Vatican City as a Free Society: Legal Order and Political Theology, By Carlo Lottieri (University of Siena and Istituto Bruno Leoni)
Despite its official self-description, the State of Vatican City is not a State. In 1929, it adopted this name because the 20th century legal culture was not in condition to accept the idea of a political institution that refuses the State model. With the Lateran Treaty, post-Christian idea of secular sovereignty did not modify the theology of the Catholic Church. For this reason, Vatican City is not a sovereign State. On the contrary, it is possible to put Vatican City in the set of legal and economic entities marked by a voluntary collaboration of individuals (as the families, the companies, the associations, and so on). Vatican City is the outcome of free and spontaneous relationships, in absence of any kind of violence, and there is a big difference between this type of interactions and the bounds imposed by a State with the violence and the threat. If Catholic people of the different countries would understand the nature of the organization charged to defend the independence of the Pope and his preaching, they could act with more determination for the transformation of their political institutions. The hope to live in societies not completely dominated by an arrogant ruling class would be made more concrete. FULL PAPER
{ 14 comments }
First of all, despite what Mr Lottieri writes, the Vatican City State is an independent, sovereign state. There is a bit more than “self description” to it since
(1) the Holy See has been treated as sovereign since earliest times;
(2) it played a major role in the foundation of international law;
(3) with the loss of territorial sovereignty in 1870, it continued to be treated as sovereign by numerous states;
(4)In 1929 the Lateran Treaty with the Italian Kingdom it was recognized by Italy as a sovereign state and its territorial sovereignty over the Vatican city was also acknowledged;
(5) it enjoys reciprocal diplomatic relations
with 172 states;
(6) it has permanent observer status at the UN in a category until recently shared only by one other state, Switzerland (which opted for this status for the same reasons as the Holy See);
(7) it enjoys similar status in numerous other international bodies for which only states are eligible;
(8) it is a member of the International Postal Union;
(9) it strikes its own coins which are legal tender;
(10) it has a head of state and government and its envoys are treated as the envoys of a sovereign state by all the states with which it has relations.
Secondly, Mr Lottieri claims:
“Vatican City is the outcome of free and spontaneous relationships, in absence of any kind of violence, and there is a big difference between this type of interactions and the bounds imposed by a State with the violence and the threat.”
This is also false. The VCS relies for its protection on at least two armed corps (the largely ceremonial Swiss Guards and the Vigilanza) plus the assistance of the Italian state.
The main difference between the VCS and other states is that, due to its very small area, it has no private citizens. Every single Vatican citizen is either a government official or a dependant of such an official (the converse is not true: it is perfectly possible to work for the Vatican without being a citizen). Indeed, were it not for points 1-10 above, it would be possible to consider the VCS the largest NGO on the planet.
The VCS is therefore not “the outcome of free and spontaneous relationships” but rather the most (indeed, only) successful collectivist state in history.
Bruno Panetta
First of all, I should say that I am not a lawyer, and am far from sure if Vatican is actually a state or not – though the working paper made some convincing claims of its exceptional non-State-like character.
But the counter claims of Mr. Panetta didn’t really persuade me. Reading through points (1) to (10) they all really amount to Mr. Lottieri’s initial claim: that Vatican is widely accepted and percieved as a state. Some of the claims (especially (2)) speak more of Vatican’s influence than of its factual status. And as for point (9), I think many frequentants of this site certainy wouldn’t consider it a privilege of the state… but let us leave that talk to other threads.
As for part two, one of the characteristics of the modern state (as far as I understand it) is the monopoly over violence in its own borders. In this case, as it seems, there are several independent “producers” of violence (security/protection), certainly not under the complete control of this “state”. (Perhaps this is what Mr. Lottieri wished to say.) The details of their relationship and working are unknown to me, though.
But what is Vatican actually? It is, so much is sure, a community of people that embrace the Catholic teachings. It has apparently no permanent “nation” or group of people that could call themselves “Vaticanians”. The State of Vatican City is apparently not the main force in this state(?) – it “differs from the other States because it is object of the sovereignty of the Pontiff, and it is not a subject of sovereignty”.
If MR. Lottieri’s claims are correct, the “State of Vatican City” is an agency for Vatican pretending to be a state and managing international relations (by necessity a monopoly, since other states are monopolies, too, and seem to accept only monopolies as partners in this regard). Similar to the mentioned security forces that are protection agencies working for this community of people.
But I would like to hear the opinion of others, too.
