The Vatican will no longer automatically adopt Italian laws as its own when a new statute comes into effect on Thursday, according to Vatican daily Osservatore Romano.
Jose' Maria Serrano Ruiz, president of the Commission for the Revision of the Code of Vatican Law, said the move was motivated by the ''exorbitant number'' of Italian laws, as well as their ''instability'' and frequent contrast with ''the irreversible principles of the Church''.
Although the Vatican is an independent city-state, its residents are largely recognised as Italian citizens.
Under the current statute signed by Pope Piux XI in 1929, Italian laws are accepted by the Holy See except in cases where there is ''radical incompatibility'' with the basic principles of canon law, Ruiz said.
But the new statute signed by Pope Benedict XVI will mean all Italian laws will have to be examined by Vatican authorities before they are adopted as part of the city-state's own legislation.
Italian Parliament Relations Minister Elio Vito said Wednesday that he agreed ''from a technical point of view'' with some of the criticism published in Osservatore Romano.
''There's no doubt that there are too many laws, they are often written badly and they are sometimes not very understandable,'' he said.
But he pointed out that Simplification Minister Roberto Calderoli has been working to cut more than 36,000 laws, most of which were passed before Italy's Constitution went into effect in 1948, from the Italian code.
Vito added that an ad hoc committee in the Chamber of Deputies was at work to eliminate ''those mysterious references and paragraphs and articles with which everyone has come unstuck at least once'', while the government also plans to publish laws online to improve accessibility.
Opposition Democratic Party Senator Giorgio Tonini meanwhile leapt to the defence of Italian law in daily newspaper La Stampa, expressing surprise at what he described as the Vatican's ''peremptory failing'' of the democratic Italian system.
''Parliament produces laws based on the changeable course of public opinion, there is a continuous political discussion and the general vision changes according to whether the centre-right or centre-left are in power,'' he said.
The Vatican's new statute also states that the Holy See will scrutinize international treatises before deciding whether to sanction ''the explicit admission of conformity of the Holy See'' - a measure that has been implicit in the past.
The move comes in the wake of a flap over a French proposal that the United Nations approve a declaration decriminalising homosexuality, which was backed by Italy but which the Vatican partly condemned, enraging gay rights groups.
The Vatican delegation at the UN urged countries around the world to decriminalise homosexuality but criticised the wording of the proposal, saying it went too far in an attempt to place different sexual orientations on the same level.
