is the genre’s presumption; Ceiling is the maximum its issuer can
exercise through it. Neither fixes the authority of any particular passage — see Table 2. Scope is juridical — whom the act
binds — not who it is addressed to: Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is addressed to the bishops and universal in scope, while the
Letter to Artists is addressed to everyone and binds no one. An omitted document.scope inherits the genre's default, so a
letter is presumed local; a non-juridical scope is not representable — both vocabularies allow only universal and local —
and the Letter to Artists therefore currently reads as local, a known limitation. Representing that case, recording the
addressee, and a possible regional value are all deferred to #4.
| Genre | Issuer | Scope | Default register | Ceiling (issuer capacity) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Constitution | Ecumenical Council | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Extraordinary | The council’s most solemn genre. May bear an optional descriptive title (below); non-definitive unless a definition is manifest. |
| Decree | Ecumenical Council | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Extraordinary | May carry canons/anathemas that are definitions (e.g. Trent); assess per canon. |
| Declaration | Ecumenical Council | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Extraordinary | Lowest conciliar genre by presumptive weight. |
| Papal Bull | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Extraordinary | The most solemn sealed form of papal document (lead/wax seal — Latin bulla). May bear one or more of the non-exclusive characteristics listed below the table. |
| Encyclical | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Ordinary Universal | Can invoke the ordinary and universal magisterium (e.g. Evangelium Vitae). Formally a letter (Litterae Encyclicae, Epistula Encyclica), yet a genre of its own rather than a kind of Apostolic Letter (see The brief and the encyclical below). |
| Apostolic Exhortation | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | Typically post-synodal, hortatory. |
| Apostolic Letter | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Ordinary Universal | Formal papal act in the pope’s own name (Litterae Apostolicae; vatican.va’s Lettere Apostoliche shelf): Latin incipit, entered in the acts, juridical effect. Spans universal teaching (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Tertio Millennio Adveniente) and local governance — erecting dioceses, proclaiming patrons (Regionis Capitanatae) — so document.scope is expected per document. Ordinatio Sacerdotalis is the exception within the genre, not the type. May bear the in-forma-brevis and motu-proprio characteristics listed below the table: the brief is an apostolic letter, not a genre of its own (see The brief and the encyclical below). |
| Letter | Pope | local | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | Ordinary papal correspondence (Epistula; vatican.va’s Lettere shelf): someone is written to, on an occasion, usually in a vernacular, with no formal instrument behind it; titled by addressee and occasion, never by incipit. What separates it from the Apostolic Letter is form, not audience or weight — the Letter to Artists (1999) addresses the whole world and is still a letter. Weight is per statement, not per addressee. |
| Discourse / Address | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | Pastoral vehicle; cannot host a definition. |
| Homily | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | |
| Prayer | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | |
| Audience / Catechesis | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | |
| Message | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | Covers both the annual World Day / Lent series and occasional messages to a congress, dicastery or body. Non-defining pastoral vehicle; sits beside Discourse, Homily and Audience. |
| Urbi et Orbi | Pope | universal | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | A solemn papal blessing to the City and the World (vatican.va’s Urbi et Orbi shelf under Messaggi), with a plenary indulgence attached under the usual conditions — extended by the Apostolic Penitentiary to those who receive it by radio, television or internet. The blessing is the act; only the accompanying address carries teaching, assessed per statement. See Acts that do not teach below. |
| Episcopal / Pastoral Letter | Bishop | local | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary | An individual bishop shares in the ordinary universal magisterium only collegially, not through a local act. |
| Episcopal Homily | Bishop | local | Authentic Ordinary | Authentic Ordinary |
Among the conciliar genres, presumptive weight descends Constitution → Decree → Declaration, even though the council’s capacity to define (the ceiling) is the same for each.
A conciliar Constitution may bear an optional, mutually-exclusive descriptive title indicating its purpose (or none). The title is descriptive of purpose, not a claim of authority — Lumen Gentium is titled a "Dogmatic Constitution" yet defined no new dogma. Any actual definition is recorded as a Table 2 assessment, never inferred from the title.
| Descriptive title | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
dogmatic |
Treats doctrine as its primary subject. | Lumen Gentium, Dei Verbum |
pastoral |
Explicitly pastoral, signalling non-defining intent. | Gaudium et Spes |
| (none) | A plain constitution on a solemn matter. | Sacrosanctum Concilium (liturgy) |
Some distinctions the sources draw are not genres but qualities a document of a given genre may have. Rather than being
sub-genres, these are non-exclusive, document-level characteristics that a genre row allows: a document may carry none,
one, or several of the characteristics its genre allows, and none that it does not (invariant 22 in SCHEMA.md).
Modeling them as document-level metadata (not separate genres) keeps the base genre stable, so it can be baked into a document’s
canonical id without forcing a mutually-exclusive choice. Two genres currently allow characteristics: Papal Bull allows
apostolic-constitution and dogmatic-definition; Apostolic Letter allows in-forma-brevis and motu-proprio.
| Characteristic | Allowed by | Meaning | Bearing on authority |
|---|---|---|---|
apostolic-constitution |
Papal Bull | The most solemn form of papal legislation — governance, laws, promulgations (e.g. Pastor Bonus, Fidei Depositum). | Formal solemnity; the register of any teaching is still assessed per statement. |
dogmatic-definition |
Papal Bull | Contains an ex cathedra dogmatic definition (e.g. Ineffabilis Deus, 1854; Munificentissimus Deus, 1950). | Its defining statement is Extraordinary / infallible — recorded as a Table 2 assessment. |
in-forma-brevis |
Apostolic Letter | Issued as a brief — Litterae Apostolicae in forma Brevis, sealed with the Fisherman’s ring (sub anulo Piscatoris) rather than a lead bulla, and until 1967 expedited by the Secretaria Brevium — a form of the instrument, not a genre (e.g. Superiore iam aetate, 1950; Quod Ioannes, 1917). | None; the register of any statement is assessed per statement in Table 2. |
motu-proprio |
Apostolic Letter | Issued on the pope’s own initiative — a mode of issuance, not a genre; Litterae Apostolicae motu proprio datae (e.g. Summorum Pontificum, Traditionis Custodes, Ad Tuendam Fidem). | None; the register of any statement is assessed per statement in Table 2. |
Munificentissimus Deus bears both bull characteristics: it is an apostolic constitution that also defines a dogma. A bull
of canonization bears neither. Socialium Scientiarum (1994) is an apostolic letter that bears motu-proprio; Ordinatio
Sacerdotalis is one that does not.
