Case puts Holy See under spotlight
Pope is both victim and judge
There was a time when a Vatican trial could end with a heretic being burned at the stake. Paolo Gabriele doesn’t risk nearly as dire a fate, but he and the Holy See face a very public airing over the gravest secu- rity breach in the Vatican’s recent history following the theft and leaking of the pope’s personal papers.
Gabriele, the pope’s oncetrusted butler, goes on trial Saturday, accused of stealing the pope’s documents and passing them off to a journalist — a sensational, Hollywood-like scandal that exposed power struggles, intrigue and allegations of corruption in the highest levels of the Catholic Church.
Gabriele is charged with aggravated theft and faces up to four years in prison if convicted by the three-judge
The pope can’t tell the tribunal what to do. GIOVANNI GIACOBBE
Vatican tribunal. He has already confessed and asked to be pardoned by the pope — something most Vatican watchers say is a given if he is convicted —making the trial almost a formality.
It’s the most high-profile case to come to the Vatican tribunal since its creation with the 1929 birth of the Vatican City state.
But, trials are nothing new at the Vatican: In 2011 alone, 640 civil cases and 226 penal cases were processed by the Vatican’s judiciary, though only a handful actually came to trial.
Yet this case will cast an unusually bright spotlight on the Vatican’s legal system, which is based on the 19th-century Italian criminal code, and the rather unique situation in which the pope is essentially the victim and supreme judge in this case.
The Vatican is an elective absolute monarchy, with the pope having full executive, legislative and judicial authority. He delegates that power through executive appointments, legislative commissions and tribunals.
But he can intervene to stop a trial from starting, can pardon someone once convicted and the sentence is issued in his name. Giovanni Giacobbe, the Vatican’s appeals court prosecutor, insisted that despite the pope’s authority, Vatican judges are wholly independent.
“The judges have never received pressure to decide in one direction or another,” he said at a Vatican briefing Thursday. “The pope can’t tell the tribunal what to do.”