Marriage between the Vatican’s 100-strong employee pool isn’t allowed. You can live together and work together, you can have children together and work together, but you may not be married and work together. Oh no.
If you marry, one of you must volunteer to leave the Vatican’s employ altogether (going to another department isn’t acceptable). If you don’t leave of your own accord, you’ll both get sacked.
That’s just what happened to two Vatican bank employees last week. They were both sacked because their recent wedding violates the newly-introduced ban and neither wanted to volunteer to lose their job.
The Vatican bank said in a statement on Wednesday that it had reached the “difficult decision” to end the couple’s employment contracts.
The “formation of a married couple among employees is, in fact, blatantly contradictory to the current regulations within the institute” the Vatican says.
Times are a-changing
The couple – nicknamed “Romeo and Juliet” by the Italian media – met some years ago at the Institute for the Works of Religion, commonly known as the IOR or Vatican Bank, while working in different departments.
Three children later, they decided to marry. Their attorney Laura Sgro says they informed the bank of their plans in February.
Although the Vatican was aware the couple have three children and were planning to marry, it pressed ahead with its new personnel regulation barring workplace marriages.
The couple appealed to Pope Francis, seeking a dispensation in the enforcement of the new regulation, as it had gone into effect once wedding plans were already underway and the official Catholic announcement made.
They received no reply.
The ban went into effect in May. The couple married in August.
The IOR defends the dismissal
The bank said it in no way meant to question the right of employees to get married – a sacrament Francis frequently urges young couples to undertake in the face of dwindling numbers of Catholic weddings.
The couple’s dismissal was dictated by the need to preserve transparency and impartiality in the institute’s activities, and in no way intended to question the right of two people to be united in marriage” the IOR says.
The IOR says the marriage ban’s primary objective is to avoid the reputational risk of accusations of nepotism and “avoid the possible emergence of situations of conflicts of interest in the institute’s operations, in order to protect its integrity and service to its clients”.
Civil court case pending
In a letter to the IOR bank chiefs, Sgro has challenged the couple’s dismissal.. She will be taking the case to the Vatican civil court within 30 days, she says.
In her view, the IOR’s notification of dismissal was “null, illegitimate and gravely harmful of the fundamental rights of people and employees, and therefore devoid of any effect”.
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