Both the brief and the encyclical are called litterae or epistulae, and both could be read as kinds of apostolic letter. The registry treats them differently, and the reason is not that one of them is called a letter. In papal diplomatics litterae covers nearly every papal instrument: the bull itself is litterae apostolicae sub plumbo (H. Bresslau, Handbuch der Urkundenlehre; Th. Frenz, Papsturkunden des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit, 1986). If being called a letter were the test, the Papal Bull would fold into the Apostolic Letter as well. The test is what the Holy See's own record calls the act.
-
The brief is an apostolic letter, and its form is recorded as the
in-forma-brevischaracteristic. The Acta head these actsLITTERAE in forma Brevis(ASS 23 (1890) 437; ASS 33 (1900) 3). The brief is litterae apostolicae sealed with the Fisherman's ring instead of the lead bulla, and until Paul VI's Regimini Ecclesiae Universae (1967) abolished the office, it was issued through the Secretaria Brevium. That is a mode of issuance, in the same way that motu proprio is. Keeping the brief as a genre split identical acts across two rows:- beatification: Quod Ioannes (1917) against the beatification letters of later popes;
- a patronage proclaimed: Superiore iam aetate (1950) against Regionis Capitanatae;
- indulgences granted: Romanorum Pontificum (1916) against Beati Petri Apostolorum Principis (1917).
Nor did the brief's lower ceiling hold. The brief was a sealed, registered act that carried doctrinal censure (Innocent XII's Cum alias, 1699, against 23 propositions of Fénelon) and grave governance (Clement XIV's Dominus ac Redemptor, 1773). It therefore takes the Apostolic Letter's ceiling. The shelf a brief came from is still recorded in
source.shelfandsourceGenreLabel. -
The encyclical stays a genre of its own. The record never heads an encyclical Litterae Apostolicae: it heads it Litterae Encyclicae or Epistula Encyclica, a separate kind of papal letter. Since Benedict XIV's Ubi primum (1740) it has had its own form, a circular to the episcopate with neither bull formulas nor the ring. The Magisterium names it as a class whose teaching calls for assent (Pius XII, Humani generis 20), within the criterion of "the character of the documents" (Lumen gentium 25; Donum veritatis 24). The commentators rank it as a category of its own (F. A. Sullivan, Creative Fidelity, 1996; F. G. Morrissey, Papal and Curial Pronouncements, 1992). Morrissey's distinction between the litterae encyclicae, addressed to the whole Church, and the epistula encyclica, addressed to part of it, is a candidate characteristic of this genre. It is deferred until it can be read from the headings.
The document categories on vatican.va — Encicliche, Lettere Apostoliche, Lettere, Motu Proprio,
Bolle and the rest — are a chancery filing system. They sort documents by the diplomatic form of the instrument used to issue
them, which is not the same question as the authority the issuer exercised. They are first-rate evidence of what forms exist and of
how the Holy See itself distinguishes them, and they should inform this registry; they do not govern it. Nor are they the
record: the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, unlike the shelves, are the promulgating instrument, and the registry records where an act
stands in them (The Acta Apostolicae Sedis reference, below). Nor are they complete, even for the current pontificate: over
2015–2024 the AAS index names 118 apostolic constitutions and 202 apostolic letters of Francis where the
apost_constitutions and apost_letters shelves carry 49 and 59 — the shelves are selections, and the acts they omit
(most circumscription erections, most beatification letters, every canonisation decretal) are registered from the Acta instead.
Three features of those shelves make the point. First, they sort by form, not by weight or audience: Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and a
letter erecting a diocese share the Lettere Apostoliche shelf, while the universally-addressed Letter to Artists (1999) sits
under Lettere. Second, they are not disjoint — Socialium Scientiarum (1994) is filed both as an Apostolic Letter and as a
Motu Proprio, because issuing a document motu proprio is a mode of acting rather than a genre standing beside the apostolic
letter. Third, their names are not stable even for one occasion: the Messaggi sub-shelf that holds the World Mission Day
messages is missions on every page from Paul VI to Francis and mission on Leo XIV's, whose page also renames poveri to
poor, nonni to grandparents and cura-creato to creation, while John XXIII and Paul VI spell the Urbi et Orbi shelf
urbi_et_orbi where every later pope has urbi — the same series, filed under five different names. This registry handles that kind of relation with characteristics rather than sub-genres (see Characteristics
above), and motu-proprio is one: a document filed on the Motu Proprio shelf, or on that shelf as well as another, is an
apostolic-letter bearing the motu-proprio characteristic, and the shelf it came from is still recorded on the document.
Our own genre rows accordingly mix two axes: diplomatic form (Papal Bull, Apostolic Letter, Letter) and content type (Encyclical, Apostolic Exhortation) — an Encyclical being, formally, itself a species of letter (Litterae Encyclicae). That mixture is deliberate and follows ordinary usage, but it means the existence of a vatican.va shelf is never by itself an argument for a genre row, a default, or a ceiling. Each of those has to be argued from the act.
Every row in Table 1 is a vehicle of teaching, and its default register and ceiling answer one question: how much authority does the teaching carry? A good deal of what the popes issue never asks it. An Urbi et Orbi is a solemn blessing with an indulgence attached, preceded by an address — vatican.va files it under Messaggi, and the Francis shelf also holds the extraordinary Momento straordinario di preghiera of 27 March 2020, plainly a liturgical event. A bull of canonization pronounces a formula. And the Latin-incipit tail of the Lettere Apostoliche shelf — Regionis Capitanatae, Sanctus Adalbertus, Ad aptius fovendas — and the toponym-headed apostolic constitutions beside it are acts of governance: erecting and reorganising dioceses, proclaiming patrons, approving statutes. For these a default register of Authentic Ordinary is not so much wrong as beside the point. A decree that erects a diocese teaches nothing that could be assessed.
