–issued by Pope Gregory IX.
Excommunicamus empowers Dominican and Franciscan religious–purity courts. The nefarious Holy Inquisition Courts have their genesis.
Rosemary Ruether writes:
“The canonical legislation of the Church in the thirteenth century effected a systematic social degradation of the Jew. The Church struggled to reimpose all the old canonical and imperial anti–Judaic legislation back to Constantine. But it went beyond this in forbidding even Christian servants or nurses to the Jews under pain of excommunication.*A The Church’s basic position was that the Jew should occupy no place of eminence or power in Christian society which would ever put him in a position of authority over a Christian, however modest. The basic principle for this, as we have indicated, was that of the Servitus Judaeorum, as the reprobate status of the Jew in history.” (Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, p. 209).
*A Grayzel, The Church and the Jews, p. 25, and documents 14, 15, 29, 69, and 104; also conciliar decrees: documents 3, 16, 25, and 33.