How will Vatican judges hear Leo’s call for ‘balance’ and ‘common good’ in cases?
With several high profile appeals being heard this year, Pope Leo’s first address to the city state judiciary comes at an interesting time.
Pope Leo XIV opened the judicial year of Vatican City on Sunday, praising the work of the city state’s tribunal as an essential service to truth and justice, but also to unity — institutional and personal — at the heart of the Church.
Papal addresses to open the judicial years for Vatican City and the Roman curia often give interesting indications of different popes’ priorities, and the philosophies of law and justice they wish to see the courts’ judges reason with.
With several high profile cases being heard at appeal this year, though, Leo’s first address to the city state judicial apparatus comes at an especially interesting time. What might his words mean for the major cases currently before a court in the Vatican?
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“Authentic justice, however, cannot be understood solely in the technical terms of positive law,” noted the pope. “In the light of the mission that guides the action of the Church, it also appears as the exercise of an ordered form of charity, capable of safeguarding and promoting communion.”
Throughout Leo’s address, the pope — himself a canonist — repeatedly highlighted the importance of the legal systems and application of law in the city state operating to create social coherence, not merely dispense judicial verdicts.
“Authentic love, in fact, is never arbitrary or disordered,” he said, “but recognises the truth of relationships and the dignity of every person. For this reason, justice is not merely a legal principle, but a virtue that helps to build communion and to stabilize the life of the community.”
Quoting the legal maxim of Aquinas, ius iustitia ad bonum commune ordinatur, Leo observed that “in the fullness of charity, justice finds its most authentic fulfilment.” The pope went on to emphasize repeatedly “the relationship between the administration of justice and the value of unity.”
“Justice, when it is exercised with balance and fidelity to the truth, becomes one of the most stable factors of unity within the community,” said Leo. “It does not divide, but strengthens the bonds that unite people and helps to build the mutual trust that makes orderly coexistence possible.”
“The administration of justice is not, in fact, limited to the resolution of disputes, but contributes to the protection of the legal order and the credibility of institutions,” Leo said.
Of course, as many listening to the address knew, the credibility of the city state’s institutions has been directly challenged in recent cases — and in the arguments of some before the court, the very notions of justice and due process are now on trial in the Vatican.
Most immediately, there is the appeal trial of the Secretariat of State’s complex financial scandal, which led to the 2023 conviction of Cardinal Angelo Becciu and eight others.
Although convictions were secured by the prosecution during the trial, judges went out of their way not to uphold the arguments of Alessandro Diddi, the city state’s promoter of justice, and they especially ignored his theory of a single grand conspiracy among the defendants.
Diddi’s arguments and methods, including his collaboration with a star witness against Becciu, attracted considerable criticism during the trial.
Judges in the appeal tribunal will also be mulling the application of justice with “balance” in the financial scandal case when it comes to the conviction of Raphaele Mincion, the former investment manager for the Secretariat of State who, in the course of an acrimonious separation from the Vatican, sold the secretariat the infamous London building, the purchase of which triggered the criminal complaints which led to the trial.
Mincione was convicted by the Vatican court in 2023 of embezzlement for participating in the illegal misappropriation of Vatican funds in a deal which placed some 200 million euros under the investment manager’s control on the Secretariat of State’s behalf.
Mincione has strenuously denied any criminal action or intent, arguing that he had no way of knowing funds being invested by the Holy See’s governing secretariat had been illegally appropriated. Last year, he filed a commercial fraud lawsuit against the Secretariat of State and two Swiss banks over his dealings with the Vatican, having already won a previous lawsuit against the Vatican in UK court.
In June 2024, Mincione has also filed a formal complaint at the United Nations, alleging his rights have been denied in in the Vatican legal process and that he and his legal team were “the victims of interference, if not intimidation, and it may be that this was at the instigation of the Office of the Promoter of Justice or another organ of the Holy See.”
The substance of Mincione’s complaint against his conviction — that he was found guilty of managing misappropriated money for the Secretariat of State under Becciu — is that there was no way for him to have known the Vatican’s own governing department and second most senior official was breaking the law, even if his involvement did fall foul of Vatican legislation.
Given the court sentenced him to five years in prison and made him party to a group liability for hundreds of millions of euros, it will be interesting to see what the appeal judges make of Mincione’s case, in the light of Pope Leo’s assertion that “authentic justice cannot be understood solely in the technical terms of positive law,” but that justice is “an ordered form of charity,” “in the light of the mission that guides the action of the Church.”
