Happy Friday friends,
And a thousand thanks to everyone who joined us in the shadow of Wrigley Field last night for our Chicago dive bar live show.
I was more than my usual level of anxious, this being a hometown event and all. And, it was kind of my birthday, and while I’m not actually turning 7, that’s about the last time I threw myself a party and I still had a child’s horror that no one would come.
But, as I should have known, it was a blast.
One of the great benefits of having my particular brand of pessimism in this particular gig is that, even though I should know better, I am always joyfully surprised by how real and how really incredible is the community of people The Pillar has turned into.
When JD and I started this thing five years ago with a pair of laptops and small overdraft, we had the real belief that the Church needed serious and seriously faithful investigative journalism; that love for the institution and the hierarchy wasn’t incompatible with a commitment to the truth and to the nobility to which the Church is called.
That was what we believed — and still do. But what I hoped, back in 2021, was that this project might stay afloat just long enough for me to finish reporting on the Vatican financial scandal, which was kind of my professional baby. It was a guarded hope, because we knew that the only way this thing would fly is if enough people believed the same things we do, and were committed to them too.
Five years later, the financial scandal trial is still very much going — more on that in a minute — and so is The Pillar. I’m still here, 275 or so Friday newsletters later, because of the people who showed up last night, and who show up here for us and with us, month in and month out.
Thank you guys. I mean it. We can work as hard as we can, write as much as we can, and millions of people can read it, but none of it works, and none of it would happen without the handful of you who are really, truly, in this with us.
You know who you are, because it says so right here.
You guys always surprise me, but I never take you for granted. Thanks again.
OK, here’s the news.
The News
Pope Leo XIV has invited the presidents of the world’s episcopal conferences to meet in Rome in October 2026 “to proceed, in mutual listening, to a synodal discernment on the steps to be taken in order to proclaim the Gospel to families today.”
He announced the gathering in a March 19 letter commemorating the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia, saying the meeting should take place “in light of Amoris laetitia and taking into account what is currently being done in the local Churches.”
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The Vatican City Court of Appeal issued a decision Tuesday ordering a review of the investigation and indictment which opened the landmark financial crimes trial in 2022.
The March 17 decision clears the way for new litigation of the evidence and charges brought against nine people convicted by a Vatican court in 2024.
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I’m not sure how to sum up the significance of the decision’s precedent which the judges appear to have set here.
What the judges have done, it seems to me, is to subject papal acts of governance to the ordinary process of judicial review in the city state. If left unchallenged, it could dramatically revise how papal authority is exercised in the Vatican.
We’re going to talk more about this in a minute.
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India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party is seeking to make new inroads in the heartland of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church.
In the southern state of Kerala, where the Syro-Malabar Church is based, the BJP is fielding Christian candidates in four pivotal constituencies — which is definitely something of a departure for the party.
If the BJP were to win in these four constituencies, it would signal a political transformation in the area known as the Syro-Malabar Belt. So, what’s the background and will the BJP’s new strategy succeed?
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The European Union’s highest court ruled this week that a German Catholic association was wrong to fire an employee solely because she had formally left the Church.
The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled March 17 that the Katholische Schwangerschaftsberatung, a pregnancy counseling service, had discriminated against the woman because it also employed non-Catholics.
The case raises sensitive issues for the Catholic Church in Germany — one of the country’s largest employers — about disaffiliation as the grounds for dismissal and how the country’s church tax is levied on families.
This is a very interesting case — read all about it here.
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The Shrine of St. Joseph in St. Louis in the city’s downtown area may or may not be on your radar, but it should be.
Founded by the Jesuits to serve the local German immigrant community in the 1840s, St. Joseph’s Parish at first resembled many other Catholic parish communities at the time.
But in the decades that followed, it gained a local reputation for miraculous occurrences.
