Don’t be daft — you can’t put the Pope on trial

Benedict XVI’s handling of sex abuse cases is not above criticism, says John L. Allen Jr. But the campaign for him to be hauled before an international court is ill informed

A Vatican spokesperson recently laughed off the campaign to issue an arrest warrant for Pope Benedict XVI when he visits the United Kingdom in September, describing it as an idea designed to make a splash in public opinion rather than something ‘serious’.

One understands that response. Whatever you think about Pope Benedict or Catholicism, it does seem a bit over-heated to suggest that international tribunals designed to prosecute mass-murderers and architects of genocide should go after someone who’s never even been accused of complicity in any instance of sexual abuse, but, at most, of failing to act swiftly enough to stop it.

Yet the ‘Put the Pope on trial’ drumbeat struck up last week by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson among others, nonetheless deserves a serious response, because it’s premised both on a misunderstanding of international law and a misreading of Benedict XVI’s record on the sexual abuse crisis facing the Catholic Church.

On the legal front, Robertson and others have suggested that the pope is not entitled to sovereign immunity as a head of state because the idea of statehood for the Vatican is a relic from the pre-modern era. Two basic mistakes are encoded in that assumption.

First, statehood belongs not to ‘the Vatican’ — a 108-acre physical location in Rome — but to the ‘Holy See’, the designation for the papacy as the central government of the Catholic Church. Second, the Holy See’s sovereign status is hardly in decline. Under Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the number of nations with which the Holy See enjoys diplomatic relations reached all-time highs, now totalling 178.