A stone’s throw from the vibrant street market in Campo de’ Fiori stands the magnificent Palace of the Cancelleria. Designed by Bramante, it was the first Renaissance palace in Rome, begun in 1489 and finished a quarter of a century later for Cardinal Raffaele Riario, who, it is said, won the cost of the project in one night’s gambling. His luck didn’t hold, and he fell foul of the Medicis for his intrigue rather than debt, forfeiting his palace.
The building became the home of cardinals who held the title of San Lorenzo in Damaso. An early Church basilica was incorporated into the north wing of the new palace. It was briefly the Cardinal Duke of York’s home and, even more briefly, the parliament of the fledging Roman republic of 1849. At some point it became the Cancelleria Apostolica, the papal chancery. On my recent trip to Rome its splendid travertine façade was once more under wraps for restoration work.
I have been lucky enough to see inside it previously. As a seminarian I was once a dinner guest of the parish priest of San Lorenzo, who had an apartment on the top floor. I remember an aperitif made from artichokes and a delicious meal served by a devoted housekeeper. But most of all I remember the post-prandial discourse of our host, Don Augusto Cecchi, who before he became a parish priest had been master of ceremonies under three popes and was the last person to hold the office of papal tiara bearer. Such a distinction would naturally incline one to a degree of nostalgia, and Don Augusto used to captivate guests with his stories of the old days and his memorabilia. As well as many wonderful photographs of papal ceremonial, he would show us, with unabashed pride, photographs of him meeting Mussolini, and then from a flat box he would produce the pièce de résistance: the sweat-stained amice which Paul VI had worn for his coronation, predicting that it would one day be a relic. Now he is right, though he has long since, please God, been reunited with its wearer.
Later I was fortunate enough to visit the Major Penitentiary, Cardinal James Stafford, who had both an office and an apartment in the Cancelleria, for it houses the oldest of all Vatican congregations, the Apostolic Penitentiary. If you want to know what this is, I recommend a little book I picked up in the Vatican bookstore last week, When and How to Have Recourse to the Apostolic Penitentiary. It explains that the work of this tribunal is very little known, largely because of its nature, which is to deal with the cases relating to the internal forum and to things heard in the Sacrament of Confession, which are, by nature, secret. These would include sins of such gravity that they are reserved to the Holy See for remission.
As with my experience of the Congregation for Clergy, a closer look reveals not some faceless, cold bureaucracy but the application of a high degree of mercy, support, expertise and experience to many difficulties of conscience. The dicastery is actually called the Tribunal of Mercy, for not only is it the department responsible for granting indulgences on behalf of the Holy Father’s Power of the Keys, but its mission is to help any member of the faithful who finds himself in a situation incompatible with his eternal salvation to be reconciled with God and the Church. How does it do this? By the judicious application of the appropriate canon law.
The book itself decries what it sees as an “anti-juridical” tendency at work in the Church which makes it fashionable to regard canon law as somehow the enemy of charity, contrary to the essence of a Church of mercy, something “unpastoral” and alien to the simple Gospel of love. Such contempt for canon law arises from a lack of understanding of its nature, which is not merely a collection of positive norms of the Church, but the expression of “that which is just in the Church”. In other words, it codifies that which is expected of a member of the Church and “that which should be recognised, returned and given to him by others”. When God judges us at the end of time, his judgment will be perfect, free of any error, and in Him mercy and justice will be as one. Until then, we have canon law, exercised in this tribunal in secrecy to protect our conscience before God and our secrets from the rash judgments of men.
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