LAW OF CITATIONS. – The name given to a part of a constitution issued at Ravenna in 426 by Valentinian III, a constitution that, as a whole, aimed to regulate all sources of law.
For the part relevant here, it established that in legal proceedings, the opinions expressed by five jurists—Papinian, Paul, Ulpian, Modestinus, and Gaius—could be cited with legislative authority. All of these jurists, except Gaius, had been granted the *ius respondendi* (i.e., the faculty to issue legal opinions in the name of the emperor). The constitution further permitted the citation of opinions from jurists cited by these five, provided that the citation was confirmed by collation with the original text, a task that was quite difficult at the time.
The judge was required to adhere to the opinion of the five jurists when it was unanimous; in the absence of unanimity, the judge was to follow the majority opinion; in the event of a numerical tie between opposing views, the judge was to conform to the opinion shared by Papinian. If none of these three conditions were met, the judge was free to adopt the opinion he deemed best.
The constitution demonstrates the degree of decline in the legal culture of the time, as the resolution of disputes came to depend on an automatic criterion based on the opinions of the five jurists.
This law has been described as a “monument of legal wisdom, and above all, of political wisdom.” A preliminary observation is unavoidable: one cannot legislate over the rights of a sovereign recognized as such without his consent; otherwise, that sovereign, subject to a law he does not recognize and enforced without his acceptance, is in reality a subject. Moreover, the law did not possess the vaunted originality: all the changes that occurred in the political regime of Rome from the end of the 18th century to 1870 were officially announced with the intention of abolishing temporal power while guaranteeing the exercise of spiritual power. The law had already been conceived in 1810, when the position of the Pope was defined within the incorporation of Rome into the French Empire. Similar intentions of guarantees emerged in the Roman Republic.
Even from the standpoint of legal technique, the law lacks the clarity and precision that would be expected of a “monumental” law (it suffices to note that it refers to the “customary” number of guards, without specifying the legal nature of the endowment of the antica rendita of L. 3,225,000, or clarifying on what basis the Pope continued to enjoy the Apostolic Palaces). It has even been argued that the legal ambiguities were intentional, so that the law might serve as a monument of political wisdom in its flexibility. Meanwhile, even jurists without prejudice against the Church, such as C. Calisse, observed: “If the Vatican has never been occupied, this does not mean it is not national territory: it was occupied by law, which, by declaring the city of Rome annexed to the Kingdom, did not exclude any part of it, and repeatedly, through various provisions, demonstrated that state sovereignty extends even to the papal residence” (*Dir. Ecc.*, Florence 1923, p. 93). This shows that the Pope’s sovereignty was so sui generis that it was not exercised over any territory and was not accompanied by even a single square foot of land in his full and absolute ownership!
The Italian government, however, understood that by entering Rome, it assumed the responsibility of replacing the territorial guarantees it was abolishing, while taking on the role of *negotiorum gestor* for the entire Catholic world regarding the security and dignity of the Pope. The conduct of official Italy, which, upon occupying Rome, stopped at the threshold of the Vatican, was not due to the enactment of the Law of Citations but to the factual conditions that imposed, to a certain extent, the perception of the commitment it had undertaken toward the Catholic powers and peoples of the world. In reality, a true test of the guarantees did not occur until the war of 1914–18, during which they proved partially ineffective and, on a fundamental point, inoperative.
The voluntary seclusion that Pope Pius IX imposed upon himself was well-advised, for the diplomatic world, faced with any offense against him if he had left the Vatican, would likely have remained indifferent or even reproached the aged Pope for seeking incidents by traversing the streets of a city where he had once been sovereign. In any case, with this seclusion, the opportunity to apply that part of the law constituting the true burden on the Italian government—the equalization, even if only in terms of sovereign honors, of the Pope with the king—began to fade. In Rome, there were not two sovereigns, as the guarantees envisaged, but one sovereign residing at the Quirinal and the august Occupant of the Vatican, who in practice occupied a house of which he did not even hold ownership. The Occupant was free to write, to speak, to receive vast numbers of people, and to do everything that any Italian citizen could do.
The law did, it is true, enable a diplomatic corps to be accredited to the Holy See, but everyone sensed that the presence and privileges of this corps depended—and still depend—on a millennia-old tradition and the power of foreign states, which would not renounce their rights. Thus, the Law of Citations, by recording the duties of the Kingdom toward this diplomatic corps, could not presume to have created in those states the corresponding rights and their enforceability. Indeed, visits to the Pope by certain foreign sovereigns, guests of the Quirinal, took place in forms and with diplomatic functions not contemplated by the Law of Citations, which lacked the power to regulate relations between these sovereigns and the Holy See. In this aspect of relations with foreign sovereigns and states—the only area in which the part of the law concerning the prerogatives of the Supreme Pontiff had occasion to be applied—the law itself was nothing more than a pleonasm.
If we add that the Pope did not accept the endowment assigned to him, we see that even on this point the guarantees did not operate. It might be said that there was, albeit rarely applied, an article punishing offenses against the Pope as offenses against the king; yet it must be remembered that this article existed even before 1870 in Italian legislation punishing offenses against foreign sovereigns. Thus, during the period this law was in force, the Pope lived almost entirely under common law, both domestic and international—two categories of law independent of and antecedent to the Law of Citations.
For the law to prove effective, three events would have had to occur: 1) that the Pope leave the Vatican; 2) that he accept the endowment; and 3) that Italy become involved in a war. The first two did not happen; and when the remains of Pius IX were taken from the Vatican on the night of July 13, 1881, to be buried at San Lorenzo al Verano, the law was shown to be glaringly inoperative. When the third event occurred with the First World War, all the goodwill of the two high parties served only to soften, in perfect diplomatic style, the fact that the guarantees were not functioning, as the diplomatic agents of the Central Powers accredited to the Holy See were forced to take refuge in the Helvetic Republic.
The Law of Guarantees, which, contrary to expectations, never exposed the Italian State to the obligation of paying those honours, disbursing those sums, and incurring those dangers of which the left had been vaguely but understandably alarmed, offered all the ministers of the Interior—including those most closely tied to the left—the advantage of justifying, in one fell swoop and in the name of that law, all the police measures that would have been indispensable in St. Peter’s Square even without the guarantees. These measures would have encountered interpellations and anticlerical criticism time and again had the Italian government taken them without being able to shelter behind a special and constant obligation. Here lies the great service that the guarantees rendered to the various ministers—merely by their appearance; hence none of them ever thought of implementing from the government bench those abolitionist proposals they may have formulated from their seat as deputies. The law did not prevent the suppression of 134 religious communities in Rome, the abolition of theological faculties in universities, the elimination of all religious instruction in secondary schools (which was also hindered in primary schools), the disregard for the sacrament of Matrimony, the conscription of clerics, and the suppression of works for congregations of charity. And yet the period from 1871 to 1929 marks brilliant years for the papacy and—despite some abrupt interruptions, such as in 1898—a progressive easing of relations between State and Church. Undoubtedly felicitous effects, but which were due less to the Law of Guarantees than to the prudent and paternal conduct of the Popes, the wisdom and political tact of the rulers, and the conscience of Italian Catholics.