An otherwise small bureaucratic edit to the Vatican City State’s fundamental law is seen inside the Vatican as another marker of Pope Leo XIV’s steady push to restore order, coherence, and predictability to the Church’s central administration.
On Friday, the Holy See published a motu proprio in which Pope Leo formally abrogated article 8 n. 1 of the 2023 Fundamental Law of Vatican City State, a provision that restricted the presidency of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State to cardinals alone. The revised norm, enforced immediately, makes clear that “other members” — including laymen and laywomen — may serve as president.
The norm regularizes the appointment of Sister Raffaella Petrini, whom Pope Francis placed at the head of the Commission and the Governorate on March 1, 2025, despite the fact that the law he himself promulgated just two years earlier explicitly required a cardinal in the role.
The minor move has been interpreted inside the Vatican as Pope Leo cleaning up inconsistencies created during the previous pontificate — inconsistencies that arose when Pope Francis repeatedly used motu proprios to override existing norms, some of them of his own making, creating a patchwork of exceptions that often operated outside the logic of written law.
By rewriting Article 8 n. 1 rather than simply ignoring it, Pope Leo is signaling that Vatican law is meant to be followed. And when reality requires changes, the law should be amended openly and coherently, not sidestepped.
So far, Pope Leo, an American and a canon lawyer by training, has made legal coherence a hallmark of his early pontificate. Friday’s motu proprio is the latest example of that instinct: Fix the rulebook, don’t improvise around it.
His apostolic letter makes that logic explicit, by arguing that strengthening the “shared responsibility,” desired by Pope Francis, requires “consolidation of certain solutions developed thus far,” especially as governance demands grow “increasingly complex and pressing.”
In other words, the Vatican’s institutional reform cannot run on exceptions forever.
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