VATICAN CITY
Huffington Post
Carl Packman
After the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI the rumour mill was fired up without abandon. Already circulating around the blogosphere is the assumption that this pardon – only the third of its kind (unless you count Gregory XII in 1415 who agreed to quit at the request of the council of Constance) – is due to an impending arrest warrant with the Pope’s name on it.
One Stuart Wilde, a metaphysics writers, has alleged that a meeting will take place between the Pope and the Italian president Giorgio Napolitano, where the subject of full immunity from the prosecution for crimes against humanity will be raised.
Immediately this was countered by asking a simple question: why would the Pope resign, renouncing not only his Papacy, but also his immunity as a head of Vatican City, a sovereign state (as it has been since the the 1929 Lateran Pacts between Italy and the Holy See)? Even if the Vatican’s sovereignty was called in to question, the Holy See has a special status in international law which gives it rights that are in some cases analogous to sovereign rights.
One does not have to like these facts (indeed as a non-Catholic I benefit nothing from repeating them), but such they are.
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