VATICAN CITY
Crux
John L. Allen Jr. Editor
July 20, 2017
Back in the 19th century, French novelist and journalist Edmond About was considered the Tocqueville of the Papal States, and he had a fairly cynical view of papal justice. As the latest Vatican trial opens, it’s interesting to apply his tests. There’s also some question marks about the timing of the trial, and a juicy irony waiting to be exploited surrounding the name of one of the defense lawyers.
As the latest Vatican trial opened on Tuesday for alleged criminal shenanigans, it occurred to me that you really have to go all the way back to the 1800s to find the last time the “courthouse beat” formed any part of covering the Vatican for most reporters in Rome.
In that era, the pope still ruled over a swath of territory in central Italy known as the “Papal States,” and criminal trials were a regular event. The pope even had his own executioner, the most famous of which was “Mastro Titta,” a nickname that was a corruption of the Italian phrase maestro di giustizia, or “master of justice.”
So famous was he in the mid-19th century that Roman mothers sang their little ones to sleep with a rhyme that goes, “Sega, sega, Mastro Titta.” Segare is the Italian verb “to saw,” so the mental image is ghoulishly accurate.
In the century and a half since, the Vatican has banned capital punishment, and today is a global leader in the abolitionist movement. The pope now only exercises civil power over about 109 acres of territory, representing the physical footprint of the Vatican City State.
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