The problem for the Church’s life, and for the application of justice, comes when the Pope appears to convey disregard or indifference for the uniform application of the law—even laws he has written—choosing to ignore them or apply them to some while reserving different treatment for others.
The role of law in the life of the Catholic Church has a long and complicated history. Debates about St. Paul’s apparent dichotomy between law and spirit have raged in Christianity for two millennia. But the place and role of the rule of law, as pointed out by Pope Francis, is clear: it is at the service of human dignity and, therefore, an effective tool of the highest law, salus animarum.
But in the life of the Church in the 21st century, there has been a consistent decline of the rule of law in favor of an approach that can appear to be rule-by-caprice. This inconsistent approach to governance, sadly, is not exclusively the product of crisis. While much of what the casual observer can notice is the fruit of repeated attempts to respond to various crises in the Church—usually sexual ones—the more careful observer recognizes that capriciousness has also been written into law. It is difficult to express just how wide a divide exists between the words of Pope Francis cited above and the reality in the Church’s juridical and administrative praxis today. It is not lawlessness but, rather, the frequent instrumentalization of law into a tool at the service of power.
Anecdotally, arbitrary decisions by figures within the Roman Curia are not new. What is novel are the cases in which that fickleness, even at the highest level, has become public knowledge.
Perhaps the most well-known example is the case of Father Marko Rupnik. Much remains to be seen about how that case is ultimately resolved, as the former Jesuit priest has been accused by dozens of women of sexual violence and abuses of the sacraments. While there was an initial process for crimes against the sacrament of penance, and the censure of excommunication was imposed, the excommunication was lifted in a matter of weeks. Worse, at least in the eyes of the public, was the decision of the Jesuits to expel Father Rupnik from their community, thus allowing him to incardinate in a diocese and exercise unrestricted public ministry, despite the fact that the accusations of these dozens of women apparently remained unexamined.
While the case of Father Rupnik represents for many a total failure on the part of Church leadership to apply the law in the protection of the dignity of the consecrated women who have described suffering horrific, even sacrilegious acts, at the hands of the charismatic artist, the matter apparently remains under examination.3 Hence, there is still hope for a just resolution. Nevertheless, even if justice were to be done, grave harm has already been done to the confidence of the people of God by the, at best, suspect adherence to the rule of law.
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