(ZENIT News / Vatican City, 11.23.2025).- For years, the leadership of Vatican City’s administrative apparatus followed an unspoken script: the governor of the world’s smallest state was always a cardinal, woven seamlessly into the hierarchical fabric of Roman tradition. That script has now been decisively redrafted. With a Motu Proprio published on 21 November, Pope Leo XIV removed the last legal obstacle preventing non-cardinals—and notably, lay men and women—from presiding over the Commission that oversees the Vatican’s legislative and administrative life.
The correction may look like a technical revision, but its reach extends far beyond the pages of the Fundamental Law. It clarifies, regularizes and ultimately stabilizes one of the most symbolically significant decisions of Pope Francis’s final years in office: the appointment of Sister Raffaella Petrini as President of the Vatican City State’s administration. Her nomination on 1 March 2025 made history, yet it also revealed a structural tension that Vatican law had never been required to address. All her predecessors had been cardinals; in Petrini’s case, the old rules simply didn’t fit.
That mismatch became evident almost immediately. While the governor traditionally briefed cardinals on the financial and logistical state of Vatican City during closed-door gatherings preceding a conclave, those meetings are strictly limited to members of the College of Cardinals. Petrini, by virtue of not being one, was excluded. What had once been a routine consultation suddenly became a procedural dilemma, not of her making but embedded in the inherited framework of governance.
Leo XIV’s intervention has now resolved that issue. By striking from the 2023 Law the requirement that the Commission’s president be a cardinal, he has made explicit what recent practice had already begun to suggest: the governance of Vatican City is not a prerogative tied to rank, but a responsibility entrusted to qualified persons chosen by the pope, according to the evolving needs of the community they serve.
In the Motu Proprio, Leo XIV framed his decision not as a break with tradition, but as a maturation of a principle long championed by Francis: shared responsibility. Citing the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium, he presented the change as part of a broader reorientation of the Curia, one that values communion, collaboration and a disciplined openness to new forms of service. The governance of the Vatican City State, he wrote, must respond to “increasingly complex and pressing” demands. In that context, restricting leadership roles to cardinals no longer reflected the diverse competencies the task now requires.
This shift is particularly visible in Petrini’s role. As head of the Governorate, she oversees everything from infrastructure, healthcare and telecommunications to the Vatican Museums, whose revenues remain essential for financing the Holy See. She also presides over the Commission responsible for authorizing laws, approving budgets and reviewing the state’s financial results. In other words, she occupies one of the most operationally demanding positions in the Vatican’s institutional architecture—one that depends not on sacramental authority but on administrative expertise.
By confirming that the Commission may be led by “cardinals and other members,” the new legislation not only resolves Petrini’s specific case but opens the way for future appointments of lay figures whose professional backgrounds could strengthen the state’s ability to respond to modern challenges. The Vatican rarely telegraphs long-term reform strategies, but this legal update suggests that Francis’s approach—favoring capable individuals over automatic clerical seniority—is far from a one-off experiment.
The revised law also reflects a deeper theological vision. Leo XIV’s text describes governance as a form of service rendered to the Successor of Peter, requiring accountability and cooperation. In that light, the change is less about diminishing the role of cardinals than about expanding the scope of those called to share in the burdens of leadership. It recognizes that administering a sovereign state, however small, demands a constellation of skills that may lie well beyond the College of Cardinals.
Although published quietly, the Motu Proprio marks a moment of institutional recalibration. In an era when the Church often finds itself navigating complex financial systems, global scrutiny and rapid juridical developments, the Vatican’s central administration cannot afford to remain bound by assumptions inherited from another era. Legal precision is no longer a procedural detail; it is the scaffolding that allows innovation to endure.
Whether future leaders of the Governorate will follow Petrini’s profile remains to be seen. What is certain is that the path has been opened, and the framework now supports what recent history has already begun to reveal—that sometimes the smallest state in the world sets precedents with global consequences.
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