The Apostolic Penitentiary in Local Contexts

Book excerpt: The volume investigates the registers of fifteenth-century supplications to the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See and presents an analysis of a multiplicity of issues in which a context of the local needs of Western Christians and the central power of the Pope occurred. The contributions make it clear that local and individual factors and the Christian faith and religion in practice must not be seen as separate from the global power of the Roman curia. The latter's influence could become directly important for any individual in any local space, even ...et usque ad ultimum terrae (Acts 1:8), in the utmost peripheries of the Christian world. It is shown that the assistance of the Apostolic Penitentiary was indispensable in a large variety of cases. Such cases were dealt with both in the local, regional space and in the globalized centre of the Holy See.