The registry therefore carries an optional document-level flag, actKind — teaching · governance · liturgical — with
absence meaning teaching. The operative act of such a document is not a statement Table 2 assesses, and its genre’s default
register does not describe it; a passage in it that does teach — the address before the blessing — is assessed per statement as
anywhere else, so the flag never forbids an Assessment. The flag is never authority-bearing: like keywords, it makes no
claim about register or definitiveness, and no invariant couples it to a genre, a ceiling or an Assessment. It is populated today from one evidenced source only: the 777 apostolic
constitutions whose circumscription keyword (an erection, elevation or union of sees, read from the heading or from the
hand-curated adjudication tables) carry actKind: governance; the flag is derived from the keyword in the harvester, so the two
cannot disagree. The Lettere Apostoliche tail is not yet flagged, because no keyword yet evidences it. Urbi et Orbi keeps its
own Table 1 row so that a reader finds it where they expect to: the row’s ceiling describes the address, and the flag
(liturgical) describes the act — every one of the 145 Urbi et Orbi harvested from the Messaggi shelves carries it, whether
or not the item belongs to the Christmas or Easter series. Seven items on John XXIII’s Urbi et Orbi shelf do not carry it,
because they are not blessings: the radio messages this pope broadcast to the world before Christmas and Easter and on other
occasions, which vatican.va files beside the feast-day messages, are harvested as message on curated rows quoting each heading. The discussion is in #15.
Some acts are delivered by a medium the source names in the heading — those same radio messages are Radiomessaggi, and
the World Youth Day 2019 and World Mission Day 2025 messages are Videomessaggi — and the medium is a fact about the act of
the kind Table 1 records, distinct from what the act does (actKind) and from what instrument it is (genre). The registry
records it in an optional medium — radio · video — absent meaning the ordinary written or delivered text; a
Radiomessaggio that is a feast-day Urbi et Orbi keeps its genre and its liturgical flag and simply gains medium: radio.
Like actKind and keywords, the field is never authority-bearing: no invariant reads it, and nothing couples it to a
register or a ceiling. It is read from the heading's own word and from nothing else, measured across the corpus first —
9 Radiomessaggi (all John XXIII's) and 2 Videomessaggi today; the bare words radio and video, which would
also tag a commission for cinema, radio and television or a Communications Day theme on videocassettes, are not the rule.
The discussion is in #27.
A large body of papal messages belongs to annual series that run for decades and across pontificates. The World Day of Peace message opens with Paul VI’s I Giornata Mondiale della Pace 1968 and continues through John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis and Leo XIV; World Communications Day opens in 1967. vatican.va carries the ordinal in the title as a Roman numeral — LI Giornata Mondiale della Pace 2018, LII Giornata Mondiale delle Comunicazioni Sociali, 2018 — while the Lent messages are dated only (Quaresima 2015: Rinfrancate i vostri cuori). A series is an entity that outlives its issuer, and tracing a theme across one — how fifty-odd messages treat migration, or communications — is exactly the kind of traversal this data should support.
The registry records this with an optional series object on the document,
{ "id": "world-day-of-peace", "year": 2018, "ordinal": 51 }, the ordinal optional; id resolves against
data/series.json, one row per occasion under a canonical English id, each row listing every vatican.va
sub-shelf slug the occasion has been filed under (missions and mission, nonni and grandparents), recording whether the
series is numbered and, where a shelf reaches the first occasion (I Giornata…), the verified firstYear — nine of the sixteen
occasions, from Paul VI's Peace 1968 and Communications 1967 to Francis's World Children's Day 2024. Consistent with the
chancery-shelves note above, these are a vocabulary of occasions, not of genres: a World Day of Peace message is a message
whichever day it is for, and series says only where it stands in a sequence. It is discovery metadata with no bearing on
register, ceiling or assent. The discussion is in #16.
A document in a series is keyed by its occasion, not by its first words: mag:francis-i/world-day-of-peace-2025,
mag:paul-vi/world-day-of-peace-1968, mag:francis-i/lent-2015. The year in the id is the occasion year the title prints
(series.year), not the year of date, because the two routinely disagree — the message for the LVIII World Day of Peace,
1 January 2025, is signed Dal Vaticano, 8 dicembre 2024, and the Peace messages are dated 8 December of the preceding year as
a rule; the 1976 message is dated 18 October 1975. Under the incipit rule "the 2025 Peace message" would have been minted as
…-2024, an id nobody would guess on a document nobody cites by its first words (the Acta Apostolicae Sedis index cites these
by occasion: Nuntius S.P. pro XCVII Die Mundiali Missionum). The ordinal is recorded only where the title prints it — as a
Roman numeral on most numbered series, Arabic on migration and vocations (110ª, 62a), not at all on Lent, Missions, Food or
Literacy — and is never computed from firstYear; where both are present, invariant 24 checks one against the other, which is
how a mistyped XXXIIII and a XXIV printed for a XXXIV were caught before entering an id. A series' printed numbering can
also be reset by the Holy See — the Care of Creation message of 2025 is titled X, repeating 2024's X, so that the edition
matched the tenth anniversary of Laudato si' in the Jubilee year, and 2026 is XI — and the vocabulary records such a
reset (renumberings) rather than the registry re-computing numbers. 537 series documents across sixteen series and five
pontificates (Paul VI → Leo XIV) are harvested this way — 526 messages and the 11 homilies Francis gave on the World Day for
Consecrated Life, which vatican.va files on the series shelf and which are members of the series whatever their genre —
together with the 145 Urbi et Orbi, of which the Christmas and Easter ones form two dated series assigned by date — or, for
the one item whose heading names the feast while the act bears another date (John XXIII’s Santo Natale of 22 December 1962,
the shelf’s only Christmas 1962 item), by a curated row. The occasional messages on the year-partitioned
pont-messages shelf are not yet harvested (#4).
The Acta Apostolicae Sedis (AAS, 1909–), and before them the Acta Sanctae Sedis (ASS, 1865–1908), are the Holy See's
official gazette. Unlike the shelves, the AAS are the promulgating instrument: publication there is what promulgates a
universal law, unless another manner of promulgation has been prescribed in a particular case (CIC can. 8 §1), and an AAS citation — AAS 87 (1995) 401 for Evangelium Vitae, AAS 115 (2023) 1041 for
Laudate Deum — is the citation of record in every scholarly apparatus. The registry records it in an optional
acta object, { "series": "AAS", "volume": 115, "year": 2023, "page": 1041 }: the series, the volume as the index
prints it, the volume year (a December act is published in the next year's volume) and the first page. It is purely
bibliographic — like keywords and series it has no bearing on register, ceiling or assent — and the only invariant
that reads it is 25 in SCHEMA.md: one page opens one act.
