The name has also been given to a canonical collection officially known as
Decretales Clementis Papæ VIII. It owes the name of "Liber Septimus" to
Cardinal Pinelli,
prefect (president) of the special
congregation appointed by
Sixtus V to draw up a new ecclesiastical code, who applied this title to it in his manuscript notes;
Prospero Fagnani and
Benedict XIV imitated him in this, and it has retained the name. The
Decretales Clementis Papæ VIII is divided into five books, subdivided into titles and chapters, and contains disciplinary and
dogmatic canons of the
Council of Florence,
First Lateran Council and
that of Trent, and
apostolic constitutions of twenty-eight popes from
Gregory IX to
Clement VIII. It was to supply the defect of an official codification of the canon law from the date of the publication of the
Constitutiones Clementinæ (1317), that
Gregory XIII appointed about the year 1580 a body of
cardinals to undertake the work. In 1587, Sixtus V established the special congregation to draw up a new ecclesiastical code. The printed work was submitted to
Clement VIII in 1598 for his approbation, which was refused. A new revision undertaken in 1607-08 had a similar fate, the reigning
pope Paul V declining to approve the
Liber Septimus as the obligatory legal code of the Church. The refusals of approbation by Clement VIII and Paul V are to be attributed not to the fear of seeing the canons of the Council of Trent glossed by canonists (which was forbidden by the bull of
Pius IV,
Benedictus Deus, confirming the Council of Trent), but to the political situation of the day. Indeed, several states had refused to admit some of the constitutions inserted in the new collection, and the Council of Trent had not yet been accepted by the
French government; it was therefore feared that the Governments would refuse to recognize the new code. It also seems a mistake to have included in the work decisions that were purely and exclusively dogmatic and as such entirely foreign to the domain of canon law. This collection, which appeared about the end of the sixteenth century, was edited by François Sentis ("Clementis Papæ VIII Decretales", Freiburg, 1870). ==Seventh Book of Decretals, 1590==