Protection
The Vatican has sovereign immunity that protects it from being sued in local courts over sexual abuse cases, the European Court of Human Rights said in a chamber ruling on Tuesday.
Why? Why does the Vatican have sovereign immunity?
It dismissed a case brought by 24 French, Belgian and Dutch nationals, who said they were sexually abused by Catholic priests when they were children.
The class-action suit sought €10,000 compensation for each victim but the Ghent Court of First Instance said in 2013 that it did not have jurisdiction over the Holy See. The applicants had argued that they had been deprived of access to a court.
The European court agreed with the Belgian court that the Holy see enjoyed “diplomatic immunity” and “state privileges under international law”.
Sure, a small neighborhood of Rome has “diplomatic immunity” and “state privileges” because Mister God said so, it’s written down right here. Because of this immunity it gets to rape kids whenever it feels like it.
It’s not the final word though.
The European court’s judgement is not final, a press statement explained. Any party to the case can request that it be referred to the Grand Chamber of the Court within three months.
Do that.
Yeah, whoever had the brilliant idea of making the Vatican its own country may have foreseen just this. Clever, no?
That would be Benito Mussolini, who cut a deal with the then-Pope to give each other mutual recognition (along with a few other details) that helped drag Italy and the Papal States out of the last bit of Renaissance diplomacy that they’d still been ensnared in. Hitler also signed a pact with the Church, his very first in fact, which strengthened the Church’s position in German society and offered Hitler’s thuggish regime a big boost in legitimacy.
Thereafter, incidentally, the Catholic Church held special prayers on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday until 1945. Catholic priests were also responsible for many of the Rat Lines which shuttled so many Nazis to the nurturing juntas of Latin America.
Hunnnnnnnnnnh. I need to read up on that.
Yeah, most of that I did know, except the Mussolini bit (I imagine I could have found that by googling, but didn’t do it). Ophelia, you might be interested in a book, Hitler’s Pope, by John Cornwell.
makes a note of it
I think I’d encountered most of that before but it hadn’t sunk in. I know I’d seen the Mussolini part before but…nope, still didn’t stick.
You might also want to check out The Pope and Mussolini by David Kertzer.
And to complete the triumvirate, the Catholic Church was heavily entwined with the Franco regime. My wife was telling me the other day that in her grandparents’ village in the mountains of León, kids had to bow and kiss the priest’s hand whenever they passed on the street. They didn’t do that in her city (probably because there were too many priests and too many kids), so one time she walked past the priest and got a cuff on the head from him for her insolence.
Roger Williams does not get the recognition he deserves.
That I did know. I was a bit obsessed with the Spanish Civil War once upon a time. Still far from bored by it.
Have you read The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston? It’s an excellent antidote to the bothsidesism you occasionally hear, and it also provides some context to Orwell’s reporting.
No, but I’ve read quite a bit of other context to Orwell’s reporting, i.e. what Stalin was up to in Spain, the Stalinist-Trotskyist divide, the show trials, the Popular Front, etc etc etc. The war over trans dogma reminds me of the Trotskyists-Stalinists fight in a lot of ways – formerly reasonable people becoming idiotically bafflingly willing to wave away whatever doesn’t fit cozily.