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Henry Denzinger · Enchiridion Symbolorum

The Sources of Catholic Dogma

A chronological collection of the Church’s dogmatic definitions and disciplinary decrees, from the Apostles’ Creed through the pontificate of Pius XII — the standard reference for locating exactly what, when, and how the Church has formally taught.

Translated by Roy J. Deferrari from the thirtieth edition of Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum, revised by Karl Rahner, S.J. · B. Herder Book Co., 1954.

Part I The Apostolic and Patristic Age

To 787 — the Apostles’ Creed through the Second Council of Nicaea.

 Part II The Early Medieval Church

855–1215 — Carolingian councils through the Fourth Lateran Council.

 Part III The High and Late Medieval Church

1227–1445 — Gregory IX through the Council of Florence.

 Part IV Renaissance to the Council of Trent

1512–1605 — the Fifth Lateran Council through the aftermath of Trent.

 Part V Absolutism to the First Vatican Council

1655–1870 — through the Syllabus of Errors and Vatican I.

 Part VI Leo XIII to Pius XII

1878–1954 — the modern papal magisterium.
About this edition. This text was OCR’d from a scanned copy of the 1954 Herder edition and lightly cleaned: running page headers, folio numbers, and the critical-edition footnote apparatus (citations to Mansi, Hardouin, Hefele, and similar standard references) were stripped for readability on the web. The cleanup was automated, not a line-by-line proofread — occasional OCR artifacts may remain, particularly around non-Latin script. The Scriptural, Systematic, and Alphabetic indices from the printed edition are not yet included; they are dense cross-reference tables that did not survive plain-text extraction legibly and would need a different approach.
On copyright. We could not find any US copyright renewal filed for this translation (renewal was required around 1982, 28 years after publication, under the law in force at the time) despite finding renewals for several of Deferrari’s other contemporaneous translations in the same official records — evidence, though not absolute certainty, that this edition lapsed into the public domain on January 1, 1983.