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Double think
As you might imagine, I have been giving a lot of thought to the Vatican City appeals court judges and their… bold decision to subject a papal act of governance to judicial review. I’ve read the ruling a dozen times now, translating it over and over so to satisfy myself I understand what they are getting at and how they are getting there.
As a journalist, I did feel a grim sense of vindication, since it was in this newsletter just a few weeks ago that I predicted this trial, on these grounds, was shaping into an assault on the principle of absolute papal sovereignty.
As you might expect, given my previous assessment of the arguments at play, my initial reaction to the ruling was, as a canon lawyer, pretty negative. The Bishop of Rome is either absolutely the head of the city state or he absolutely isn’t — and if it’s the latter, it erodes entirely the whole purpose of the Vatican as a territory and legal jurisdiction, as well as our fundamental ecclesiology of papal governance.
That being said, credit where it is due to the judges. As well as I can parse their thinking here they seem to have done everything they can to judge the validity of a papal act of governance while loudly protesting they wouldn’t dream of doing any such thing. Except I’m not sure any of it holds water legally or logically.
Put as simply as I can, here’s what I think they have done:
Pope Francis issued a rescript (an executive order, if that makes things simpler), which of its canonical legal nature is something that grants a dispensation from following some aspect or requirements of the law.
In this case, the rescript authorized the Vatican City Promoter of Justice to conduct a confidential investigation into the Secretariat of State’s financial affairs “by summary proceedings” instead of by a “formal investigation” — the latter having certain legal procedural requirements attached to it.
The judges ruled that while Pope Francis might have thought he was placing a rescript/executive order, what he did was create an alternative mechanism for criminal investigations — in doing so, they said, he created a new law, exercising not his supreme executive power but his supreme legislative power.
With me so far? OK.
Then the judges argued that since it isn’t a rescript (even though Francis wrote “RESCRIPTUM” in big capital letters across the top) but a law, the law has to be published publicly to have effect.
Of course, they said, it isn’t that the pope couldn’t change the legal requirements for publishing a law if he wanted to, it’s just he didn’t in this case (because, you know, he wasn’t passing a law he was placing an executive order — we know this because, again, he literally wrote the word RESCRIPT right at the top). So the result was that when the promoter of justice used the permission — Francis says rescript, the judges say law — to conduct his investigation, it was legally “ineffective” because of the lack of publication.
Now, the judges didn’t do anything so crazy as to come right out and say Francis tried to pass an invalid law. They appear to have bent over backwards to say the “law” isn’t itself exactly invalid, because the pope can’t possibly govern invalidly, it’s just that the nature of the circumstances left it “ineffective” for the person trying to use it.
And they included a whole bunch of sweet-sounding tendentious judicial flummery about how “these findings do not, nor could they, affect the value and nature of the Rescripta. They are, in fact, the legitimate form of expression of the powers of the Supreme Pontiff.”
It all sounds very respectful, except they absolutely challenged the nature and value of the rescript in question, since they redefined its nature as “not a rescript but a law” and assigned it the value of having “ineffective” effects.
So, according to my best and most generous reading, that’s what the judges did. They coined a kind of dubious judicial doublethink in which they simultaneously held Pope Francis to be incapable of invalidly acting, by virtue of his supreme governing power, but that his act of governance was still somehow invalid. SHAZAM!
It’s a nifty slight of hand, but I think this is… problematic.
We can look at the problems here as general and particular.
In particular, I think it’s just nonsense as it relates to the specific question of the rescript in question.
No reasonable person could read the three whole lines of text and conclude “yeah, Francis was aiming to pass a new law here.” He was manifestly writing investigators a permission slip to allow them to pursue their investigation with maximum latitude and discretion in a single specific case — a dispensation from the laws of ordinary procedure. A rescript.
You can argue that this is no way to run a generationally important criminal investigation, and that there is no person more likely to abuse such latitude to comically disastrous effects than Alessandro Diddi. I am here for both those arguments. But those are questions of discretionary judgement, not the nature of what Francis did and his legal capacity to do it.
