Il Supremo Tribunale della Segnatura Apostolica dopo la costituzione apostolica Praedicate Evangelium. Riflessioni e proposte per una giustizia sostanziale in Ecclesia by Giovanni Parise (review)

The reform of the Roman Curia, instituted by His Holiness Pope Francis and conducted gradually throughout the first nine years of his pontificate, came to fruition with the promulgation of the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium (PE) on March 19, 2022. This small book authored by Professor Giovanni Parise focuses on that constitution's norms governing the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, which he has studied in depth for the past decade. PE did not introduce significant modifications to the Supreme Tribunal. Still, it offers an occasion to reflect on the administration of justice in the Church at the highest level and to consider further modifications of the law governing the Apostolic Signatura.

This slim volume opens with a presentation by His Excellency, Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, Secretary of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, and a preface by one of the Church's leading experts in administrative justice, Father Javier Canosa of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. It includes seven chapters and a conclusion, to which are appended a twelve-page essay on the need for canon law in the Church and an eighteen-page bibliography.

Chapter 1 makes a series of general points pertaining to the Apostolic Signatura, including the author's proposal for a specialized section for handling contentious-administrative causes, the Signatura's membership, and an identification of which curial institutions are truly subject to it. Chapter 2 is an excursus on the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, which supposedly might have been merged together with the apostolic tribunals in a single "diaconia of justice," instead of being distinctly confirmed as they have been in PE.

Chapter 3 offers a general presentation of the Signatura's threefold competence. It aspires for a distinction of its judicial and administrative functions in theory, while recognizing the difficulty of this in practice due to its small membership and staff. Chapter 4 presents the strictly judicial competence of the Signatura, scarcely analyzing its elements since they have not changed. Chapter 5, the longest one, treats its contentious-administrative competence whereby the Apostolic Signatura stands as the administrative tribunal of the Roman Curia and not a general high court for the protection of ecclesiastical rights. The author emphasizes the importance of "substantial justice" resulting from the contentious-administrative process and explores many enduring and current questions (e.g., recourse against the Signatura's administrative decrees, the reparation of damages, the execution of the sentence), drawing from and synthesizing doctrinal debates and proposals. Chapter 6 presents the Signatura's competence of exercising vigilance over the correct administration of justice.

Chapter 7 constitutes the author's major proposal for how the Apostolic Signatura can serve the Church as an instrument for truly achieving substantial justice. According to said proposal, the Apostolic Signatura would be the sole supreme tribunal in the Church, competent over the judicial sentences of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith just as it is over those of the Roman Rota (cf. c. 1445 §1) and even over that Dicastery's extrajudicial penal decrees, both in regard to their legitimacy and their merits.

The author is to be applauded for his rich scholarship and his consideration and presentation of important current questions pertaining to a just social order in the Church. Its audience would seem to be especially academia and those in the Church who can influence a future reform of the law. The English reader may occasionally find its Italian prose laborious to read, especially when a single sentence spans sixteen (34–35) or twenty-one lines (68–69), and when a single paragraph extends more than ten pages and contains eleven (including several dense) footnotes (34–44). More generally, it is not clear to this reviewer why this research is presented as a book instead of a lengthy journal article, considering that the autonomous...