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Of course, the court will also be aware that many around the Roman curia are expecting — in some cases demanding — a finding of “charity” in the case of the financial crimes trial’s star defendant, Cardinal Becciu.
The cardinal, who is also facing a years-long prison sentence if his conviction is upheld, is something of a photo-negative of Mincione’s case. His arguments in court over his many financial crimes have essentially suggested he wasn’t ignorant of Vatican law but considered himself above its authority, due to the seniority of his former role as papal chief of staff.
He has previously dismissed evidence that he funnelled hundreds of thousands of euros in Church funds to the bank accounts of members of his own family — where Italian authorities say it disappeared in a coordinated fraud — as “normal,” even if it was against the law.
Similarly, Becciu has skated over disclosures in court that he secretly recorded phone calls with Pope Francis while appearing to make veiled threats to secure papal intervention in his case.
The ultimate source of Becciu’s discontent has often appeared to be a resentment of a 2021 legal reform stripping cardinals of their previously privileged exemption from standing trial in ordinary Vatican court, and said publicly that the lesson of his subjection to trial is that the pope should no longer be the head of the city state.
For many Vatican watchers, the final result of Becciu’s trial will prove a wider litmus test for whether senior curial cardinals are subject to the same laws and punishments as laymen. Framed that way, Leo’s repeated insistence on the necessity of judicial institutions and processes serving the “common good” and the building up of society, as well as safeguarding the credibility of the legal order, could throw the cardinal’s somewhat individualistic notions of privilege and status into sharper relief.
Closely connected in substance, but entirely separate in terms of legal procedure, meanwhile, is the ongoing appeal of the Vatican’s first and former auditor general, Libero Milone, whose claim for damages for wrongful dismissal has now been rejected by two courts of Vatican City. His final avenue of appeal is the city state’s Court of Cassation.
Milone has been suing or attempting to sue the Holy See’s Secretariat of State for wrongful dismissal since November 2022, over his departure from office in 2017, when he was forced to resign by then-sostituto Cardinal Angelo Becciu, under threat of criminal prosecution for “spying” — Milone says “auditing” — the financial affairs of senior officials.
Along the way, the auditor has faced a slew of legal objections to his request to be heard in full, facing arguments that at time seemed Kafka-esque.
First, lawyers for the Secretary of State first argued that he hadn’t filed his suit within the necessary time limits, though a lower court dismissed that objection, accepting that Milone spent five years asking for out-of-court mediation — and were essentially strung along by the Secretariat of State for that time.
Finally, the Secretariat of State argued that while Cardinal Becciu may have forced Milone’s departure, and while it may have been wrongful, if he did, it would have been an ultra vires act by the cardinal and therefore the Secretariat of State cannot be held responsible for it.
Despite all that, Milone has repeatedly stated that he is only seeking a “just settlement” for the damage suffered to his professional reputation and the chance to restart his career. Sources close to the case have repeatedly told The Pillar that under Pope Francis there was no openness in the Vatican any kind of mediated settlement, with figures as senior as Cardinal Pietro Parolin reportedly claiming it was the previous pope who ultimately refused to engage with the former auditor.
Throughout Milone’s various appeals, no one has emerged from the Vatican to publicly claim the former auditor was justly ousted from his role, or treated fairly — or even reasonably — in the process.
On the contrary, in Becciu’s criminal trial, lawyers for the Secretariat of State essentially conceded Milone’s central argument, that his office was empowered to audit Becciu’s former department and had financial oversight of it — which Becciu publicly branded as illegal “spying” while forcing Milone out.
While officials around the Vatican usually appear empathetic to Milone’s plight, though, no legal expense or argument has been spared in preventing him from even getting a full hearing.
Milone, perhaps more than any other person caught up in Vatican legal proceedings, may be justified in taking personally Pope Leo’s observation that “justice in the Church is not merely a technical application of the law, but a ministry in the service of the People of God” which “requires not only legal expertise, but also wisdom, balance and a constant search for truth in charity.”
How far any of these papal exhortations and meditations on justice make it into the courtrooms of Vatican City, and the verdicts they deliver this year, will likely provide the backdrop for the most important stories to come out of the Vatican this year.