More than a billion people around the world look to the tiniest nation on the planet for guidance.It occupies less than a quarter-square mile and contains fewer than 1,000 residents, yet has all the privileges of an independent, fully functioning country.
Surrounded by Rome, the Holy See is more than the central authority of a worldwide religion, Roman Catholicism.
It has a government of its own and diplomatic relations with 178 other nations.
It stations ambassadors around the globe.
And it has sovereign immunity.
That last benefit has so far shielded the Vatican from lawsuits by American victims of child-molesting Catholic priests.
However clear the evidence of abuse, whatever proof there is that the Church protected the abusers instead of the victims, the Vatican couldn't be held liable.
Not yet, at least.
Two federal appeals courts punctured that shield in 2008 and 2009.
They ruled that victims can sue the Vatican in limited circumstances, though neither case has progressed far enough to know whether the evidence is sufficiently strong, and whether it will fit through the narrow cracks those two rulings allow.
And now, as new evidence seems to implicate Pope Benedict XVI, the United States Supreme Court is trying to decide whether to consider closing the small opening one of the appeals courts created.
The issue is whether sovereign immunity can shield the Holy See from suits when its agents (assuming US priests are its agents or employees) caused personal injury.
Does the central Catholic church lose its immunity when priests are accused of hurtful conduct that gets them sued?
Can Rome be held responsible when priests inflict life-altering harm on hundreds of parishioners, when bishops and the Vatican failed to stop sexual predation and maybe even acted to cover it up?
PIERCED SHIELD
So far, it hasn't happened.
Even under those two appellate rulings that pierced the Vatican's immunity shield, a plaintiff - in order to hold the Holy See liable - must show that the priest's actions were somehow part of his job description, or that it was only because of the priest's job that the molestation was possible.
And, victims must show that abusing priests were actually employees or agents of the Holy See.
The Church says that priests answer not to Rome but to local bishops and archbishops, who act as the governing authority over their dioceses.
The plaintiffs say the Pope and his delegated advisers control the Catholic Church around the world.
With all these hurdles yet to be jumped, no court has entertained evidence of precisely what role, if any, the Holy See played in the scandal.
CARDINAL RATZINGER
The New York Times reported last month that the office of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, intervened to stop a canonical trial of a priest accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at a Wisconsin school for the deaf.
The Vatican denies it was Ratzinger who stopped the trial but defends the decision.
By the time the case got to the Vatican, the accusations were more than 20 years old, the Reverend Lawrence C Murphy had already been stripped of his pastoral duties, ordered not to be in the presence of children alone and was in poor health.
But it doesn't help that, when Ratzinger served as archbishop in Munich in 1980, a memo informed him that a priest known as a paedophile was working in a parish days after being ordered into therapy, according to the New York Times.
Church watchers say that the future Pope underwent something of a conversion when he went to work at the Vatican heading the office that handled accusations about abusive priests.
Reading so many complaints and realising the depth and breadth of the problem, he instituted reforms that took such allegations more seriously, said Mr John L Allen Jr, a senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.
DETERMINING LIABILITY
The issue for US courts at the moment isn't whether the Holy See should be held liable, but whether it can be.
Both appeals court that have ruled on the issue say the answer is yes, in limited circumstances.
The Supreme Court would be wise to step aside in the more recent case as it did in the previous one.
Let the plaintiff in Oregon try to prove the Holy See responsible for assigning his former priest to a parish in Portland, even though the cleric had already admitted sexually abusing boys in Ireland and Chicago.
The plaintiff says he was in his mid-teens in the 1960s when the cleric repeatedly molested him.
Given enough evidence of harmful behaviour by men shown to be true agents of the Holy See and under its control, surely these victims should be able to hold the Vatican responsible.
But don't count on it.
The Vatican City may be small, but the wall around it is high and thick.
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