McAleese cracks the canon law code

THE recent disclosure during the trial of Pope Benedict XVI’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, that he stole highly sensitive documents the pontiff had marked “to be destroyed”, raises the intriguing question: What else is missing from the papal archives?

The Pope’s authority and power to order documents to be destroyed is beyond question — he is, after all, the last person in Europe exercising the powers of an absolute monarch. The code of canon law says so.

According to Canon 331, the Pope “by virtue of his office... has supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, and he can always freely exercise this power”. Canon 332 tells us the Pope “acquires full and supreme power in the Church” when he is elected and accepts the election result. According to Canon 333: “There is neither appeal nor recourse against a judgment or a decree of the Roman Pontiff.”