The Bull Ineffabilis Deus ‘Ineffable God’ is the apostolic letter with which Pope Pius IX declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary on 8 December 1854. This text affirms the great privilege of the Virgin, who was conceived free from original sin, to be the mother of Christ and thus of God himself, her creator. It is a bull of particular importance for Catholicism, especially in view of the theological and philosophical questions raised. After its enunciation, the great impact of the Marian dogma on the community of the faithful was evident in the countless works – artistic, literary, and musical – dedicated to the Virgin as a sign of joy and veneration.
In this historical and cultural context, a priest of the Society of Saint-Sulpice called Marie-Dominique Sire, was encouraged by his devotion to the Immaculate Conception to create an ambitious monument: he wanted to represent symbolically the universality of the message proclaimed and the unity of the Church in receiving it. Sire was initially interested in the bull and the documents relating to the declaration of the dogma. Then, he began to collect letters, official acts and other writings in more than three hundred volumes, which he placed at the feet of the Virgin of Puy-en-Velay in 1860 (Duval-Arnould 2002: 115). In a few years, Sire collected more than three hundred translations of the Bull from all over the world which, in June 1867, on the occasion of the birthday of the Apostle Peter, he offered to the Supreme Pontiff, who decided to exhibit them to the public of the faithful in the Vatican, in the room of the Immaculate Conception (Duval-Arnould 2002: 116). They remained there until 1993 when the collection was transferred to the archives of the Vatican Library.
The great linguistic value of the Sire Collection had been recognised from the outset, both as a written record of individual languages and as a comparative corpus. In an article published in La Civiltà Cattolica in 1877, for example, the uniqueness of the collection for linguists was underlined several times, since the Collection constituted a polyglot monument without comparison in terms of the number of varieties, the breadth of the text and the possibility of comparing words in different languages (N/A 1877: 533; Duval-Arnould 2002: 116). To this day, however, the Collection has not been exhaustively studied, except in the artistic field, through the work of the Austrian researcher Ingonda Hannesschläger.
References:
Duval-Arnould, Louis, 2002, “La collection “Sire” de la Bibliothèque vaticane”, en: AA.VV., Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae IX: 115-168.
Hannesschläger, Ingonda, 1998, “Übersetzungen der Bulle Ineffabilis Deus”, en: AA. VV., Meisterwerke Europäischer Kunst. 1200 Jahre Erzbistum Salzburg 138: 235-237.
N/A, 1877, “I monumenti e la biblioteca della bolla sul domma dell’Immacolata Concezione”, en La Civiltà Cattolica, Serie X, Vol. 2: 524-533.