Month: March 2020

Vatican City, Mar 16, 2020 / 11:30 am (CNA).- The Holy See announced a new law governing the judicial system of the Vatican City state Monday. The motu proprio provides enhanced safeguards for the independence of judges and prosecutors in Vatican City to better address economic, financial and criminal cases in the sovereign territory.

Law CCCLI was signed by Pope Francis on Friday, March 13. 

“Administering justice,” the pope said in the preamble of the new law, “is not just a necessity of a temporal order.” 

“The cardinal virtue of justice, in fact, illuminates and summarizes the very purpose of the judicial power proper to each State, which is essential above all to cultivate the personal, generous, and responsible commitment of those who are vested with the judicial function,” Francis said.

In the legal text, the pope explained that the law is part of an ongoing process of legal renewal to replace the original 1929 laws of Vatican City, which began with the adoption of a new fundamental law for the city state in 2000.

Francis said the changes are aimed at adapting the Vatican courts to better enforce the law, and to ensure the city state’s compliance with international commitments.

“In the last decades, the Vatican legal system has undergone a season of regulatory reforms in economic, financial and criminal matters, also as a consequence of the adhesion to important international conventions,” the pope wrote, making the changes necessary to keep the wheels of justice turning in the Vatican.

“In continuity with this work of progressive legislative updating and institutional reorganization, I would now like to introduce some changes to the structure of the judiciary, aimed at increasing its efficiency,” he said.

The law provides for new measures to protect the independence of judges and prosecutors in the city state, making explicit that Vatican magistrates are, subject to the law, answerable to the pope directly and to no other office or authority.

Article 2 of the new law states that judges “are hierarchically dependent on the Supreme Pontiff” and “in the exercise of their functions, they are subject only to the law.”

The new norms also codify the ability of prosecutors to deploy the judicial police of the Vatican courts, and grants the law enforcement agency enhanced budgetary independence, explaining that they are not required to account for spending to any other body within the curia.

“The judicial authority has direct use of the judicial police, which it can also use for the notification activities,” the law says. “The judicial bodies enjoy autonomy of expenditure for their operation, on the basis and within the limits of the accounting provisions in force in the State. The relative charges are borne by the Governor’s budget [of the Vatican City state].”

The judicial police, which are a separate section of the Vatican City Gendarmes, are under the direction of the Promoter of Justice, the courts’ chief prosecutor, who is to have two assistants, one of whom “carries out his duties on a full-time basis, without having subordinate employment relationships or carrying out freelance professional activities on an ongoing basis.

Judicial independence is further protected by article 8, which says that judges should be chosen from “tenured or retired university professors, and in any case from well-known jurists who have gained proven experience in judicial or forensic, civil, criminal or administrative matters.”

While recommendations for judicial appointments are still to be made by the Secretary of State, who has overall responsibility for the governance of Vatican City, the article prevents the appointment of curial civil servants to serve as judges, pointing out the necessary conflict of interest.

The pope’s reform, which repeals and replaces the 1987 Law CXIX of St. John Paul II, also underlines the supremacy of canon law in the Vatican’s civil legal system.

The new Law CCLI grounds Vatican City civil law in the Church’s canonical legal system, making the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the curia’s highest canonical appeals court, as the final court of cassation for the civil judicial system, charged with hearing appeals related to legal procedure and judicial competence.

Citing 2008 Vatican City state legislation issued by Pope Benedict XVI, which states that “the Vatican legal system recognizes in the canonical order the first normative source and the first criterion of interpretative reference,” Pope Francis said that canonical principles are essential to understanding and applying Vatican City laws.

“This is a founding and precious link that I hope can be increasingly explored by the judicial bodies of this state, in order to express its underlying potential and that the juridical norm puts to the work of the interpreter,” the pope wrote in the legislation’s preamble.

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Vatican City, Mar 16, 2020 / 08:05 am (CNA).- A French bishop who visited the Vatican last week has tested positive for coronavirus, his diocese announced Monday.

Bishop Emmanuel Delmas of Angers tested positive for COVID-19 on the evening of March 15… […]

Rome, Italy, Mar 15, 2020 / 12:43 pm (CNA).- Pope Francis on Sunday took a brief walking pilgrimage in the city of Rome, and prayed for an end to the coronavirus pandemic during a surprise visit to both the Basilica of St. Mary Major and a cross that t… […]

Washington D.C., Mar 15, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- A researcher from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum told CNA that she hopes the recent opening of the Pius XII archives in the Vatican will give historians a fuller, more transparent image of the wartime pope. 