The reference is joined to the shelf harvest, not substituted for it. vatican.va publishes a separate annual Index
generalis PDF for 2003–2024 and a whole-volume OCR PDF for each year 1909–2002, which carries the same chronological index
in its tail; the harvest parses the Acta Summi Pontificis part of each (checked in as text under tools/fixtures/acta/:
the ten index PDFs of 2015–2024, the 2003–2014 indexes, the index pages of the five sample volumes of phase 2b — AAS 1 (1909),
9-I (1917), 23 (1931), 50 (1958) and 70 (1978) — of the twenty-six volumes of 1932–1957, AAS 24–49, the pontificates of
Pius XI and Pius XII, of the nineteen of 1959–1977, AAS 51–69, John XXIII and Paul VI, of the twenty-four of 1979–2002,
AAS 71–94, John Paul II, and of the five of 1926–1930, AAS 18–22, Pius XI) and matches every entry in a
harvested category to a document of the pope the
part heading names (Pius X → Francis) by issuer, date and incipit, writing acta only where one candidate is evidenced. The join
is reported before it is trusted: 225 Francis documents carry a reference from the ten annual indexes, and every ambiguous
entry, every act the shelves lack and every document two entries claim is listed, classified, in the
join report — whose headline is that vatican.va's Francis shelves
for constitutions and apostolic letters are selections (49 and 59 against the index's 118 and 202), while the Acta are the
record. The sample report of phase 2b-i measures the century's
typography and OCR the same way, volume by volume, with a parse rate per volume: 137 references from the five volumes and
the 2012 index (Pius XII's 1958 alone carries 73), and the findings that decide the rest of 2b — the OCR text of AAS 1 and 9-I
has lost the page column of most index pages, the columnar layout of 1909–1931 dates some acts to the month only, and a volume
can print an act another volume already published. Phase 2b-ii-a (era report)
joined the twenty-six volumes of 1932–1957 the same way: 144 references, thin because the Pius XI and Pius XII shelves are
(18 and 227 records dated in the era), twenty-two of the volumes above the 95 % parse-rate floor and the four below it
explained line by line, every OCR misreading of a date the parser admits measured on a named volume, a year the index
does not print (a » with nothing above it, a token the OCR has broken) left blank and supplied only by a curated row
quoting the act's own dating formula — so that Munificentissimus Deus and Humani generis, at the head of AAS 42, are
cited — and a year the OCR misread inside the century never repaired but corrected the same way. Phase 2b-ii-b (era
report) joined the nineteen volumes of 1959–1977: 800
references, full where the earlier eras were thin because the John XXIII and Paul VI shelves carry their acts up to 1972,
every volume above the floor once eight of them were extracted in pypdf's default mode (in this era the layout mode fuses
lines and the default mode keeps the dates, the opposite of 1909–1957), the join's toponym rule reading the mother see and
the new see the index prints in parentheses against shelves that title an erection by either. The sixteen documents of the
Second Vatican Council are in those volumes under a part of their own, Acta Ss. Oecumenici Concilii Vaticani II, which the
parser skips; this era read their pages and listed them in its report as the evidence for a curated reference, which phase 2d
below has since written. Phase
2b-ii-c (era report) joined the twenty-four volumes of
1979–2002 and the index PDFs of 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014: 1,421 references, the era being a join rather than a harvest
because John Paul II's shelves are the registry's largest, the matcher reading the shelf's incipit without the addressee
vatican.va appends in parentheses (Tanta est (Episcopus Ipialensis)), every source but one above the 95 % floor (AAS 80's
text layer drops the words of eight messages), eighteen pages the volumes set two apostolic letters on read and curated,
and the join's largest residue characterised rather than loosened: from 1989 the index prints a constitution without its
toponym while vatican.va titles it by the see alone, so 167 same-day erections stay ambiguous. An act the Acta print twice
— Ibi vacabimus in 2012 and 2020, Deus caritas twice in 2014 — carries one reference, the first printing's, by a curated
table (ACTA_REPRINTS) that quotes both fascicles. Phase 2b-iii-a (era report)
joined the five volumes of 1926–1930, the early volumes whose OCR kept the page column: 66 references, 53 of them AAS 21's
(1929), the one year Pius XI's apostolic-letters shelf holds in number, and the year the 1930 index's OCR lost at the head of
three sections (1J30, 1030, 1@30) supplied by curated rows quoting each act's dating formula. A page the index prints
wrongly for an act it dates and names — the OCR's 530 for Casti connubii at 539, 307 for the motu proprio In allocutione
at 337, the index's own 946 for a constitution that opens at 947 — is replaced from a curated table (ACTA_PAGE_CORRECTIONS,
tools/src/acta/curation.ts, both pages read in the volume; eight rows on 2026-09-21), applied before the join matches or creates,
so the act is cited at its page and the page it shared with another act by the misprint holds neither. Phase 2b-iii-b
(era report, spec §10)
joined the seventeen volumes of 1909–1925, whose OCR lost the page column on most index pages, after recovering the pages from
the volume bodies (tools/src/acta/recover.ts, the sidecars beside the fixtures): of the 1,136 entries opened without a page,
770 recovered (unique 732, dated 13, fuzzy 25; the era report §1b) and 366 not (205 described by the index without an incipit,
108 of them AAS 1's; 58 incipits opening several pages with no formula to settle them; 61 found nowhere; 26 outside the category's
runs; 14 under a damaged running header; 2 whose one page another entry of the same incipit claims), seventeen more read by hand,
and 111 documents carrying a reference into the seventeen volumes — 109 matched from a quoted index line and two curated; sixteen
encyclicals of Pius X, Benedict XV and Pius XI cite their page, eleven of them recovered. No volume clears the 95 % floor after
recovery (the era's rate is 71.8 %, 78.4 % without AAS 1, whose index describes its acts without incipits): the rate counts every
line the recovery cannot reach, and the reasons are listed per volume rather than the floor lowered. Nineteen curated rows supply
the year the OCR read 1910 for 1916 over nine letters of AAS 9-I (1917) and 191Í for 1911 over ten of AAS 3, from each act's own
dating formula; twelve pages the volumes set two short letters on are read and curated. Phase 2b′
(era report,
spec §11) joined the seven annual index PDFs of 2003–2009
