Suing the Pope (updated)

In a move that may not have any precedent, three men in Houston suing the Catholic church pursuant to the priest-abuse scandal have now named Joseph Ratzinger -- a.k.a. Benedict XVI -- as one of the suit's targets.

The men claim that they were molested by a priest in 1995, when their ages ranged from 11 to 13. In May of 2003, Cardinal Ratzinger (who then headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) wrote a letter to various bishops which includes the phrase "cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret."

That phrasing may strike many jurors as legitimate grounds for a charge of conspiracy.

A law professor said there are a number of hurdles to suing the pope, most importantly, the fact the U.S. does not allow people to sue a sitting head of state.

Hmm. The precedent of Manuel Noriega comes to mind. Not to mention the current charges against Saddam Hussein. Of course, those are criminal matters, not civil suits. There was an attempt to bring a civil suit against Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, but it seems to have gone nowhere.

Is there really a proscription against bringing suit against the leader of a foreign country?

UPDATE: A friendly voice directs our attention to this story in the Washington Post, about a billion-dollar lawsuit against Iraq filed by American POWs tortured at the hands of Saddam Hussein's henchmen. The Supreme Court tossed out the suit on the grounds that "Congress never authorized such lawsuits against foreign governments." The judgment might have gone the other way, I suspect, if Saddam were still in power. (The U.S. has frozen $1.7 billion in Iraqi assets; no doubt the strapped-for-cash Bush administration would rather not use that money to pay off POWs.)

Previous rulings had upheld a 1997 law allowing Americans to sue officials of foreign nations for hostage-taking, torture and murder. This gets us closer to the conspiracy and cover-up charges at the heart of the suit against Ratzinger.