The tenth canon of the Council of York in 1195 ordered all priests to publish censures of excommunication against perjurers with bell and lighted candle thrice in the year.
A widespread and growing opposition to papal prerogatives in the eighteenth century, the works of Febronius and Pereira, favouring the omnipotence of the State, eventually resulted in a general attack on the Bull.
A very few of its provisions were rooted in the old medieval relations between Church and State, when the pope could effectually champion the cause of the oppressed, and by his spiritual power remedy evils, with which temporal rulers were powerless or unwilling to deal.
The excommunication of Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, by Clement XIII on 30 January 1768, proved the signal for a storm of opposition against the Holy Thursday Bull in almost all European states.
Similar edicts followed in the same year from Ferdinand IV of Naples, the Duke of Parma, the Prince of Monaco, the free states of Genoa and Venice, and Maria Teresa, Empress of Austria, to her subjects in Lombardy.
Emperor Joseph II followed the lead of his mother, and on 14 April 1781 informed his subjects that "the power of absolving from the cases reserved in the 'Bulla Cœnæ', which the pope had hitherto given in the so-called quinquennial faculties, was now and henceforth entirely withdrawn".
Nevertheless, there was good ground for supposing that the few obnoxious clauses that had outlived their purpose, and in the changed times were no longer applicable to the Christian community, had ceased to have any binding force.
The Bull was formally abrogated by Pius IX through the issue of the new Constitution Apostolicae Sedis moderationi, in which the censures against piracy, against appropriating shipwrecked goods, against supplying infidels with war-material, and against the levying of new tolls and taxes find no place.