(AAS 95–101), which vatican.va serves under a URL its own index page links wrongly — the spec had recorded them as none
online, and the premise was the era's first finding: 186 references, every one from a quoted index line (John Paul II 90,
Benedict XVI 96), the fixtures taken from pypdf's layout mode because the default mode drops the spaces between words in
2003–2006, the ditto marks that mode glues to the guillemet, to the day and to the text read at the date position, and the
narrow column's fullLine: 40 — which the 2010 and 2011 indexes already carry — recovering thirteen acts of harvested
categories that the parser had been dropping in silence, since the line whose page it missed counted in neither term of the
parse rate. All seven parse at 100 % over the harvested categories and 98.6–100 % over all pope-part page lines, and every one
of the hundred lines left unread falls in a category the registry does not harvest. The AAS join covers 1909–2024 without a
gap. Phase 2c-i (era report,
spec) reaches into the Acta Sanctae Sedis, which print no
chronological index: for five sample volumes (ASS 1, 12, 23, 33, 41) the index is synthesised from the volume body — every
papal act's class heading, salutation, opening words and dateline quoted beside the entry — and checked against the volume's
own Summa actorum, whose 87 rows over the five leave the scan one genuine miss. 73 entries stand as the scanner read
them and 24 were read by hand, 97 in all, and 64 references follow (Leo XIII 35, Pius X 29, Pius IX none: ASS 1's three acts are hand
readings, its allocution of a class the registry does not harvest and its two apostolic letters of 1866 without a shelf record
on their date), 61 of them by the unique rule and 3 by the opening rule — the shelf's incipit as a word-boundary prefix of the
act's first words, the rule the ASS needed and the AAS did not, an ASS entry carrying no incipit at all — with no ambiguous
entry in the whole sample. The body scan works from 1879 on and fails on 1865, where the OCR spells the headings ALLOCVTIO and
LITERAE and the volume's summa has no papal part at all. Phase 2c-ii-a then made the rest of the series measurable
before its eras are planned (the survey, spec §10): the summa parser was
taught the papal headings the other 36 volumes print, so 37 of the 41 find their papal part where 21 did, and the brevia of
the Secretaria Brevium — papal acts headed by a descriptive title and closed under the ring of the Fisherman — are read from
the ring, and the parser was taught the two dicastery headings that had kept three Pius X volumes' papal parts running on into
the congregations (EX SACRO CONSISTORIO, ACTA ROMANARUM CONGREGATIONUM). Across the series that is 482 acts by rule
where 380 stood, and 342 of 658 summa rows claimed (52 %) where 257 of 549 were (47 %); no reference count moved, since nothing
was joined. The remaining 36 volumes are 2c-ii.
The Acta are therefore also a second source. An index entry the join leaves unmatched becomes a document of its own
(phase 2a, tools/src/acta/create.ts) when its category is one the registry creates from the Acta — encyclicals,
exhortations, constitutions, motu proprio, apostolic letters, and the bull class of canonisation decretals and sub plumbo
letters — and the vatican.va shelf that carries that class is harvested for the pope, so that the fuller shelves (letters,
speeches, homilies, the occasional pont-messages), which bring a URL and a vernacular title, are harvested first and the
Acta fill their residue afterwards. The record is minted from the index's incipit exactly as a shelf incipit mints (provisional
where the index names a constitution by toponym alone), titled with the index's own entry, and carries source.shelf of the form
aas/{year} with url: null and its acta reference as source and citation both; it carries no keywords or actKind, since an
index line evidences neither. A duplicate guard holds, rather than creates, anything the shelf may already have: a same-date
record carrying the entry's incipit or toponym under another class (the shelf and the Acta disagree about class, discussion
#30), a same-date record with no incipit (vatican.va files canonisation
decretals on apost_letters without one; the Tarragona letters of #31), a
same-incipit record a day off or anywhere in the pontificate, and two entries of one date with one incipit, which no form of the
id tells apart. Measured on 2026-09-13, with the 2012 index joined: 265 AAS-only documents created from the ten annual
indexes (260 of Francis, 5 of Benedict XVI; 150 apostolic letters, 76 constitutions, 39 bulls) — one fewer than on
2026-09-12, since Benedict XVI's Ibi vacabimus is printed in both the 2012 and the 2020 volumes and the id-collision rule
now holds both — and 460 entries held with a reason: 267 in categories that wait for their shelf, 81 Epistulae whose
pope's letters shelf is not harvested, 43 by the guard, 40 ambiguous, 24 claimed twice, 3 id collisions, 1 dated before the
pontificate, 1 with no resolvable date; no shelf id changed. The join report
lists every creation with the index line it rests on and every hold with its candidates. Phase 2b-i added 146 documents
from the sample volumes and the 2012 index (Pius XI's 1931 volume alone 60: the shelves of the early twentieth century are
thinner still than Francis's), created by the same rule — an Epistula only where the pope's letters shelf is harvested, a
constitution or apostolic letter minted from the incipit the volumes print beside the toponym — with source.url the
whole-volume PDF, and held 98 (sample report). Phase 2b-ii-a
added 1,636 from the twenty-six volumes of 1932–1957 — 472 of Pius XI and 1,164 of Pius XII from this era (532 and 1,234 in all); 631 constitutions and bulls, most
of them named by the see alone and therefore provisional, 563 apostolic letters, 441 letters — and held 434, among them the
vernacular texts of four encyclicals the index enters a second time (curated), the entries whose page another act cites where
the volume prints one (a new page-shared hold), and every incipit the OCR has damaged, which is never minted into an id the
page does not print (era report); four pages the volumes print
two short letters on were read and curated. Phase 2b-ii-b added 655 from the nineteen volumes of 1959–1977 — 294 of John
XXIII, 327 of Paul VI, 34 last acts of Pius XII; 331 constitutions and 321 apostolic letters, minted from the incipit the
volumes print beside the toponym — none from 1967–1970 and 1972, where Paul VI's shelves hold what the index prints, and
45–59 a year from 1973, where vatican.va's shelves for his constitutions and letters stop; the Epistulae and canonisation
decretals of both popes are held, their letters and bulls shelves not being harvested. It held 775, among them the
