Folia Theologica et Canonica 9. 31/23 (2020)
Ius canonicum
80 PÉTER ERDŐ It should be noted that in the West the diocese of a bishop also went by the name of plebs.42 The Council of Hippo, for example, in 393 ruled that each bishop ought to be content with his own diocese {plebe sua) and could not interfere in another’s Church.43 Thus at that time the word plebs was almost a synonym for an episcopal Church, today called a diocese. For smaller units within a diocese, or ‘parishes’ in the more modem sense, the word often found in the sources is diocese. For example, in the acts of the Council of Toledo (400) ‘diocese’ refers to an internal subdivision of the episcopal Church at some distance from the diocesan centre. After the consecration of the Chrism by the bishop, the consecrated oil was to be distributed among the parishes {per dioeceses) before Easter.44 Other terms were more closely connected with the church in the sense of building. One occasionally gets the impression that the sacred building was prioritised in a certain sense, rather than the community. This is the case as regards large cities, where churches also called tituli (in Rome) were built in areas further away from the place where the bishop was based;45 these were places of worship where the liturgy was celebrated by one of the presbyters of the city, but which did not yet have a fixed community defined according to where the faithful lived.46 Differentiation by language, ethnicity or other factors was typical of the organisation of synagogues, but was not completely unheard of among Christians either, despite the fact that from the very beginning the unity of the Church had been understood to mean that Jewish Christians and those coming from paganism constituted a single Church.47 From the fifth century the meaning of paroecia and dioecesis began to change in ecclesiastical usage. In seventh century Gaul, parish was already the name for a community entrusted to a presbyter. In other parts of Europe different terms remained in use. The words plebs and plebania were also found.48 The latter has remained the only term in Hungarian down to the present day. 12 Cf. e.g., Breviarium Hipponense (393/397), canons taken from the Council of Hippo, B. 43 Ibid. 44 Conc. Tolet. (400) c. 20. 45 Cf. Basdevant-Gaudemet, B., Les lieux de culte, 306-308. 46 Cf. Houtard, F. - Niermann, E., Pfarrei, pfarrer, in Sacramentum Mundi. Theologisches Lexikon für die Praxis, Freiburg-Basel-Wien, I-IV. 1968-1969, III. 1140-1151,1141. For the numerous churhes in Alexandria around 328 and the presbyters who served in them see Martin, A., Topographie et liturgie: leprobléme des “paroisses" d’Alexandrie, in Actes du IP congrés international d’archéologie chrétienne, Roma 1989. 1133-1144. 47 Cf. Conc. Lateran. IV (1215) const. 9; see e.g., Erdő, R, La cura pastorale dei gruppi etnici con speciale riguardo alle loro lingue. Uno sviluppo dal Concilio Lateranense IV al Concilio di Trento, in Vergentis 2 (2016) 19-46, 21-23. 48 Cf. Puza, R., Pfarrei. Pfarrorganisation, 2021. Niermeyer, J. F., Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus, Leiden 1984. 807.
