# Breve

**Breve**

**Known today as.** A written prayer or holy names folded and worn on the body.

Kind: Sacramental

## What did Canale use it for?

Worn against demons, hexes, bindings, sigils, charms, and incantations; the Breve of St. Ubaldo (Treatise Two; note CIV).

## What does modern science say?

The Church distinguished these from pagan amulets by Aquinas’s two conditions (note LXXV); its authorities had condemned superstitious amulets since the fourth century.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia lists among amulets “carved stones, bits of metal, figures of gods, strips of paper, or parchment bearing enigmatic phrases, blessings, and maledictions,” and discusses the Jewish tephillin, “the small leathern pouches containing passages of the law, and later known as phylacteries,” which “subsequently, however, … unquestionable were employed as such.” Pope St. Gregory the Great himself sent Queen Theodolinda “two phylacteria, one of which contained a fragment of the wood of the True Cross, the other a sentence of the Gospel,” and “the custom of carrying portions of the Sacred Scriptures as phylacteries is mentioned by St. Jerome and St. John Chrysostom.” The Council of Laodicea nonetheless “made the penalty for wearing them excommunication.”

## Sources

- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Amulets, Use and Abuse of.” newadvent.org/cathen/01443b.htm
- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Amulet.” newadvent.org/cathen/01443a.htm

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*Breve.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/breve

Historical description, not medical advice.