twenty-nine cardinalatial-title constitutions of 1965 and 1967 the index names by incipit and the shelf by church, and it
re-minted one id of the sample (three constitutions Qui divino of 1977 take the full-date form) and no shelf id
(era report). Phase 2b-ii-c added 94 from the
twenty-four volumes of 1979–2002 and the four index PDFs of 2010–2014 — 43 of John Paul II (his constitutions of 1982–1983
and 1989, where his shelf is thin, and six canonisation decretals, the rest of which the guard holds as the class mismatches
of discussion #30) and 51 of Benedict XVI (the beatification letters of 2007–2012 his shelf lacks) — and held 750, 266 of
them the toponym-less constitutions the join could not tell apart; it re-minted no shelf id, and its rule for an incipit the OCR
split or set in capitals (H orti conclusi, QUO gravius) holds sixteen records the earlier eras had minted under such
readings (era report). Phase 2b-iii-a added 277 of
Pius XI from the five volumes of 1926–1930 — 138 apostolic letters, 87 letters (his letters shelf being harvested), 41
constitutions, 5 decretals and 6 motu proprio, the era being a harvest more than a join since vatican.va holds fifteen of
his acts of 1926, 1927 and 1930 — and held 53; Quo maiori rerum (30 March 1930), printed in AAS 22 and again in AAS 23,
is created from the first printing by the reprint table, and the Italian text of Divini illius Magistri the 1929 index enters
as an encyclical of its own is held as the 1933 and 1937 vernaculars are
(era report). Phase 2b-iii-b
(#25, spec §10,
era report) added 458 from the seventeen volumes of
1909–1925 with the pages the volume bodies gave back — 192 letters of Pius X and Pius XI (Benedict XV's letters shelf is not
harvested, so his 279 stay held), 190 apostolic letters, 56 constitutions, 12 motu proprio, 4 sub plumbo and 4 decretal
letters — and held 537; the shelves of Pius X and Benedict XV being thin, the era is a harvest. Five entries whose incipit
the index OCR misspells into a well-formed word the body contradicts (Placet oculog for oculos) are held by curated rows, as
Begnum Dei is. The acts of weight the recovery left without a page were read by hand (ACTA_PAGE_READINGS, seventeen rows,
each quoting the page the act opens on and its dating formula): the encyclicals Ad beatissimi Apostolorum Principis, Quod iam
diu, Principi Apostolorum Petro and Annus iam plenus now cite their pages, and eleven constitutions and motu proprio are
created at theirs; the 349 entries still without a page are neither created nor cited. The constitution Sapienti Consilio was
read by hand at AAS 1 (1909) 7 and its row still quotes that page, but phase 2c-i found the act printed first at ASS 41 (1908)
425, so the document is cited there and AAS 1's entry is a reprint by an ACTA_REPRINTS row — as Promulgandi is, the
constitution that instituted the AAS, printed at ASS 41 (1908) 619 before it opened AAS 1 (1909) at p. 5.
Two references are curated (ACTA_CURATED_REFERENCES): Providentissima Mater Ecclesia (27 May 1917) opens AAS 9 part
II — the Code of 1917, which has no chronological index — at p. 5; and Ubi arcano Dei consilio (23 December 1922) is cited at
its Latin printing, AAS 14 (1922) 673, whose index line lost its date columns and opens no entry, the row displacing the match
of the Italian printing (AAS 15 (1923) 5) it names and quotes. Phase 2b′
(era report,
spec §11) added 79 from the seven index PDFs of 2003–2009 —
65 of Benedict XVI and 14 of John Paul II; 67 apostolic letters of the beatification series, 6 constitutions, 4 canonisation
decretals and 2 motu proprio — and held 232: 79 in categories that wait for their shelf (72 of them Nuntii), 60
ambiguous, 36 on shelves not harvested for these popes, 34 by the guard, 14 claimed twice, 7 id collisions and 2 incipits the
text layer damaged. It re-minted no shelf id and needed no curated row of any kind. Forty-five of the sixty ambiguous entries
are circumscription constitutions of a single day, which the index names by incipit and vatican.va by see. The era report's
§11 lists 162 shelf documents of the two popes dated in the volume years that carry no reference, 118 of them of the formal
genres, most dated to a canonisation or beatification day whose decretal the next volume prints. The one act of weight the
phase left held was John Paul II's Pastores gregis, which the 2004 index dates 5 October 2003, a canonisation day, and
vatican.va's shelf 16 October, the signing, so the guard held the entry rather than mint a second record; the act's own dating
formula (AAS 96 (2004) 924) reads 16 October, and a curated index correction (#44) now matches it at AAS 96 (2004) 825. Phase 2c-i joined the ASS sample without creating from it: 0 documents created, the 24 unmatched entries all held
series-not-created, 23 of them with no shelf record of any class on their date. The ASS-born documents and the reprints of
earlier popes are 2c-iii, to be decided from the sample's reverse gap — 41 shelf documents of the volume years carrying no
reference (Pius IX 2, Leo XIII 24, Pius X 15; 18 letters, 14 apostolic letters, 6 encyclicals and 3 addresses), of
which almost none has an ASS entry on its date, so they are acts the five volumes do not print rather than acts the scanner
missed. The registry holds 496 shelf documents dated 1865–1908 and 64 of them carry a reference from the sample.
Phase 2c-ii-b (#25, spec §10 decision 3,
era report) then joined the rest of Pius X's pontificate, ASS 36–40,
the era the survey put first: 182 acts read by rule across 3,721 pages, 140 of 197 summa rows claimed (71.1 %, the best rate in
the series) and 112 references written — ASS 36 7, ASS 37 19, ASS 38 9, ASS 39 50, ASS 40 27. ASS 36 prints
two popes, Leo XIII to his death on 20 July 1903 and Pius X from his election on 4 August, so its Leo XIII half belongs to 2c-ii-c.
The curation round was three rows for 181 entries — the thinnest any ASS phase has needed, the parser of 2c-ii-a having already been
taught what the series prints — and it left no ambiguity at all: the corpus totals for ambiguity and double claiming are the ones
they were before the era joined. Its one rule was a blind spot the sample could not have shown: GREETING_RE read Nostri and
Nostra but not the nominative Noster, so Dilecte Fili Noster et Venerabiles Fratres, stood unstripped as four acts' opening and
told them apart from nothing. 50 entries are held, every one series-not-created, and 36 of them are briefs with nowhere to go:
Pius X has neither a briefs nor a bulls shelf, so the Secretaria Brevium acts these volumes print are the registry's gap and not the
scanner's. ASS 38's bound-in Supplementum at pp. 433–702 hides no papal act — no page of it carries Pontificatus Nostri. The
remaining volumes were 2c-ii-c (Leo XIII) and 2c-ii-d (Pius IX).
