Pope Francis is claiming legal immunity as a head of state to fight a damages claim brought by two Aboriginal men over the Vatican’s failure to protect them from the priest who sexually abused them as children.
Speaking to this masthead from London, he said the case was likely to gain international attention. “If it does reach the stage of answering the vexed question of whether the Vatican is in practice a state, it could have considerable consequences,” Robertson said. This argument, which mirrors legal defences the church has successfully employed in Europe and the US, has never been tested in Australia, where decades of clerical abuse of children and the church’s “catastrophic failure of leadership” were exposed and documented by a royal commission and state-based parliamentary inquiries.
London-based barrister Geoffrey Robertson KC says the Vatican’s assumed statehood is “a matter of “continuing controversy.”Comensoli and the Pope’s representative in Australia, Apostolic Nuncio Charles Balvo, did not respond to questions from this masthead. Pope Francis has previously urged the church to submit to aThe current legal status of the Vatican as an entity with “the resemblance to statehood” was established by the 1929signed by Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI.
The lawyer for the two Aboriginal men, Angela Sdrinis, said Pope Francis had a vicarious case to answer for John Paul II’s inaction during that time.
Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)
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