RIPROVAZIONE DELLE TESTIMONIANZE (reprobatio attestationum). — This is a juridical institution which the CIC, deriving it from the ius vetus, regulates in cann. 1783 n. 2, 1784, and 1785, and which is also found in the more recent (6 January 1950) motu proprio Sollicitudinem nostram concerning Oriental judgments (cann. 306–308).
In essence, once the testimony has been made public, the parties have the right to reprobate it, that is, to challenge it, adducing arguments and documents and also invoking other testimony to demonstrate that one or more witnesses have spoken falsely. The judge, unless he considers the reprobation manifestly futile or inspired by dilatory purposes, admits the request and proceeds to deal with the matter in the customary form of incidental proceedings (can. 1837 ff.), that is, either formally and solemnly, to be decided by an interlocutory judgment (generally after the formulation of the doubts), or by simple decree (can. 1840). The outcome of the incident will therefore be a judicial decision declaring either that the witness did not speak falsely, or that he did speak falsely and that his testimony cannot be taken into account. Thereafter, the judgment on the merits resumes and the case continues its course.
It should be noted that the reprobation is a purely civil-law institution; that is, it does not entail criminal proceedings for perjury against the witness, nor can it conclude with a criminal judgment of conviction against the witness himself, who, moreover, does not become a party to the incident. No one can fail to see that such a device, if it might have been compatible with the lengthy, cumbersome, and costly forms of an archaic procedure, is wholly incompatible with the demands for expedition and speed, and especially for procedural concentration, of a modern procedure. This fragmentation of the judgment into incidents, in which the merits of the evidence are examined before the definitive decision; this anticipation, even if only partial (and perhaps, precisely because partial, all the more objectionable), of the evaluation of the evidentiary material—nothing could be imagined less consistent with the principles now accepted by procedural doctrine. Fortunately, in the practice of ecclesiastical tribunals, the reprobation of testimony (as, for that matter, the analogous institution of the reprobation of the person of the witness) is an institution to which recourse is almost never had. Moreover, the instruction of 1 July 1932 of the S. Congreg. of the Sacraments concerning matrimonial processes, while expressly mentioning the reprobatio personae testium (art. 131), says nothing of the institution of the reprobatio attestationum. In practice, therefore, after the testimony has been published, if a party, the defender of the bond, or the promoter of justice considers that he can and must refute some testimony which, in his view, does not conform to the truth, he requests a supplementary investigation. The judge normally grants this request (unless he considers it irrelevant or already precluded by certain and irrefutable evidence) and gathers the requested evidence. Then, in the discussion of the merits, the parties, arguing on the entire body of evidence, will set forth the reasons why a witness should be regarded as truthful or false, and the judge, in the reasoning of his judgment, will state upon which evidence he bases his decision, without the need for a formal declaration of reprobation of the testimony. In essence, practice has corrected the excessively formalistic precept of the written law. It is curious, however, that this practice, although so sound, was not taken into account in the recent formulation of the Oriental law.