In December 2023, Cardinal Becciu—once considered a leading candidate for the papacy—became one of several defendants sentenced to prison by a Vatican tribunal for financial crimes against the Church. The case, dubbed the Vatican “trial of the century,” is a high-profile example of Pope Francis’ fight against corruption within the Church, one of his top priorities since taking charge. Despite the convictions, the trial embroiled the Vatican in controversy about the fairness of its legal system and the Pope’s allegedly improper involvement in the investigation. There is extensive debate as to whether the Pope’s actions were justified.
What is less open to debate, however, is that international press coverage was highly critical of the Vatican. Major news outlets picked up and ran with defendants’ claims that certain papal actions amounted to “unacceptable abuses” and “invalidated the entire justice of the trial.” For example, the New York Times described the trial as “rais[ing] as many questions about the Vatican’s judicial system, the competence of its officials and the pope’s style of governance as it did about [the] crime.” The Washington Post said the Vatican emerged from the trial “worse for wear, with new questions raised about the effectiveness and fairness of its legal system.” The Associated Press’ (AP) reporting, which is reproduced in publications across the globe, is particularly worth highlighting. In an article titled “The First Outside Legal Analyses of Vatican’s ‘Trial of the Century’ Are In, And They’re Critical,” the AP featured Professor Geraldina Boni’s claims that the Pope’s actions “represented a clear violation of the right to a fair trial,” and raised the prospect of a “violation of divine law to which even the pope is subject.” These and other news articles included rebuttals from Vatican officials, but those rebuttals mostly consisted of conclusory platitudes, such as the claim that the trial was carried out “in full respect of the guarantees for the suspects,” or condemnation of the criticisms as “on the level of international heresy.”
As earlier posts on this blog have highlighted, because public opinion of a government’s anticorruption work is an important factor in whether the work succeeds, public relations is a “crucial tool” in fighting corruption. Negative media coverage is a familiar issue to those in the anticorruption field. Targets of a corruption probe will often do their best to delegitimize it. Common tactics include casting the probe as a politically motivated witch-hunt, or, as here, denouncing the legitimacy of the process as an unfair, abusive violation of human rights. How anticorruption authorities respond to these accusations may play a significant role in the perception and legitimacy of the prosecutions. The consistently negative press coverage of the Vatican’s prosecution of these cases suggests the Vatican made mistakes in its public relations strategy. Is that correct? And if so, what might the explanation be?
It’s worth noting at the outset that, as a general matter, anticorruption investigators and prosecutors face a tricky situation when trying to figure out how to respond to attacks on the legitimacy and fairness of their work by defendants and their allies. Remaining silent in the face of such attacks may allow defendants and critics to control the narrative. Responding aggressively can be seen as political or as diving into the muck. Between the two extreme options, there is a third approach: furnishing directly to the media accurate and timely background information. According to a United Nations and World Bank joint working paper, when a corruption case generates significant media attention, the failure of an agency to respond with basic information can cultivate negative assumptions regarding the anticorruption measures. Without this information, the media may inaccurately construe the reality in line with their “preformed perceptions” of the case. As the working paper explains, government agencies can “set things straight only by providing sufficient and clear information, and by working closely with the media to ensure the message is accurate.”
The Vatican did a poor job in providing that sort of information to media outlets. It’s true that after the trial, Alessandro Diddi, the Vatican’s head prosecutor, published an academic article in an Italian journal defending the Pope’s actions and the Vatican’s judicial system. But this response was too little, too late. A key aspect of communicating with the media is doing so directly and on the media’s timeline, not in an academic article written in Italian and focused largely on the complexities of Vatican law.
Certain institutional barriers may explain why the Vatican did such a poor job handling PR around this trial, and recognizing these barriers may help point the way toward better performance in the future:
First, because the Pope wields supreme legislative, executive, and judicial power, the Vatican may have opted for a cautionary PR approach to avoid any suggestion that the Pope had a vested interest in the outcome of the case. But working effectively with the media doesn’t require an enforcement agency to disprove inaccurate claims or mount an aggressive offense. Rather, it requires the provision of “basic background information” on the measures that are in place, what measures have been taken, and why.
A second institutional barrier is the complexity of Vatican law. The Vatican could have raised a principled defense of the Pope’s actions, but doing so would have entailed explaining why Vatican law made the actions both necessary and legitimate—and Vatican law is difficult to understand, and even harder to explain. For one thing, it is based on several different legal sources. While canon law is “the first normative source” and interpretive reference point, Vatican criminal law is based on Italy’s 1929 penal code as amended and supplemented by the Vatican over the years. This complex patchwork has raised questions among church experts as to what the law authorizes or requires in particular instances. Nevertheless, the Vatican could and should have provided this background information to the media to explain why the Pope’s actions were, in the Vatican’s view, necessary clarifications or resolutions to these questions. Indeed, far from excusing the Vatican from directly communicating background information to the media, these barriers make it even more important. A well-intentioned journalist looking for answers on a deadline may be inclined to accept those offered by the defense team, if those are the only ones available.
Third, the Vatican’s history of secrecy and coverups may make the media understandably skeptical of any Vatican claims. Repairing this negative reputation is a longer-term project, but it is one that the Vatican needs to undertake if it has any hope of balancing out the negative coverage its conduct receives in the international press. Actively working with the media, and developing a reputation of providing clear and accurate factual information concerning ongoing investigations or prosecutions, would help the Vatican’s efforts to counter unduly negative coverage.
Although some lessons from the Vatican “trial of the century” are specific to the Vatican, this example further underscores the more general importance of effective public relations, and in particular of why it is important for anticorruption enforcement agencies to develop a healthy working relationship with the media, one that includes timely provision of useful background information. While substance is more important that image, public perception is also important to the long-term struggle against corruption, and missteps by anticorruption authorities can allow corrupt actors to win the battle over the narrative.