Phase 2c-ii-c (#25, spec §10 decision 3,
era report) joined Leo XIII's remaining twenty-one volumes — ASS 13–22, 24–32, 34
and 35 — the largest era of the series and the thinnest. 177 acts read by rule across 15,259 pages against Pius X's 182 across 3,721, 114 of
246 summa rows claimed (46.3 % where his claimed 71.1 %) and 98 references written; ASS 14 and ASS 15 yield no reference at all — ASS 15
scanning two acts in 623 pages — and ASS 17 one. The ASS now carries 274 references in all, Leo XIII 133 and Pius X 141. Three rules and sixteen curated rows did the era's curation,
each rule measured over all 41 volumes before it was accepted: LETTERA, LETTERA APOSTOLICA and LITTERAE APOSTOLICAE IN FORMA BREVIS as class
headings — the last being a brief's whole name, which the series prints once; the bare capital A. the anno normaliser did not know; and the months
the volumes abbreviate after the day (Nov., Ian., Dec., Oct., Sept., Iun., decem.), which latinDate holds only in full. The era
raised no ambiguity and no double claim at all. Its sixteen rows are fifteen solemn datelines — the year of the Incarnation spelled out in words and
the day by the Roman calendar, which the owner ruled are curated rows rather than a Roman-calendar reader, since the date is what the join matches on —
and one ACTA_REPRINTS row for the single act the ASS prints twice, Officiorum ac munerum at ASS 29 (1896) 388 and again at ASS 30 (1897) 39. What
holds the era back is the shelf, not the scan: 36 of its 88 holds are briefs against a briefs shelf of 13 records, thin rather than absent, and
ASS 20 and ASS 26 find no papal part in their summa at all — 20's opens on its rows with no class heading, 26's on a dicastery — while still yielding
5 and 3 references, because the summa is the completeness check and not the source. The remaining 10 volumes are Pius IX's, 2c-ii-d.
Phase 2c-ii-d (#25, spec §10 decision 3,
era report) joined Pius IX's ten remaining volumes, ASS 2–11, and with them the whole
series: all 41 volumes of the Acta Sanctae Sedis are joined, and phase 2c-ii is complete. Over the era's eleven volumes — ASS 1 was 2c-i's — 63
acts were read by rule across 8,023 pages with 90 defects, 43 of 141 summa rows claimed (30.5 %, where 2c-ii-c claimed 46.3 % and 2c-ii-b 71.1 %)
and 16 references written: ASS 3 2, ASS 4 2, ASS 5 3, ASS 6 3, ASS 7 2, ASS 8 1, ASS 11 3, and none at all from ASS 1, ASS 2, ASS 9 and ASS 10 — 9 by
the unique rule, none by the opening rule and 7 by a curated override. The ASS now carries 290 references in all. By issuer the era's 16 are Pius IX
11, Leo XIII 3 and Vatican I 2: the first ASS references Pius IX has ever carried, the sample having given him none, and the first reference of
either series on a council-issued record — Dei Filius at ASS 5 (1869) 481 and Pastor Aeternus at ASS 6 (1870) 40, which the volumes print under the
pope inside the conciliar narrative. The owner ruled on 2026-09-26 that a conciliar act printed under the pope who promulgated it is the same document and
takes an ASS reference; the two acts reach the join by curated rows and not by a rule, the general promulgatedBy rule having been built and measured over
the whole corpus to an identical match set before it was rejected (spec §5 carries the ruling). What holds this era back is the shelf and not the scan, and
the era report's §6.1 counts the ceiling: the registry holds 37 records dated 1865–1878 against the 77 entries the scanner read — Pius IX 31 of his 75,
Leo XIII 4, Vatican I 2 — and 14 of them now carry a reference, while 1866, 1869 and 1878 hold no record of Pius IX at all, so no reference of his can
ever be written on a date in one of them — which is not to say a volume of those years can match nothing of his, since the volumes reprint older acts:
ASS 11 (1878) prints two acts of Pius IX, of 17 August 1877 and 26 October 1865, both of them no-date defects and neither day on his shelf. He is a flat-era pope (pontiffs.ts) publishing as one reverse-chronological list with no shelves, so every
record of his carries source.shelf: null and the class the join matches on is the genre alone; 44 entries are held, every one series-not-created,
10 of them briefs against a briefs shelf of 5 records — thin rather than absent, as under Leo XIII. Two rules did the era's work, each measured over all 41
volumes before it was accepted. ALLOCVTIO, the V the earliest volumes set for U, is repaired in HEADING_OCR, and its movement is confined to ASS 1 and
ASS 2 with no running header opening an act; not one reference came of it, since all 17 allocutions the era's volumes print are skipped before the
class rule is asked (Allocutiones is harvested: 'no'), so what it bought was a complete reading rather than a citation. The other is ASS 7's papal
heading EX ACTIS AD INSTAR CONSISTORIALIUM, which names the manner of the acts rather than the pope and which DICASTERY_RE also matched, so the
volume had been reported as finding no papal part at all: it has one, 13 rows, 4 claimed and 9 unclaimed — and the new check paid at once by naming
what the store cannot hold, printed pp. 496–497 being absent from the store's PDF altogether, which is what ASS 7's curated +2 offset actually is. A
third rule was rejected with its numbers: the one-T LITERAE half of the same ruled V-for-U pair reads 0 acts over all 41 volumes, so the owner's
fallback branch was executed instead and the acts ASS 2 prints under a one-T spelling or under none are curated readings — curated readings for acts the
rule would not have reached anyway, which is what the discipline prefers to a rule that fires for no gain. The round is 16 curated readings and 7 match
overrides keyed inside ASS 1–11, 23 rows for 77 entries — 3 of the 23 being phase 2c-i's, its readings of the sampled ASS 1 (ASS:1:193, ASS:1:578
and ASS:1:744), so this era wrote 20 — and it raised no ambiguity and no double claim at all: five of the overrides are class disagreements, where the
volume's heading and the registry's genre disagree and the class rule reaches the right record only to refuse it, and the owner ruled that such a
disagreement is bridged by a curated row quoting the page and never by a rule (spec §6). Three acts stay unread and recorded,
#56's: ASS 8 pp. 443 and 445, reprints of 1860 and 1857 with no first printing inside the series, and the
Mella letter the summa lists at ASS 8 p. 623 and the volume opens at p. 625, which no admissible key reaches. One of them is a finding in its own right —
DATUM_RE matches only a dateline given at Rome, so an act given anywhere else, Datum Bononiae, is invisible to the scanner. What 2c-iii inherits is
the reverse gap over the whole series: 207 of the 496 shelf records dated 1865–1908 carry no reference of either series (Leo XIII 127 of 263, Pius X 59
of 200, Pius IX 21 of 31, Vatican I 0 of 2), which is the difference between what vatican.va shelves and what the gazette printed, and closing any of it
means reading the volumes for acts the summa never listed.