The author has said some interesting things about the relationship between law and morality. Law does two things: it delineates acceptable from unacceptable behavior, providing sanctions for the latter, and it expresses the moral values of those who promulgate laws. We have an interesting situation in the US today where abortion, as is often said, “is the law of the land”. For those who view abortion as immoral, the fact that it is the “law of the land” means that the law of their country does not reflect their moral values, an intolerable situation. But what if the Supreme Court does what so many desire/dread: they reverse Roe v Wade. Those who hold with clear consciences that abortion is a moral action will find themselves in the same intolerable situation: the “law of the land” will not reflect THEIR moral values. Is the solution to merely fight for the high ground (or, in this case, the high court), and have it pass back and forth endlessly? Or is there another way out of this dilemma?
I think there is another way out. We have a parallel situation in the aftermath of the Reformation. There the divisions were along doctrinal lines. The resolution to the tumultuous conflict that resulted was to recognize (eventually) the right of all religions to exist, to recognize the human right of freedom of conscience in theological matters, and to thereby allow the creation of communities of believers (denominations) according to their consciences.
In the same way, we need to recognize now the human right to freedom of conscience in moral matters. But to do this we must be able to live within an environment where the “law follows the individual” (cf. article by Richard CB Johnsson), where, as another recent blog entry puts it, we have “polycentric laws”. We deserve, our human dignity demands, to live within a system where our laws reflect our morality, whatever it may be. Freedom of conscience must extend beyond theological matters to encompass moral ones as well. It therefore must allow the creation of communities of law, where the law reflects the moral values of the members of that community. And these communities must be non-territorial, non-coercive, completely voluntary, as are religious denominations.
Do we extend this tolerance to include the right of some individual or group to espouse murder as a morally valid option? Generally, where the law follows the individual, the defendant is tried according to HIS system of law, not the accused’s. The exception is in the case of murder. Then the accused is subject to the laws of the victim. That would mean that, if your laws allowed murder, and I murdered you, I would be tried according to your law. Oops!
The discussion of auctoritas (authority) is also very interesting, contrasting the Pope who exercises authority in the Church with political rulers who prefer to exercise power (potestas). The Pope’s only power is to exclude from the community of the Church, a power rarely used, and even then always due to a conscious choice made by the one who is excommunicated, or more correctly, has excommunicated himself.
The discussion of whether Vatican City State is really a state or not is not important. The importance of this article is the description of how it operates, how it rules by authority and not by the power of coercion. As such it is model for other human organizations.
Could I maintain the unborn baby that was aborted might consider murder as morally invalid, so if you did the abortion, you would be tried under that law?
Otherwise the “out” to the problem of murder is that you, as an individual, didn’t consider the victim to be a person, so you can’t tried for murder, because the victim has to be a person, not a nonentity.
I’ve already noted I could easily live in a system where I hold all property as being a commons – I could not be convicted of trespassing or stealing, or robbery for that matter. If I want something, I just take it.
Or some people would like to oppress you (they would call it doing good or social engineering – what we are doing to Iraq). You would say you find it intolerable to be controlled by such people, yet those people would find it intolerable to not be able to micromanage your life. So you do at least at one point have an objective morality – your “moral value” of individuality transcends all others – or you have nothing.
There is also no more reason to recognize the right for a religion to exist or freedom of conscience if we aren’t appealing to reason in the cases of abortion or murder.
Error can be tolerated, but it must not be mistaken for truth. Errors confined to your thoughts might cause your damnation, but otherwise don’t affect me (though I would point out that generally such errors don’t stay within people’s heads). If you look at Cyberspace, errors occur, but tend to be superceeded or corrected. Errors which damage the physical world or persons within are the material of law.
The Reformation was not a good thing. No two churches can agree on points of doctrine (they might say they agree on the important point, but if you push it, “importance” is subjective).
This is my objection to the multiple laws, enforcers, forms. If law is based on truth, it must be a unity – there can be only one right answer. If it is not based on truth, it will result in tyranny. Actually I don’t care about the form if it works and is enforcing the right thing.
Abortion is not a question of values, it is a question of truth. There is no authority in malformed consciences or erroroneous ideas. Law enforcement is power acting from authority.
On the LRCBlog, a birth and traditional baptism announcement (they let the church tell them what to do!) of a baby who will grow up to be anti-state also shows the difference between authority and power.
Could I maintain the unborn baby that was aborted might consider murder as morally invalid, so if you did the abortion, you would be tried under that law?
TZ, you could maintain it, but you could not prove it, and trials depend on things being proven, not merely maintained.
Otherwise the “out” to the problem of murder is that you, as an individual, didn’t consider the victim to be a person, so you can’t tried for murder, because the victim has to be a person, not a nonentity.
Well, that is exactly the “out” used by those who are pro-abortion. They deny that a fetus is a person. This was exactly the decision of Roe v Wade.
I’ve already noted I could easily live in a system where I hold all property as being a commons – I could not be convicted of trespassing or stealing, or robbery for that matter. If I want something, I just take it.
Couldn’t we all! How nice to be able to just take what we wanted. The downside, of course, is that, before long, there would be nothing left to take.
