Topics tend to include homiletics, pastoral care, sacramental theology, and ethics.
Pastoral theology presupposes other various branches, accepts the apologetic, dogmatic, exegetic, moral, juridical, ascetical, liturgical, and other conclusions reached by the ecclesiastical student, and scientifically applies these various conclusions to the priestly ministry.
[clarification needed] During the Middle Ages, there was not yet a separated and systematized science of pastoral theology.
Still, even then writings of the great Doctors of the Church were at times purely pastoral; such was the "Pastoral Care" of Pope Gregory I; "Opuscula", 17–20, of Thomas Aquinas; Bonaventure's "De sex alis seraphim", "De regimine animæ", "Confessionale"; the "Summa theologica" (Books II, III), together with the "Summa confessionalis" of Antoninus, Bishop of Florence.
By the dawn of the sixteenth century, the care of souls was to many priests and not a few bishops a lost or a never-acquired art, with the result that the laity were ready to throw off what was deemed to be a useless clerical yoke.