Phase 2d (#36, spec §12,
report) cited the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican
Council, which had carried no reference at all: with Benedict XIV's 43 records, which predate the ASS, and Leo XIV's 40,
which postdate the printed AAS, they were the corpus's three issuers at zero, and the only one a gazette could reach. The
AAS prints them in AAS 56–58 (1964–1966) under ACTA SS. OECUMENICI CONCILII VATICANI II, a part index.ts reads as a
part — PART_HEADING_RE matches any heading opening ACTA — and then skips as it skips the dicasteries', POPE_PART_RE
failing on SS.. They are cited on the owner's ruling of 2026-09-26, the one that gave Vatican I its two ASS references:
a conciliar act printed under the pope who promulgated it is the same document, and every one of the sixteen carries
promulgatedBy: rp:paul-vi, the registry asserting as much itself. The references are sixteen curated rows and the
pipeline is unchanged, because a reader for that part was refused on its measured reach: over the 116 non-ASS sources the
parser records 107 distinct skipped part headings, of which three are the council's over four sources — II - ACTA SS. OECUMENICI CONCILII serving both 1965 and 1966, beside AAS 54's ACTA PATRUM S. CONCILII OECUMENICI VATICANI II, the
Fathers' own — and those four parts hold 18 entries that cannot grow, the
council having closed in 1965, filed by title and never by incipit, one of them printing no date at all and one pair fused
onto a single OCR line. That is the trade this project has twice refused on measurement, the general promulgatedBy rule
and LITERAE both. What a reader would have bought, the completeness accounting, the phase's report generator takes
instead by reading the part's lines (tools/src/acta/conciliar.ts), and it finds every date the part prints agreeing with
its record's and every genre word agreeing with its category — Constitutio 4, Decretum 9, Declaratio 3. The reading
paid at once: the chronological index enters Ad gentes at p. 948, where the volume prints article 2 under CAPUT I,
while the decree opens at 947, which is where the volume's own Index analyticus cites it — so the row cites the
printing and quotes both, a correction ACTA_PAGE_CORRECTIONS could not carry, keying as it does off an entry the parser
never reads. Two entries of the council's parts hold no record of the registry and wait on a call of their own: the
Fathers' Nuntius ad universos homines of 20 October 1962 (AAS 54 (1962) 822, recorded from its index line alone, the
volume unfetched) and the Nuntii a Patribus Oecumenicae Synodi hominibus missi of 8 December 1965 (AAS 58 (1966) 10,
read). The corpus now carries a reference on 6,991 of its 8,569 records, and of the 1,578 that carry none the largest
holds are John Paul II's 682, the ASS reverse gap of 2c-iii, and the two issuers no gazette can reach.
Concrete documents live in data/documents/, rendered as
registry/documents.md. Identifiers follow
mag:{issuer}/{incipit-slug}-{year} — or mag:{issuer}/{series-id}-{occasion-year} for a document in an annual series (see
Numbered annual series above) — and reference popes and councils by their
CRPDR rp: and
COECDR oec: identifiers. The registry is generated by
npm run harvest and checked by npm run validate; see
SCHEMA.md.
The discerned authority of an individual passage, keyed by a locus (document-id + section/paragraph). This layer is curated
and interpretive: entries carry provenance and may be marked contested. Reformability is derived from Intent
(non-definitive ⇒ reformable; definitive ⇒ irreformable); infallibility is computed (Intent = definitive AND issuer capacity
is the supreme magisterium).
| Locus | Mode exercised | Intent | Object | Assent owed | Reformability | Source / status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
mag:vatican-ii/lumen-gentium-1964#* |
Authentic Ordinary | Non-definitive | — | religiosum obsequium | Reformable | Vatican II defined nothing “even in the two documents which it called ‘dogmatic constitutions’.” |
mag:john-paul-ii/evangelium-vitae-1995#57 (murder) |
Ordinary Universal | Definitive | Revealed | fides divina et catholica | Irreformable | Taught “by the ordinary and universal magisterium.” |
mag:john-paul-ii/evangelium-vitae-1995#62 (abortion) |
Ordinary Universal | Definitive | Revealed / connected | fides divina et catholica | Irreformable | idem; object primary-vs-secondary debated. |
mag:john-paul-ii/evangelium-vitae-1995#65 (euthanasia) |
Ordinary Universal | Definitive | Secondary / connected | firmly hold (fides ecclesiastica) | Irreformable | idem; secondary object — “in harmony with … my Predecessors”; classification debated. |
mag:john-paul-ii/ordinatio-sacerdotalis-1994#4 |
Ordinary Universal | Definitive | Secondary / connected | firmly hold (fides ecclesiastica) | Irreformable | “to be definitively held”; not ex cathedra per Ratzinger — status debated. |
Note the four-rung Assent scale used above and in the schema: fides divina et catholica (revealed dogma) → firmly hold (fides ecclesiastica, a definitively-taught truth not itself revealed but connected to revelation) → religiosum obsequium (authentic non-definitive teaching) → prudential caution (the lowest sub-level of non-definitive interventions).
The machine-readable schema for these two tables — the controlled vocabularies, the genre → document → assessment relationships,
the locus identifier convention, and the validation invariants (ceiling bound, derived reformability, computed infallibility) —
is specified in SCHEMA.md, with JSON Schema files under schema/ and a worked example under
examples/.
N.B. Both tables are an initial draft and will be refined as the repository’s document set grows. The theological framework follows Francis A. Sullivan, Creative Fidelity (1996); see also CDF, Donum Veritatis (1990) §§15–24 and John Paul II, Ad Tuendam Fidem (1998) for the levels of assent.