Or some people would like to oppress you (they would call it doing good or social engineering – what we are doing to Iraq). You would say you find it intolerable to be controlled by such people, yet those people would find it intolerable to not be able to micromanage your life. So you do at least at one point have an objective morality – your “moral value” of individuality transcends all others – or you have nothing.
Sorry; I really don’t understand what you are saying here.
There is also no more reason to recognize the right for a religion to exist or freedom of conscience if we aren’t appealing to reason in the cases of abortion or murder.
Who is not “appealing to reason”? Both pro-choice and anti-abortion partisans believe that they are being reasonable. As for recognizing religious freedom and the freedom of conscience, that cuts both ways. The rights apply to all equally.
Error can be tolerated, but it must not be mistaken for truth. Errors confined to your thoughts might cause your damnation, but otherwise don’t affect me (though I would point out that generally such errors don’t stay within people’s heads). If you look at Cyberspace, errors occur, but tend to be superceeded or corrected. Errors which damage the physical world or persons within are the material of law.
I agree with your first line. I believe that truth is objective, and I believe that error has consequences. And I believe that the search for truth is one of the most important things we do. But it is a process of discovery that we are all in together.
The Reformation was not a good thing. No two churches can agree on points of doctrine (they might say they agree on the important point, but if you push it, “importance” is subjective).
Have you ever heard the expression that “God can bring good from evil”? I would agree that in some ways the Reformation was not a good thing. Yet, had it not happened, we might never have discovered the truth about freedom of conscience.
This is my objection to the multiple laws, enforcers, forms. If law is based on truth, it must be a unity – there can be only one right answer. If it is not based on truth, it will result in tyranny. Actually I don’t care about the form if it works and is enforcing the right thing.
I too believe that there is only one truth. We just can’t all agree on what it is. Nor can we allow anyone to force us to believe what another thinks is true. But it seems to me that if we really respect one another, we will more quickly come to the unity that we all want.
Abortion is not a question of values, it is a question of truth. There is no authority in malformed consciences or erroroneous ideas. Law enforcement is power acting from authority.
It if is true that those with malformed consciences have no authority, then we have nothing to fear from them. It is those who forsake authority and seek to wield raw power over us that we need to resist. Those with true authority do not need power.
On the LRCBlog, a birth and traditional baptism announcement (they let the church tell them what to do!) of a baby who will grow up to be anti-state also shows the difference between authority and power.
Sorry, tz; once again you’ve lost me. How does the birth and baptism announcement show the difference between authority and power?
Gentlemen,
We can eliminate about 99% of the pitfalls you so clearly elucidate if we make our goal reducing the law to two principles;
1) Self-ownership
2) A prohibition on the initiation of force.
Under these two principles, murder will always be illegal and demand justice. Abortion, as a practical matter, will still occur during the period of pregnancy where it is impossible for an unborn child to live apart from its mother. Since technology will eventually reduce this to the point of conception, abortion will mostly be a thing of the past if unwanted children can be adopted prior to birth. By continuing to wrangle legally over the issue, we guarantee that the situation that has existed with regard to abortion since Roe will continue unaffected: i.e., far too many abortions. Even the most rabid pro-choice people will admit this. But none of this is support for federal regulation of abortions – they have no constitutional jurisdiction, 14th amendment notwithstanding. Let’s devolve the issue back to the states, and let the market, and the future take care of the problem.
I think I could prove that the unborn baby was human, thus was murdered. Usually those who want to fudge truth or proof into the relative or subjective don’t like what is objectively true.
My point in the middle is that you would consider some “moral” statements as “true”, but more than that, you will force me to believe them as true. You maintain there has to be freedom of conscience. Why?
Why isn’t there a pro-freedom-of-conscience and an anti-freedom-of-conscience side, just like pro-aboriton and anti-abortion? And I think the “anti” does apply to both sides (e.g. the FACE act, and RICO actions against pro-lifers on the pro-abort side).
I think you would say an anti-freedom-of-conscience position is “unreasonable” (tell me if not), just as I think a pro-abortion position is “unreasonable”.
I cannot “force” you to believe I am a person. I cannot force you to believe 2+2=4. But that is not a matter of agreement with each other, it is a matter of agreement with an objective standard.
(my latest post on the “warlord” thread goes into why I think there are objective standards).
People with malformed consciences may have no authority but may have power. They ought not. I would allow the freedom to have a malformed conscience, but not to violate life, liberty, or property with it.
The methods to correctly form consciences (or fix broken ones) can be debated, but the immediate problem is to not let them have their way.
And as a practical matter, even if there is a debate about truth, one position might be objectively less harmful. You might not consider some others persons so think you can murder them, but that would be harmful if you are wrong. Is your injured conscience more important than my injured body? “First do no harm”.
