Sabbatine Privilege

The Sabbatine Privilege derived its name from the apocryphal Papal Bull Sacratissimo uti culmine attributed to Pope John XXII, dated 3 March, 1322. According to this, the pope declared that the Mother of God appeared to him, and most urgently recommended to him the Carmelite Order and its confratres and consorores (respectively male and female members of the confraternity).

The Sabbatine privilege consists in the early liberation of souls from Purgatory, through the special intercession and petition of the Virgin Mary, which she exercises preferentially on Saturday, the day consecrated to her.

The Blessed Virgin is said to have asked that Pope John, should ratify the indulgences which Jesus Christ had already granted in heaven for the members of the Carmelite Order and for the members of the confraternity. She herself would graciously descend on the Saturday (the Sabbath, hence 'Sabbatine') after their death to liberate and conduct to heaven all who were in Purgatory. The papal bull about this lists the conditions which the confratres and consorores must fulfill. These conditions include: to observe chastity according to their state of life, recite daily the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Saturdays, or accomplish faithfully some other similar sacrifice.

Information of this Bull is derived from a work of the Carmelite Balduinus Leersius ("Collectaneum exemplorum et miraculorum" in Bibliotheca Carmelit, I, Orléans, 1752, p. 210), who died in 1483. The privilege was not without opposition. In 1603 a book containing the privileges of the Carmelite Order, including the Sabbatine privilege, was condemned by the Portuguese Inquisition. Six years later the church in Portugal put all books mentioning the Sabbatine privilege on the Index of Forbidden Books. An appeal to Rome ended when the Roman authorities supported the Inquisition's ban.

The tradition of the Sabbatine Bull seems to have spread in the fifteenth century. Historically, however, the tradition of the Sabbatine Bull is vulnerable. No evidence of the Bull appears in the registers of John XXII. Its literary character is entirely too odd to recommend it as the work of John XXII. The authenticity of the Bull was keenly contested, especially in the seventeenth century, but was vigorously defended by the Carmelites. The chief opponents of its authenticity were Joannnes Launoy and the Bollandist Daniel Papebroch, both of whom published works against it. Today it is universally regarded by scholars as inauthentic, even the "Monumenta histor. Carmelit." of the Carmelite B. Zimmerman (I, Lérins, 1907, pp. 356-63) joining in rejecting it. Carmelite historians have determined that the bull is a fifteenth-century forgery originating in Sicily.

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