ROME – Anyone who’s ever read or seen Inherit the Wind knows that almost 100 years ago, a celebrated trial took place in the American state of Tennessee, dubbed at the time the “Trial of the Century”, in which a teacher was accused of teaching evolution in a public school in violation of state law, thereby creating a classic showdown between science and religion.
It would take a true master of Trivial Pursuit, however, to recall the outcome: John T. Scopes was found guilty and fined $100, the amount stipulated by a 1925 state law that barred teachers from contradicting the Book of Genesis, though the result was later overturned on a technicality – under the state constitution at the time, a judge could not impose a fine exceeding $50, meaning the jury should have been asked to impose the penalty.
This juxtaposition between a universally recognized case, and the obscurity of its result, is a reminder of an important truth about any legal system. Sometimes a trial raises such transcendent issues that it’s the verdict of history that truly matters, not so much the specific findings of the judge or jury.
Such would appear to be the case again now, as the Vatican’s own version of the “Trial of the Century” has finally reached its climax.
On 16 December, the three-judge panel that’s been hearing the case for the past two and a half years delivered its conclusions, finding Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, the former chief of staff to Pope Francis, guilty of embezzlement and fraud in three separate contexts and sentencing him to five and a half years in prison.
Eight of the nine other defendants in the sprawling case were also found guilty and sentenced to either prison terms, fines or both. Aside from Becciu, the roster of the accused included a couple of shady Italian financiers, a handful of obscure former Vatican bureaucrats and advisors, and a self-described private security consultant who’s been dubbed “The Cardinal’s Dame”.
The trial centred primarily on a contentious real estate deal in London that stretched from 2014 to 2018, in which the Vatican’s Secretariat of State eventually paid roughly $400 million (£315 million) to acquire a former Harrod’s warehouse on Sloane Avenue in the posh neighbourhood of Chelsea. By the end of the affair, the Vatican sold the property at a loss of around $150 million (£118 million).
The claim put forward by lead prosecutor Alessandro Diddi, an Italian layman whose previous claim to fame was being the defence attorney for a notorious Roman mob boss, was that Becciu and the other defendants engaged in a de facto criminal conspiracy to defraud the Vatican, deceiving superiors, including the Pope, into approving transactions that resulted in massive losses.
In addition, Becciu also faced charges on two other fronts: One regarding transfers from the Secretariat of State to a charity in his home diocese on the island of Sardinia operated by his brother, and the other concerning funds set aside at the Pope’s personal request for the ransom of a Colombian missionary nun kidnapped in Mali by Islamic militants, which were funnelled through a lay woman and friend of Becciu, Cecilia Marogna, who supposedly spent some of the money on luxury goods for herself.
Becciu’s attorneys immediately announced plans for an appeal, which presumably will be heard by the Court of Appeals for the Vatican City State, which is made up of six judges, three clerics and three laity. If that court reaches a different conclusion from the tribunal, the case could theoretically end up before the city-state’s supreme court, known as the Court of Cassation, which is led by US Cardinal Kevin Farrell and three other cardinals in addition to two lay jurists.
Other defendants may decide to lodge appeals as well, with the deadline for making that decision set for 19 December.
In addition, there’s also the possibility of a pardon or a commutation of the sentence by the Pope, as has happened in past instances when defendants were convicted and sentenced to prison terms by a Vatican tribunal.
As a result, it may be months, if not years, before a final resolution is reached.
In the meantime, it’s clear that the debate unleashed by the mammoth trial, which stretched over 85 hearings and a grand total of 600 hours of courtroom time, doesn’t simply concern the guilt or innocence of the defendants.
In effect, the trial captured a broader contest between two competing narratives about Pope Francis and his leadership. One styles the trial as the cornerstone of a brave new day of accountability and transparency being ushered in by a reforming pontiff, while the other sees it, instead, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, as a case of the Vatican being borne back ceaselessly into its own troubled past.
Specifically, the counter-narrative about the trial sees it as the reassertion of a sweeping concept of the Pope’s temporal power, which most people thought had been consigned to the dustbins of history after the loss of the Papal States in 1870.
Like the villain in cheap horror movies, or so this theory holds, the concept of the “Pope-King”, believed to be dead, is popping back up for one last throw of the dice.
