Case in point | Playing devil's advocate

The Vatican's announcement in July that Pope John Paul II is to be sainted marks the whirring into action of one of the world's oldest legal systems - the Holy See's canon law. For canonisation is at once a theological and legal event, the culmination of a juridical process heavily regulated by the apostilic constitution. There is, however, a figure absent from the intricate legalities behind John Paul II's imminent sainthood, a figure now relegated to the status of cliché: the devil's advocate.

The advocatus diaboli was once the ultimate lawyer, whose satanic brief was to argue vehemently against a venerable deceased's canonisation. But the devil's advocate's effective abolition by Pope John Paul II appears to have led to the creation of an unprecedented numbers of saints. So is there a need for the devil in the Vatican City? And will there always be a place for devilish lawyering?

Iniquity

The post of devil's advocate was instituted by Pope Sixtus V in 1587 as a Counter Reformation response to Lutheran and Calvinist scorning of the credibility of sainthood. A highly trained cannon lawyer, the advocatus diaboli, also known as the promotor fidei ('promoter of the faith'), would scrutinise the possible natural causes of the purported miracles of proposed saints and would sniff out truffles of iniquity beneath candidates' surface virtues.

Devil's advocates were, in essence, prosecutors who brought an adversarial element to the forensic testing of saintliness by opposing the promoter of a saintly candidate, the advocatus dei ('God's advocate'). Devil's advocates' objections to candidates' holiness had to be answered satisfactorily before canonisation giving them a de facto veto over who would join the hagiarchy, the circle of saints.

Pope John Paul II did away with the advocatus diaboli in 1983 to make sainting a 'simpler process'. So the very pope who is shortly to be canonised, in essence, abrogated the post of advocatus diaboli by downgrading the promoter of the faith's office to a clerical rather than prosecutorial role. Rather than a trial with prosecuting and defending lawyers, saintliness is now determined by a committee concerned perhaps more with procedural regularity than strict evidence testing.

Furthermore, the number of miracles needed for sainthood was cut by Pope John Paul II from four to two. With none of the detailed forensic enquiry that characterised the work of the advocatus diaboli, ever more haloes are flying off the Vatican's production line.

Between 1900 and 1978 there were 96 canonisations; following John Paul II's accession in 1978 and his subsequent reforms to the process of sainthood, there have been 480 canonisations.

The removal of an advocate for the devil appears to have lubricated the cannonisation mechanism. Would John Paul II, a pontiff who was anxious to deter his followers from using condoms to guard against HIV/AIDS and allegedly ignored pederasty within the priesthood, have been so quickly canonised if the devil's advocate still existed?

It is outside the Holy See that the devil's advocate might now be found. Geoffrey Robertson QC in The Case of the Pope (2010) suggested that Pope Benedict XVI should face civil, even criminal, liability for his alleged shielding of child-molesting clerics behind the confessional booth and canon law. Geoffrey Robertson had to concede, however, that, if considered a head of state, Pope Benedict XVI would be immune from civil suit. "An ex-Pope'¦ is an oxymoron", Geoffrey Robertson QC concluded. However, after Benedict XVI unexpectedly unpoped himself this year, his head-of-state immunity is no more. Perhaps neo-advocatus diaboli Geoffrey Robertson can now bring an action against the Pope Emeritus. And might Robertson testify before monsignors in the Vatican against John Paul II's canonisation as Christopher Hitchens '¨did against Mother Teresa's beatification '¨in 2003?

Satan himself

Or perhaps the devil can simply represent himself. In the mediaeval imagination, Satan and his demonic minions were lawyers with busy (fictional) practices. In the Processus Satanae, ascribed to Bartolos Saxoferrato, founder of Perugia's 14th-century law school, the devil's claim of possession of the human race was successfully defended by the Virgin Mary before Jesus. And the Liber Belial (1382), where Satan sued Jesus over the loss of damned souls during Christ's Harrowing of Hell, provided an allegorial romp through late-mediaeval eclesastical law so useful it could have been used as a primer for canon lawyers.

So much for Satan the fictional claimant, what of Satan the actual defendant? Bizarrely, in United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v Satan 54 F.R.D. 282 (1971), the plaintiff alleged before the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania that Satan had "placed deliberate obstacles in his path and ha[d] caused his downfall" and "by reason of these acts Satan ha[d] deprived him of his constitutional rights". District Judge Weber gently doubted whether relief could be granted by the court and noted that no address for service of papers on the defendant fiend had been provided by Mr Mayo. The action did not proceed further.

A final note of caution though to those who would take on the mantle of 'devil's advocate'. In March, Giovanni di Stefano, dubbed 'the devil's advocate' for his claims to have represented vilified defendants ranging from Gary Glitter to Saddam Hussein, received a 14-year prison sentence at Southwark Crown Court for fraudulently holding himself out as a solicitor to unsuspecting clients. And with a whiff of sulphur, that particular devil's advocate was taken down.