A Loose Canon?

The Economist
February 6, 2014

http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2014/02/church-laws-and-state-law

AS I said in my initial response, this week's UN report on child abuse in the Catholic church seemed both too broad and too narrow to address this enormously grave subject. But the report does at least throw into sharper relief a problem of our times: the difficulty that arises whenever a religious institution practises a body of law which co-exists with, and sometimes competes with, secular law.

The legal system used by the Catholic church is known as canon law. Many of its provisions are of little interest, arguably, to people outside the church; they concern, for example, the relations between different levels of church authority, and the prerequisites for a marriage which the church can recognise. But canon law also provides for the investigation of serious misdeeds, including sexual ones, by clergy. It has no power to send anybody to prison but it can be used to defrock a priest or excommunicate a lay-person. So as well as exercising full state power in one small place—the Vatican City—the pope and his team do have a say, putting it mildly, in what happens in many other places.

Now there have been several times in the last decade or so, as abuse scandals were erupting in one country after another, when the Holy See insisted that it could only take full responsibility for what happened in the small patch of Rome that it fully controlled. Accurately enough, the UN retorts that Catholic leadership must also be held to account for things that happen under its influence, and under its rules, across the world. After all, the Holy See is a player in diplomatic affairs (with permanent observer status in the General Assembly and full participation in many UN conventions) by virtue of its global role, not just its administration of a small piece of real estate.

These days, in every country where the influence of the Catholic faith is strong, the church faces a dilemma which the child-abuse revelations have made razor-sharp. Does it cling as long as possible to the privileges and immunities it has traditionally enjoyed under canon law, or does it renounce those privileges and turn all investigations over to the state authorities? If it insists on investigating child-abuse cases internally, then its responsibility for whatever horrors (including cronyism and cover-ups) are ultimately uncovered will be all the greater. But if it accepts the principle that secular state institutions must have absolute primacy in at every stage then it loses all control over the fate of people under its authority.

As is pointed out by Marco Ventura, a professor who thinks creatively about canon law, the nature of the dilemma varies from country to country. In Italy, Spain and Germany, the terms of the church-state relationship still give the church a degree of autonomy and immunity which it is unlikely to give up voluntarily. But in Ireland, the history of church interference in the political and judicial system has been so dreadful that the state has fought back; it has now taken an unchallenged lead in investigating both child-abuse itself and the way in which perpetrators were protected. In that situation, there is not much the church can do except its lick its wounds and ask where it went wrong. Why, some may ask, does the church bother with canon law at all in the 21st century? Some say that having its own rule-book helps it to function in places like China where the governments want to interfere in church life. Whatever the Vatican decides about the future of its legal system, it won't be a one-size-fits-all answer. But the church will find itself under ever-increasing pressure to justify the existence of its own rule-book, and the UN report is only one sign of that trend.