John L Allen Jr explains the absolute power of the Pope, but also that two current controversial situations are very different in nature.
Although not generally known for the limpidity of its prose, the Code of Canon Law does deliver at least one sentence of crystalline clarity in canon 331, regarding the Roman Pontiff: “By virtue of his office he possesses supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely.”
Not that such a phrase requires much unpacking, but in effect it means a pope can do pretty much whatever he wants.
It’s a good bit of context to keep in mind whenever conversation turns to the matter of papal power, and whether in a given instance a pope has “abused” his authority. Such charges are in the air again these days, prominently in the US with regard to the recent defenestration of Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, and also in Rome with regard to the slow-moving “trial of the century” involving allegations of financial crime against 10 defendants, including Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu.
In a strictly literal sense, such charges are, almost without exception, baseless. A pontiff is the supreme executive, legislator and judge in Catholicism, and, by definition, infinite authority can’t be exceeded.
Yet there is also a key difference between the Strickland case and the trial, because they’re two different animals in terms of the kind of papal power involved.
Bishop Strickland’s removal involves the pope’s ecclesiastical and spiritual authority over the life of the Church, while the trial has brought up an arguably anachronistic, and self-defeating, pretence to total temporal authority too, albeit over an extremely small piece of territory – a claim many Catholics believe the modern papacy had renounced, but which actually turns out to be alive and well and living in the Vatican tribunal.
To begin with Bishop Strickland, his dismissal on November 11 seems the inevitable denouement of tensions that had been building for a decade.
Although it’s been reported that the motives weren’t simply Strickland’s theological and political criticism of Pope Francis, but also management difficulties within the diocese, it’s hard to avoid the impression that those concerns could have been, well, “managed”, if they didn’t pertain to one of the most publicly strident critics of the sitting pope in the hierarchy.
In effect, the Strickland saga has more or less followed the arc of other dissident bishops in the recent past.
There’s a natural comparison, for instance, with the late French Bishop Jacques Gaillot, who died this past April after having been removed from his diocese of Évreux under Pope John Paul II in 1995. Both Strickland and Gaillot led small, relatively obscure dioceses, and achieved a national and international following because of their challenges to authority, though in Gaillot’s case his rebellion came from the left. Both were given repeated opportunities to change course, and actually stuck around as diocesan bishops for more than a decade before the axe finally fell.
(As a footnote, Gaillot was received by Pope Francis in 2015 on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in what was seen as a gesture of reconciliation. Time will tell if Strickland gets the same treatment from a future pope.)
Despite heated charges floating around the Catholic commentariat suggesting that Pope Francis’s actions with Strickland are tantamount to a “police state” and a “cancel culture” in the Church, bishops who publicly flout papal authority, no matter the integrity of their reasons, have been fired before and no doubt will be again. If anything, the situation simply illustrates an old bit of Catholic wisdom, to wit: if you want to rage against the machine, knock yourself out – just don’t expect to do it on the company dime.
If there’s anything to talk about, it’s probably not about the Pope’s right to fire Strickland, but perhaps the advisability of it. It may cast the 65-year-old firebrand as a martyr, and free him up to pursue his anti-Francis campaign even more energetically. On the other hand, Gaillot enthusiastically embraced the titular see he was assigned after his dismissal, Partenia, turning it into a sort of virtual diocese for progressive Catholics – all without much notable success in derailing the John Paul papacy.
In terms of a serious conversation about authority and the papacy, the current trial is a much better focus, because it pivots on an entirely different sort of power.
At the moment, defence lawyers are currently presenting closing arguments – which the Italians, aptly enough, refer to as “harangues”. The three-judge panel hearing the case is expected to render a verdict in mid-December, in a case which involves charges of embezzlement, fraud and misappropriation to the tune of tens of millions of euros against a cabal of shady Italian financiers, formerly obscure Vatican advisers and managers, and, most notably, Becciu, who once held the all-important position of sostituto, or “substitute”, in the Vatican’s Secretary of State, making him effectively the pope’s chief of staff. No matter what the tribunal decides, it seems likely at this stage that doubts will surround the outcome due to widely held impressions of irregularities which, collectively, raise questions about the due process rights of the defendants.
In part, those concerns focus on a series of four rescripts, or waivers, granted by Pope Francis between 2019 and 2020 to the lead prosecutor, Italian attorney Alessandro Diddi, granting him broad investigatory powers, including the use of wiretaps and the seizure of confidential documents, without any judicial review, in ways arguably at odds with Vatican penal law. Those rescripts have generated consternation, especially given how they seem to reflect a certain casualness about the rule of law – as Pope Francis himself said on November 16 in a session with Roman priests, “a good rule is one which has lots of exceptions”, in a line destined to drive many jurists to distraction.
More basically, the issue concerns the lack of a true separation of powers. Recall that this isn’t a canonical trial for an offence against the Faith, protection of which falls within a pope’s apostolic mandate; it’s a civil process within the Vatican City State, involving entirely secular charges. In the context of civil law, modern popes uniformly are on record supporting the legitimate autonomy of the judiciary, as a core element of respect for due process and human rights – everywhere, that is, except within the Vatican itself, where the pope is both technically the injured party and also controls the judiciary (including hiring and firing judges), a fact that no democratic society would acknowledge as fair.
Historically speaking, what has actually surfaced is a key piece of unfinished business from the collapse of the Papal States. It’s often, and erroneously, said that the 1929 Lateran Pacts marked the end of the pope’s temporal power. Wrong: it marked the loss of the pope’s ability to project that power over a swathe of central Italy, but not the claim to temporal authority itself, which remains fully intact and which the anomalies of the present trial abundantly illustrate.
Perhaps the real verdict in the case, therefore, may be less about the guilt or innocence of Becciu et al, and more about the urgency of a long-overdue reform towards a real separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of the Vatican’s civil government. Such a voluntary renunciation of papal control arguably would not only bolster the credibility of the Vatican, but the moral standing of the whole Church when it lectures the rest of the world on the demands of justice.
In other words, Pope Francis does face a serious conundrum when it comes to the exercise of power – if not in how he disciplines a wayward bishop, then certainly in how much vestigial temporal power he still wants to wield.
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