AUSTRALIA
Pearls and Irritations
Posted on January 15, 2014 by John Menadue
On 29 December 1170, four armed knights from the Court of King Henry II of England entered Canterbury Cathedral. They had previously heard the King complain about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a’Becket, who was in dispute with Henry over “privilege of clergy”, the right of clergy to be tried exclusively in Church or canonical courts for any kind of crime. “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have said. Four knights of his Court took the hint, went to Canterbury Cathedral, and sliced the top off a’Becket’s head.
Privilege of clergy was whittled away over the years, and was finally abolished by the English parliament in 1827, but the Catholic Church has always hankered back to the 12th century when it had the exclusive right to try clergy for every kind of crime. Priests were special people, ontologically changed by God on ordination, and therefore deserving of special treatment. A secret canonical trial avoided “scandal”, which has a special meaning in Catholicism: the loss of faith when adherents realise that those who represent Christ are misbehaving badly.
In those countries where the Church exerted some influence, it has written some form of the privilege into the civil laws. The Vatican’s treaties with Latvia (1922), Poland (1925), Italy (1929) and the Dominican Republic (1954) provided that convicted clergy would serve their sentences separated from “lay people” or in a monastery. In Spain, Franco’s 1953 Concordat with the Vatican provided that a bishop could only be tried in a civil court with the consent of the Vatican, and clergy with the consent of the bishop. Any deprivation of liberty was to be spent in a religious house, not in jail, and the trial was not to be publicised.
Colombia’s 1973 Concordat with the Vatican provides that bishops cannot be tried by the State Courts, but only by Church Courts. Priests can be tried in State Courts, but the proceedings are not to be publicised. In 1993, the Colombian Constitutional Court declared the Concordat inconsistent with the 1991 Constitution, but the Vatican, as recently as 2007, insisted that the Concordat be honoured, that bishops should be above the law, and that trials of priests be held in secret.
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