Last May, Francis issued a new fundamental law for the Vatican City State, the preamble of which opened with the claim that the pontiff’s sovereign power is part of the Petrine ministry. The language dumbfounded observers of both Left and Right, who noted that even at the apex of the era of the Pope-King, no one ever suggested that the temporal powers of the papacy were essential to the office.
Were that the case, they noted, how could one explain the fact that popes governed the early church for centuries without any temporal sovereignty whatsoever, and did so again in the period between 1870 and the signing of the Lateran Pacts in 1929?
All that might seem an academic exercise, were it not for the fact that, at least in the eyes of many observers, the trial itself witnessed a concrete exercise of just the sort of untrammelled and quasi-absolute authority asserted in the fundamental law.
To begin with, Pope Francis effectively judged Becciu before the trial even began, demanding his resignation as prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and stripping him of his privileges as a cardinal in September 2020.
The pontiff then issued a series of four decrees, or rescripta, between June 2019 and February 2020, which granted the prosecution broad investigatory powers, including wiretaps and intercepts, without judicial review, in effect dispensing with even the rudimentary procedural guarantees contained in the Vatican’s own customary criminal procedure.
More basically still, Francis insisted throughout the trial on acting not simply as the chief executive of the Vatican City State, but also its supreme legislative and judicial authority – not just notionally, but actively, as the pope involved himself in the prosecution at multiple turns. In other words, there’s no separation of powers whatsoever, despite the fact that modern popes, including St. John Paul II, have praised the autonomy of the judiciary as a hallmark of modern democratic states.
Ask yourself: If you were being judged by a tribunal in which the alleged injured party also happened to hire and fire the judges, and could change the rules on the fly, how confident would you feel in justice being blind?
Thus, the trial raises an unavoidable question about the legacy of Pope Francis.
Is he, in the phrase coined by biographer Austen Ivereigh, the “Great Reformer”, a change agent guiding the Church into a more synodal and participatory style of governance? Or, as critics would have it, is he actually the “Great Restorer?” That is, is he de facto taking the Church back to a concept of the pope as a temporal sovereign with essentially unlimited power?
Could he actually be both? That is, could it be the case that Francis is leading the church into a post-modern style of pastoral leadership, and simultaneously a pre-modern form of civil sovereignty?
The unsettled nature of that debate seemed clear within hours of the verdicts being released Saturday night.
Vatican editorial director Andrea Tornielli quickly posted an essay to the Vatican News site under the headline, “A trial that guaranteed the rights of all”, insisting that it was a “fair trial” marked by “full respect for the rights of the defendants”.
“The genesis of this process showed that the Holy See and the Vatican City State possess the necessary ‘antibodies’ to identify alleged abuses or improprieties,” Tornielli wrote. “The trial process attests that justice is administered without shortcuts, following the procedural code, respecting the rights of every person and the presumption of innocence.”
Obviously, Tornielli felt the need to say all that out loud because he knows full well many observers still have their doubts. Just 20 minutes after Tornielli’s essay appeared, Luis Badilla, a veteran Rome-based Chilean journalist who operates the widely read blog Il Sismografo (“The Seismograph”), posted his own commentary on the outcome.
Badilla openly called the trial “completely unreliable”.
“This contraption is a drama scripted by the sovereign, and nothing else,” Badilla scoffed. “Everything is made of papier-mâché, and every single element was artfully created, even with retroactive effect, for a single purpose: To serve Pope Francis’s narrative on the fight against corruption.”
“The conviction of Becciu is not the real, central question,” Badilla wrote. “The problem is a tribunal subjugated to the sovereign.”
Shortly afterwards, Badilla announced that he was closing down Il Sismografo, which has been in operation since 2006, but that he’d wanted to wait until the verdicts were in.
Calling the trial a “painful affair”, Badilla wrote that “it has been, and remains, for us, for our readers, and for the whole church, a decisive watershed, because it exposes the singular fashion in which power is exercised by Pope Francis”.
In a nutshell, that’s the core judgment the trial and its aftermath seem to beckon: Is this justice, or a perversion of it? Is this reform, or proof that real reform has yet to come, especially in terms of the papacy’s temporal power?
On that front, alas, it seems clear that the jury is still very much out.
Photo: Pope Francis arrives for the weekly general audience at St Peter’s Square, Vatican City, Italy, 27 September 2023. (Photo by Filippo MONTEFORTE / AFP) (Photo by FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP via Getty Images.)
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