Normae Congregationis (NC) is a 1978 document written by the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (SCDF) concerning guidelines for Catholic bishops in discerning claims to private revelation such as apparitions.
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In November 1974, when the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith met for its annual Plenary Congregation,[1] part of the discussion concerned problems relating to reported apparitions and revelations. New developments in theology and psychology prompted questions on how to evaluate claims of such events.
The eventual fruit of those discussions was a four-page document in Latin bearing the title "Normae S. Congregationis pro doctrina fidei de modo procedendi in diudicandis praesumptis apparitionibus ac revelationibus" ("Norms of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the Manner of Proceeding in Judging Presumed Apparitions and Revelations", hereinafter Normae Congregationis or NC). The document was approved by Pope Paul VI in February 1978 and was signed by Franjo Cardinal Seper and Archbishop Jérôme Hamer, then the prefect and secretary of SCDF.
The Holy See decided that the text was an "in-house" document intended for bishops, and as such did not need to be published.[1] It was given to bishops “sub secreto” and not published in the Holy See's official journal Acta Apostolicae Sedis.
Though Normae Congregationis had been issued sub secreto, excerpts from the text and, later, full translations of it have been published.
In 1994, Japanese author Francis Mutsuo Fukushima published a book entitled Akita: Mother of God as Co-Redemptrix.[2] Chapter 3 of Akita quoted parts of NC in Latin with an English translation, with permission from Fukushima's bishop. Three years later, French authors Joachim Bouflet and Philippe Boutry published a French translation of the entire document in their book Un signe dans le ciel.[3]
NC became accessible to the English-speaking world when British author Donal Anthony Foley translated NC into English from the French of Bouflet and Boutry and placed it on the web site of his Theotokos publishing house, along with the French text from Un signe dans le ciel.[4][5] Another English translation, also based upon the French text in Bouflet & Boutry, was made by Fr. James Mulligan in 2008.[6]
In 2007, Mariologist Fr. Rene Laurentin published his own French translation of NC in his Dictionnaire des apparitions de la Vierge Marie ("Dictionary of Marian Apparitions")[7][8]
In 2010, an emendation of Foley's English translation was published based upon the original Latin text of NC.[9]
In 2001,[10] 2003[11] and 2008, there were reports from Vatican sources that the Holy See was preparing to update NC.[12][13] However, this was contested in a 2009 article in the National Catholic Register based upon the word of an anonymous Vatican official.[14]
As of September 2010, NC remains in force.
There has been some discussion concerning NC's presentation of the possible judgments given by a diocesan bishop on a claim to private revelation.[15] There are traditionally three such possible judgments in Catholic theology:
Because NC mentions only the first two options, there is a question of whether or not CDF decided to forego the third "constat" and collapse its meaning into the second.