Most people would say if you see something that looks like a person passed out on the street, but don’t know, you should not run it over with your car because you don’t know. If you don’t know the truth about personhood in a different context, you would say that you could do something which might destroy a person (Original argument is from Peter Kreeft)
Vince, I agree with the fundamental principles of property and non-aggression. I guess the whole point of the various paleo-libertarian sites is to try to get the rest of the world to agree to live by those principles as well. My thought-experiment positing that murder was moral was an attempt to prove that it was an impractical option. I am not as sanguine as you that technology will make the morality of abortion moot. And certainly it is not the only moral issue that people disagree about. What I have said about freedom of conscience in morality applies to all such issues, and is directed at people who argue for militancy.
TZ, You’ve made some excellent points. I do believe that an anti-freedom-of-conscience stand is unreasonable, and I believe that a pro-abortion position is unreasonable, but that’s just me. Why do I believe that freedom of conscience should apply to morality as it does to religious doctrine? The first reason is that the alternative is perpetual war between the various sides, which tends to become an issue in its own right, preventing the combatants from looking at the initial causes of division. Ecumenism rather than militancy allows us to view things with reason rather than emotion, and I believe that has been a step forward. It also, I believe, illustrates that freedom of conscience in all things is a human right, that it is consistent with human dignity. Yet, as you say, and I too think it is true, there are those on both sides who favor continued militancy where the issue is a moral one. You would seem to be one of those people. I respectfully disagree.
Peter Kreeft’s argument is an excellent one, and I agree with it. But it is an argument, not proof, and reasonable people can disagree with it, as it seems many do. So the question then becomes, do we try to force them to “see the truth”, or do we tolerate their “blindness” (as we see it) and hope that eventually they will be won over to our view of things. To put it in the terms of this article, do we favor authority or power? I think it is time to renounce power in favor of authority.
Finally, Peter Kreeft is the author of several excellent books. You do well to quote him.
I am the opposite of militant – I am opposed to violence against abortion, but I use that as an argument for any of the wars against lesser things on my blog (click on “tz”, find the Abortion, Proportion and War post where I consider abortion against the four points in the CCC on “just war”).
But you’ve made my greater point for me:
The anti-freedom-of-conscience ultimately will destroy life, and has in the past.
The pro-abortion actively destroys life.
In both cases I can’t do anything to prevent people from holding such views, but if they act on them I will hold them accountable for the destruction of life. Killing heretics or the unborn is wrong.
A human conscience requires a live human. And if I believe in human dignity, then if I would preserve freedom of conscience, it would not make any sense if I don’t also preserve life itself.
With our government, maybe 2+2 doesn’t add up to 4 – there is a federally funded math manual…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nypost/mathmanualdoesn39taddup;_ylt=Ai18glXcU7SrkEjctPIWhX6s0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3ODdxdHBhBHNlYwM5NjQ-
I guess my point, inadequately made, is that the state of affairs since Roe has established precedent regarding abortion, namely; a)Regulation therof by the states is totally unconstitutional, and b)Abortion on demand is not only legal but becoming a cultural virtue in our society. This is true because a)the supreme court has been allowed to usurp states’ rights on the issue, and b) this abomination has imbued many with the sense that there is no other way. My own feeling is that the majority of the public are equally appalled with the current abortion climate (de facto on-demand throughout) and the prospect of more federal interference. From my perspective, the current situation, while appalling and unconscionable to anyone except idealogues, is preferable to greater federal meddling. I suspect many people understand this intuitively, and consider themselves “pro-choice” not out of any love for what is happening but rather an understanding that federal regulation will only make it worse.
“If law is based on truth, it must be a unity – there can be only one right answer. If it is not based on truth, it will result in tyranny. Actually I don’t care about the form if it works and is enforcing the right thing.”
For the law to be applied, it must be interpreted. If one institution is granted this monopoly of interpretation, then it follows that it will interpret it to its own advantage and to the disadvantage of others. A centralized legal authority guarantees that over time the law will be manipulated to serve the monopolist and not the public. This institution will promote lawlessness and destroy justice.
Vince, your recent comments seem to indicate that we have but two choices: 1) Roe v Wade remains unchallenged, resulting in less government intervention, at least on this issue, and 2) Roe is overturned, resulting in greater federal government intervention. With a little imagination we can envision a couple of other possibilities:
1) The decision about abortion (and other decisions that are morally divisive) are returned to the states to be decided on a state-by-state basis. I find this preferable to either of the above choices, but not optimal.
2) We develop a polycentric system of laws (see my earliest comment, 7/20 1:14pm), so that the law follows the individual.
Note:
there is a discussion on the original topic of this post in the Austrian Forum… if anyone has an opinion, please join.
http://austrianforum.com/index.php?showtopic=190
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