Unam Sanctam - Content

Content

Most significantly, the bull proclaimed, "outside of her (the Church) there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins". It is an extreme form of the concept known as "plenitudo potestatis" or the plenitude of power; it declares that those who resist the Roman Pontiff are resisting God's ordination.

The bull also declared that the Church must be united, that the Pope was the sole and absolute head of the Church:

The Bull also stated:

The swords being referred to are a customary reference to the swords yielded by the Apostles upon Christ's arrest, which were said to have been buried next to the Apostle Peter. Early theologians believed that if there are two swords one must be subordinate to the other. It then became a spiritual hierarchal ladder, the spiritual judges the secular "on account of its greatness and sublimity, while the lower spiritual power is judged by the higher spiritual power, etc. Thus, it was concluded, the temporal authorities must submit to the spiritual authorities, not merely on matters concerning doctrine and morality: "For with truth as our witness, it belongs to spiritual power to establish the terrestrial power and to pass judgment if it has not been good."

The bull ends:

In the bull, Boniface reiterates what popes since the time of Gregory VII had been declaring. Much of what is said can be taken from the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of St. Victor, and Thomas Aquinas. The bull also contains writing from the letters of Innocent III, who mainly reasserted the spiritual power and the "plenitudo potestatis" of the papacy. A voice heavily noticed in the bull is Egidius Romanus (Giles of Rome), who some hold might have been the actual writer of the bull. In his writing On Ecclesiastical Power, Giles voices the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff over the material world. His line of argument states that since the body is governed by the soul and the soul is governed by the ruler of the spiritual, the Roman Pontiff therefore is governor of both soul and body.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia in the registers, on the margin of the text of the record, the last sentence is noted as its real definition: "Declaratio quod subesse Romano Pontifici est omni humanae creaturae de necessitate salutis"; thus this phrase, like some in canonic scripture, may have moved from an original position as a marginal gloss to an integral part of the text as it has been accepted. Some believe that this is the only dogmatic definition in the bull because the rest is based on differing "papal claims of the thirteenth century".