Vatican.va website

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Maximian

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It used to be easy to access any Papal encyclical or any document of the Magisterium quite easily on the Vatican Website.

I can’t seem to do it any more, can anyone help me? I’m a technological cretin.
 
You are not alone. Unfortunately, as many priests such as Father Z have noted, the Vatican is not exactly internet savvy, and there is a lot of room for improvement on their website.
 
Maximian said:
I can’t seem to do it any more
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Indeed. It’s become quite complicated unless you’re looking for the current Pontiff’s texts.

I’ve been mostly resorting to using google – type the title of the document you’re looking for, and the vatican.va page is usually the first Iink of the search.

The other way is to research by Pope – click on the relevant Pope portrait at the bottom of the homepage, and you’re taken to a page where you can access the documents he promulgated on the left-side menu.

For other Magisterial texts, you need to click the “resource library” tab on the right side of the homepage, just under the Popes’ gallery.
 
All things considered we are so lucky to have access to so many church documents 🙂
 
OddBird said:
The other way is to research by Pope – click on the relevant Pope portrait at the bottom of the homepage, and you’re taken to a page where you can access the documents he promulgated on the left-side menu.
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Even so, the further back in time you go, the scarcer the documents get.
 
OddBird said:
I’ve been mostly resorting to using google
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To restrict one’s search to the vatican.va website, you can attach ‘site:vatican.va’ (without the quote marks) into the Google search field.

So for e.g. the following will show directly Lumen Gentium:
site:vatican.va lumen gentium
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Another useful resource is Documenta Catholica Omnia which is a more complete collection of a variety of magisterial and other documents.

Failing that one usually has to consult Labbe-Cossart’s Sacrosancta Concilia, of which there are a myriad of Google Book scans (avoid the Gallica scans as their user interface is horrendous). Unfortunately the scan quality can be exceptionally poor, and the OCR (for searching purposes) is non-existent.
 
You can revert to the old ways and send a scribe with parchment, ink and pen to Rome and get it copied. Bit difficult at the moment given everything but the aesthetics are wonderful and you will stand in an age-old tradition which held the Church in good stead in its days of greatest glory.
 
One thing I do appreciate is that they used to only go back to say, Leo XIII. In the last couple years they actually added a lot of much older documents from prior Popes as well. It’s not exhaustive and it still doesn’t go back super far, but it is nice.
 
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https://www.papalencyclicals.net/ has a nice collection of documents, mostly translated into English. I think it is Australian, started with duplicating EWTN’s collections, but has been adding more and more to it.

EWTN is another source.
 
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