(Geraldina Boni, Manuel Ganarin e Alberto Tomer. Stato, Chiese e pluralismo confessionale).
ABSTRACT: The clamor that has been caused by the sequence of events
resulting in the judgement by the Vatican City State Tribunal of December 16,
2023 is well reflected in the name itself of ‘trial of the century’ that is commonly
used by the international press in its regard: a sequence of events which has
aroused serious doubts concerning a procedural development that was
characterized by many gray areas, which, by casting themselves onto the tiny
State beyond the Tiber, also affects a plurality of levels from a legal point of
view. The essay (that was born as a pro veritate opinion) intends to address these
critical issues and to investigate their extension: starting from what emerges
from canon law (that is notoriously “the first normative source and the first
interpretative reference criterion” of the Vatican legal system, but still has been
the ‘great absent’ in this framework), according to which the principles of due
process that here appear to be at least questioned are directly linked to divine
natural law, up to the implications of the increasingly organic participation of
the Vatican State in the international community, with the obligations that these
dynamics inevitably imply. By comparing the problems of the trial in question
with such parameters, the examination not only explores the depth of the
above-mentioned deficiencies, but also highlights the risks that their
consequences may entail for the existence itself of the Vatican ‘Stateinstrument’.