Dr. Suzanne Brown-Fleming, the museum’s director of international academic programs, has been unable to travel to Rome to view the archives due to the COVID-19 outbreak, but told CNA that she hopes to make the trip in April. 

Brown-Fleming spoke to CNA Thursday about what she expects to find in the archives. 

The Vatican officially opened the archives, which cover Venerable Pius XII’s entire pontificate — March 1939 through October 1958 — on March 2. It is the first time scholars have been granted access to the  approximately 16 million documents they contain. 

Pius XII remains a disputed figure, with some historians criticising him for not making a more explicit denunciation of Hitler and the Nazis, and others pointing to Mit brennender Sorge, his 1937 encyclical to the Church in Germany, and the limits imposed on him by the Lateran Treaty.

After examining the documents in the archives, Brown-Fleming said that historians will “definitely have a more fair reading of [Pius XII].”

“I think that on both sides of the argument there has been picking and choosing as to ‘let’s show this document and interpret it this way and ignore these five documents,’ and his critics have done the same,” she said. “So I’m not sure either side has been completely fair, because there’s been no access to the full documentation.” 

Brown-Fleming thinks that the public opinion will likely end up “somewhere between the two polar opposites that we’re seeing now,” but that this will not happen until the archives have been fully studied. 

“But it will be a fair and transparent reading,” she said. 

Pius XII died in 1958, his cause for canonization was opened in November 1965, by Pope (now Saint) Paul VI during the final session of the Second Vatican Council. On December 19, 2009, Pope Benedict XVI declared him “Venerable,” meaning the Church has determined that he led a life of heroic virtue.

A practicing Catholic, Brown-Fleming told CNA that she hopes she is able to find documentary proof that the Church and individual Catholics in Europe invoked the tenets of their faith and tried to save their Jewish neighbors. 

“Did they respond in a uniform ‘love thy neighbor’ way, or did they parse in their minds? I think it’s going to be very interesting to know,” she said. 

A big question, and one that Brown-Fleming hopes will be answered by the archives, concerns Pius XII’s actions in September 1943, when Rome’s Jewish population was rounded up and deported. 

“There’s a big question around whether Pius XII gave orders to have Roman Jews hidden. Many Jews were hidden including on Vatican grounds,” she said. “Did he order that? Did he know about it and say, okay, ‘this is not a good idea because it puts Vatican property in danger’? Did he say, ‘yes, please do this and save who you can’?” 

“We know that Jews were rescued by Catholic families in Italy and in France,” said Brown-Fleming. She told CNA that she was hopeful her time in the archives will reveal the motivations behind why these families chose to risk their lives to save people: “Was it because of messaging from the pope or was it spontaneous?”

Another question Brown-Fleming wants the archives to answer is what Pius XII knew in the post-war era, when a Vatican “ratline” enabled many former Nazis to escape to South America.

“In the Cold War period, many Nazis escaped to South America with the help of the Vatican–lower level officials,” she said. “But how much did the Pope know about this? That’s a very big question.” She is also hoping to find information about Pius XII’s personal attitude towards the Jewish people, which is “something that’s very hard to discern in public messaging.” 

Once she is granted permission to travel to Italy and examine the archives, Brown-Fleming intends on starting her research in the Vatican Apostolic Archive. She explained that there are four reading rooms in the archive, and that the first room is dedicated to indices. She says the plan is to look for certain keywords in the indices.

Once those keywords are found, Brown-Fleming will request the entire folder. She hopes that, similar to the 2003 opening of Pius XI’s archives, the United States Holocaust Museum would be given permission to reproduce the some of the contents of the archives and keep them in Washington.

Regardless of what is found, Brown-Fleming said she is glad that there will finally be answers about the legacy of Pius XII, and she is confident that whatever is uncovered will be a positive move for the Church.

The archives will “kind of settle those questions” regarding Pius XII and the actions of the Church during World War II, “even if the answers aren’t always good. And I don’t think they always will be, because we’re talking about human beings and even a pope makes mistakes.” 

“We’re going to find a mixed record, but at least we know what it is,” she said. “And then once we know what it is, we can really wrestle with that.”

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