History
On July 21, 1542, Pope Paul III proclaimed the Apostolic Constitution Licet ab initio, establishing the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, staffed by cardinals and other officials whose task it was "to maintain and defend the integrity of the faith and to examine and proscribe errors and false doctrines". It served as the final court of appeal in trials of heresy and served as an important part of the Counter-Reformation.
This body was renamed the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office in 1904 by Pope Saint Pius X.
The Congregation's name was changed to Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on December 7, 1965, at the end of the Second Vatican Council. Soon after the entry into force of the present Code of Canon Law at the end of 1983, the adjective "Sacred" was dropped from the names of all Curial Congregations (it remained in use throughout 1984, as can be seen in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis of that year, but no longer appeared in the 1985 issues of that official bulletin of the Holy See), and so the dicastery adopted its current name, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Read more about this topic: Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith
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“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crisesMof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)