In general, the problem is more existential.
The judges subjected a papal act of governance to judicial review on procedural grounds — was it a law, technically speaking, and was it enacted in a way which gave it technical effect — they offered no judgement about the rights or wrongs of what he wanted to achieve and his right to pursue that end.
At the level of pure concept, I don’t have an issue with papal acts of governance concerning the city state being subject to strictly procedural judicial review.
As Pope Leo said just last weekend, quoting Aquinas, defined justice as constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum unicuique tribuendi, the constant and perpetual will to give to each person what is due to them. People have a right to be governed coherently, and to have authority exercised over them in a manner that they can understand so that they in turn can fulfill their obligation to comply.
If the pope has the right to govern absolutely the Vatican, then the people living and working there have the right to understand what his laws are, the better to observe them.
The problem here is not the principle of erecting a “coherence test” to acts of governance to assess properly their ability to be received according to the processes laid out by the popes’ own laws. Given everything we have seen and heard of Pope Leo, he seems to place a real premium on good governance and the proper administration of justice and law — I’m all for it and I couldn’t be more squarely behind him.
The problem is that the judges of the Court of Appeal have arrogated this authority to test the force and effectiveness of papal governance to themselves. That is a big deal. That is something which I think would be deeply problematic to let go unchallenged.
If this ruling goes unchallenged in the current trial, and isn’t brought before the Court of Cassation for speedy review, I would really really really like something from Pope Leo himself, a legal act of the kind and clarity which these judges will recognize and accept, explaining in small words for the benefit of all, that either he explicitly endorses and sanates this act of judicial overreach, or does not.
If we don’t get some kind of clarity, I fear this decision — presumably meant to bring clarity and coherence to a messy case — will ultimately lead to legal anarchy in Vatican City.
You might think I’m overselling this. But I really don’t think I am.
Double standards
Finally, staying on the subject of this week’s appellate court ruling and legal chaos, please allow me to illustrate what I mean.
For almost as long as the Secretariat of State’s financial crimes trial has been going on, I have been simultaneously covering the repeated attempts by Libero Milone, the Vatican’s first auditor general, to sue the same Vatican department for wrongful dismissal.
The connective tissue of the two cases is, of course, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who as sostituto authorized the various fiscal shenanigans which led to the London property fiasco and much else besides, and was responsible in 2017 for having Milone detained by Vatican cops and forced to resign his post under threat of criminal prosecution.
That isn’t, to be clear, me editorializing, that was Becciu’s public statement on the event at the time, which he proudly owned, saying the auditor was “spying” on his financial affairs. Like, you know, the ones he now faces criminal charges over.
Anyway, Milone has been in a kind of Kafka-esque legal mirror world to Becciu as he attempts to clear his professional name.
As of this week’s ruling, Becciu’s lawyers have successfully got the appeal judges to agree that its a legal sine qua non for all the evidence to be made available in order for the trial to proceed.
Becciu’s lawyers have, again thanks to this week’s order, prevailed in overturning a direct, personal act of governance by the pope which was used, he’s argued, to his unfair detriment.
Milone’s last appeal was rejected by Vatican City judges because, and I am not making this up, he didn’t sue Becciu first as an individual, rather than suing the Secretariat of State, for something Becciu did in office, using the powers of that office, which he then publicly said he did as an act of that office shortly before being promoted.
My point here is it’s great to say we need proper procedure, and protection of rights, and the constant vigilant pursuit of justice with balance and an eye for the common good and the credibility of the institutions.
I could not endorse all of that more strongly.
Just once, though, I’d like to see any of those noble principles brought to bear in a Vatican court when it’s a layman in front of the judges instead of a cardinal. You know what I mean?
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
That's surely "Pillar reader Cardinal Becciu"?
"ultimately lead to legal anarchy in Vatican City."
-But it's based on the Italian legal system. The insanity and anarchy is baked in from the start.