Credentialed as he is in canon law, Pope Leo will soon have to put this expertise to the test in ensuring justice in trials held at the Vatican, both ecclesiastical and civil. Because in both fields the flaws are evident and serious.
In the ecclesiastical field, in the interview with Elise Ann Allen made public on September 18 and included in a book published by Penguin Peru, Leo has already hinted at his intention to make adjustments in trials for sexual abuse.
Acknowledging “an authentic and deep sensitivity and compassion to the pain, the suffering” of the victims, the pope in fact added immediately that “the accused also have rights, and many of them believe that those rights have not been respected. There have also been proven cases of some kind of false accusation. There have been priests whose lives have been destroyed because of that.”
And again : “The fact that the victim comes forward and makes an accusation and the accusation presumably is accurate, that does not take away the presumption of innocence. So, the accused person also has to be protected, their rights have to respected.”
“The Church certainly has tried to make new legislation,” Leo continued. But in spite of this “we’re in kind of a bind there,” because “the protection of the rights of the accused party is also an issue.”
Indeed, if one looks at the criticisms of leading canon law experts, the “new legislation” promulgated in this matter by the Church, most recently with the changes introduced by Pope Francis on December 7, 2021, has inflicted serious impairments on “due process.”
First of all, it has facilitated the widespread practice of replacing the judicial process, administered by dioceses or at the Vatican by the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, with a simple and expeditious administrative procedure, with a sentence issued by decree of the competent authority.
But even more it has demolished at least two cornerstones set by the law to protect the accused.
The first “vulnus” is the ability, now encouraged and routinely practiced by ecclesiastical authorities, to dispense with the twenty-year statute of limitations established by canon law for crimes of sexual abuse and therefore to proceed to trial even for acts committed before that date. This is the case, among others, with the trial of the former Jesuit and artist Marko Ivan Rupnik, ordered by Pope Francis in October 2023 with the concomitant waiver of the statute of limitations for acts – most of them – charged to him from before 2003, a trial, moreover, of which nothing is known apart from the appointment of the judges, which took place only in the early summer of 2025.
The second “vulnus” inflicted on the basic principles of the Church’s penal system is the frequent retroactive application to the accused of provisions that are unfavorable to him but did not exist at the time he committed the crime of which he is accused, because they were issued only at a later time.
Experts in ecclesiastical law have raised strong criticisms of these injuries of “due process” that now characterize canonical trials. And it is clear that this harmful punitive rigidity is a consequence of the “zero tolerance” that common sentiment noisily imposes on the Church regarding sexual abuse, as if the present and future of the Church itself were wholly at stake here.
On this too Pope Leo, in the interview, sounded the alarm. “We can’t make the whole Church focus exclusively on this issue, because that would not be an authentic response to what the world is looking for in terms of the need for the mission of the Church,” he said. “The Church has a mission to preach the Gospel, and thanks be to God, the vast majority of people who are committed to the church, priests, and bishops, religious, have never abused anyone.”
But in the absence of a vigorous initiative to heal the wounds inflicted on “due process” in the ecclesiastical judicial system, the growing risk is that those who find themselves punished through flagrant violations of their fundamental rights will turn to the civil courts to obtain compensation for the damages suffered “as a result of the alleged breaches of procedure adopted in the evidentiary phase,” as stated in one of the most widely studied ecclesiastical law textbooks in Italian universities, authored by Carlo Cardia, a leading figure in the Italian delegation that in 1984 led to the updating of the 1929 concordat between Italy and the Holy See.
The risk is serious. And in Italy it is so precisely because of the new concordat, according to which the civil effects of ecclesiastical rulings must be interpreted “in harmony with the constitutionally guaranteed rights of Italian citizens.”
But it can also be a healthy risk. This is what is maintained by Geraldina Boni, professor of canon law at the University of Bologna and consultant to the Vatican dicastery for legislative texts, as well as president of the Italian Interministerial Commission for Agreements with Religious Confessions, in her well-documented essay on “The violation of the principles of criminal law and of due process in the canonical system,” co-authored with her students, now professors, Manuel Ganarin and Alberto Tomer :
“The almost supplementary and surrogate intervention of temporal power could deploy a powerful stimulus, enough to discourage and divert the evidentiary authority from the insidious temptation of wanting to repress odious and deplorable acts without any indulgence, an intent certainly in itself abstractly laudable, but at the unacceptable cost of the destruction of that achievement of civilization in which the canonical system has generously collaborated, which is due process.”
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As for the civil trials held at the Vatican, the appeals process in the management of Holy See funds began on September 22, requested by some of those convicted in the trial of first instance, including Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, sentenced to five years and six months in prison but already before that, on September 24, 2020, stripped of his offices and duties as cardinal by Pope Francis, without ever being told the reasons.
Leo briefly mentioned the main subject of this “trial of the century,” as the international media call it, in the interview : “There was great publicity given to the purchase of this building in London, Sloane Avenue, and how many millions were lost because of that.”
But this trial too has provoked a deluge of criticism from jurists and canonists, for “the very serious violations of law, even divine law,” identified in its development and summarized in this article from Settimo Cielo of March 18, 2024 :
> “Summa iniuria.” The Disaster of Vatican Justice Under Pope Francis
With further grounds for criticism both for what has come to light in the interval between the two trials and for what is now happening in the appeals process, where, however, signs of a change of course are already visible.
In particular, Cardinal Becciu and other defendants immediately asked the Vatican promoter of justice, Alessandro Diddi, to withdraw from his role as prosecutor – which he also held in the trial of first instance – on account of private WhatsApp messages that allegedly prove his personal interest in the conduct of the trial.
According to these messages, only a small portion of which was made public by Diddi during the trial of first instance but afterward were published in full in the newspaper Domani, he appears to have been involved in the machinations carried out by two women with Vatican connections, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui and Genoveffa Ciferri, to make Monsignor Alberto Perlasca, former director of the administrative office of the secretariat of state, the main prosecution witness against Becciu, starting in August of 2020.
The president of the court of appeal, Archbishop Alejandro Arellano Cedillo, accepted the petition for recusal and referred the final decision on Diddi’s fate to the court of cassation of Vatican City State : a court that Pope Francis entrusted in 2023, in a disconcerting choice, to four cardinals so entirely unversed in the law as Joseph Farrell, Matteo Maria Zuppi, Augusto Paolo Lojudice, and Mauro Gambetti, with the assistance of two jurists, Antonia Antonella Marandola and Chiara Minelli, the former of whom is however also the co-author of books with Diddi himself.
And meanwhile, already excluded from the courtroom pending the decision of the court of cassation, Diddi – who has never hidden the fact that he had a direct relationship with Pope Francis – has already suffered another setback.
Because he too had appealed the first-instance sentences, in his opinion too lenient. But on September 25 the court rejected his appeal, compiled with such and so many blunders as to render it inadmissible. With the consequent confirmation of some of the first-instance acquittals, for Cardinal Becciu those relating to abuse of office and to embezzlement in his dealings with a financier.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry : traduttore@hotmail.com)
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.
