DEFENSE OF THE SOVEREIGN PERSONALITY OF THE HOLY SEE

This juridico-philosophical argument is a response to the juridical argument against the sovereignty of the Holy See and for its status as an “instrumentality” of the State of Vatican City, both objectively and specifically for the purpose of civil suits in American courts against the Holy See in matters of clerical sexual abuse.

1.     The State of Vatican City (SCV) was created by a bilateral treaty (Lateran Pacts) between the Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See, both acting as sovereign entities. Therefore, the Holy See is juridically prior to the SCV as a sovereign entity with concurrent sovereign personality equivalent to states under international law and by that fact constitutes it as a sui generis sovereign state.

2.     Therefore the Holy See cannot be an instrumentality of the SCV, since an instrument which is created by a given entity cannot be temporally prior to such entity, for the created cannot have existed before the creator.

3.     But the Holy See existed before the creation of the SCV and existed independent of it until 1929.

4.     Therefore the SCV was created as an instrumentality of the Holy See, in order to protect the sovereign personality of the Holy See, in absolute independence of the Pope, and the salvific mission of the Catholic Church against temporal sovereigns.

5.     Therefore suits against the Holy See as instrumentality of the SCV are absurd and should not be allowed.

6.     It also follows that the Holy See is the only sovereign personality of “The Vatican” entity, and the SCV is an instrumentality to ensure the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See (historical evidence of this being the “States of the Church” themselves were created in the 700s as a protection for the Church and the Papacy against temporal sovereigns; this has always been the function of the terratoriality of the Holy See and was the reason why the Roman Question had to be resolved with a grant of sovereign terratoriality).

 

Written 16 August 2013, 7:24 am.

This argument is written in response to the argument set forth by James Fantau in Rethinking the Soverign Status of the Holy See: Towards a Greater Equality of States and Greater Protection of Citizens in United States Courts, 19 Card. J. Int'l & Comp. L. 487 (2011).

Accessed in 2013 @ http://www.cjicl.com/uploads/2/9/5/9/2959791/cjicl_19.2_fantau_note.pdf

 

Rights, Duties, and the Justice of Criminal Law

The debate surrounding treating juveniles as adults in certain cases in criminal law—be it indictment as an adult or being sent to an adult prison—misses the fundamental injustice of the thing: juveniles should not be treated as adults anymore than adults should be treated as juveniles.

Although the common law is less emphatic than the civil law on this point, physical persons are classified into different legal categories. Two such categories are minor (juvenile) and adult (major). With each of these categories come certain duties and corresponding rights. It is therefore unjust to attribute to a minor certain duties juridically attributable to an adult or to deprive him of certain rights juridically deprived of an adult.

With every duty comes a right. Hence  with the duty to follow the law and submit to adult punishment for its breach comes the right to vote, an active voice in society and a corresponding duty to behave for its good. But the minor does not have this right, nor a host of other rights, and therefore does not have the same obligation under the law to submit to the same degree of punishment. To impose a duty without granting a corresponding right is a contravention of justice.

Further, if a juvenile is capable of committing the same heinous crimes that an adult is capable of, and therefore has the same degree of rationality for the purposes of law, then the deprivation of suffrage to juveniles is thereby unjustifiable. The degree of one’s rationality under the law is an all-or-nothing category; adults are presumed to have greater rationality and are therefore accorded greater duties and rights, while juveniles and the mentally retarded are correspondingly accorded fewer duties and rights due to their diminished rational faculties.

It is patently unjust to categorize a person as an adult for the purposes of duty but as a juvenile for the purposes of right. A person is a person; he is either an adult or a juvenile. Justice does not recognize personal duality. Neither should law.