A country within a country holding some pretty big secrets.

Come along to the centre of the ancient world. A country within a country, that could, potentially, hold some of the world’s greatest secrets, but could actually just be a storage space for the good old snail mail. Secrets abound.

The Vatican

The Vatican City is located within Rome in Italy and is pretty much the centre of Catholicism. If you’re of a certain religious persuasion, then the Vatican is almost like a pilgrimage for you.

Being the home to some amazing architecture, the Vatican’s most famous resident is the big man himself, the bloke in white, with a funny-looking car. The Pope.

The current Pope goes by Francis, that’s not the name he’s born with, but the one he chose when he was voted in as the most powerful Catholic in all the land.

What’s quite interesting is that during our lifetime the previous Pope, currently known as Emeritus Benedict XVI, is still living. While he lives outside of the Vatican City, I’m sure he visits the old workplace every now and then.

It was 10 February in the not-too-distant past of 2013, that the then Pope Benedict XVI told the world that he would be resigning. Which was quite the scandal at the time, since Popes tend to go the way of Kings and Queens, in that they stick it out until their dying breath. Benedict was the first one to put his hand up and ask for an out since Gregory XII who was Pope all the way back in the early 15th century.

But we can’t blame Benedict, he was sick and only getting older by the day, he deserved to retire along with the rest of us. He did say that his increasing age and illness had forced him to

recognise my incapacity to adequately fulfil the ministry entrusted to me.

But the Vatican isn’t just stuffed full of Popes. It’s actually the smallest country in the world at just over 100 acres, that’s smaller than Central Park in New York. Officially it only has about 842 residents, so it’s also the smallest country by population.

Although the Vatican does carry around a couple of titles, like ‘World’s Most Precious Artwork Collection’ and ‘World’s Most Spiritual Place of Catholics’. You’ll also find a couple of Museums just for Vatican use which are home to just a few Roman sculptures.

It was actually Pope Julius II who, in the early 16th century, decided that the Vatican should be home to the world’s most magnificent art collection. The museums together house over 70 000 pieces, but they only have room to have any 20 000 on display at any one time.

Despite its tiny size, the Vatican also has its own railway station, radio station, post office (with stamps), flag and anthem. As a country the Vatican can operate media outlets and even issues passports to its citizens. The place, despite its teeny tiny size, even mints its own euros with the Pope’s head on the coins.

But oddly enough, being a citizen is not a birth right like it is in other parts of the world. You can’t become a citizen just because you were born in the Vatican or because your parents are citizens. You can only earn citizenship by being an employee in the city-state. Basically if you’re a cardinal, bishop or part of the Swiss Guard. But it’s only valid while you’re employed, as soon as you’re no longer working at the Vatican, you’re no longer a citizen. Your citizenship actually goes back to the default of Italian.

Even though Italy probably has the most UNESCO World Heritage listings in the world. It can’t count the Vatican, because the Vatican is its own country, it actually holds the title of the only country to appear on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. And due to its massive cultural significance, it’s held the title since 1984.

UNESCO says of the Vatican:

The Vatican City, one of the most sacred places in Christendom, attests to a great history and a formidable spiritual venture. A unique collection of artistic and architectural masterpieces lies within the boundaries of this small state.

What might surprise you is that the Vatican is really quite young.

Even though the Catholic Church has been around for over 2000 years, the Vatican City only officially came about in 1929 when the Lateran Treaty was signed making it a sovereign state. It was actually Benito Mussolini, that Italian, who signed the Treaty making it official.

The Pope hasn’t always lived at the Vatican, before 1300 the Pope lived at the Lateran Palace on the other side of Rome. And in 1309, the Pope and his court moved out of Italy entirely and over to Avignon in France. They were actually there for a while, or if we’re measuring time in Pope. They stayed in France for 7 Popes. They seemed to really enjoy France because they didn’t come back to Rome until 1377, and they only settled in the Vatican because the Lateran Palace was destroyed by a fire. An accident or a sign from God, you decide.

As we know from our episode on the Lion Monument in Switzerland, the Swiss Guards, weren’t actually military personnel guarding Switzerland. They were basically mercenaries who would do what their employer paid them to do. The only difference between your average mercenary was the Swiss Guards were ridiculously loyal, to the point of death loyal. So naturally, the Pope was going to be all over it.

It was all the way back in 1506 when Pope Julius II established that the Pontifical Swiss Guard would be responsible for the Pope’s safety.

But the Holy See is very specific about their guards. If you want to be a Swiss Guard, you need to be Catholic (naturally), single, male and between the ages of 19 and 30 and a Swiss citizen. Now you might be thinking, that’s not too bad, and could even be understandable. But you also have to be at least five feet eight-and-a-half inches tall. And of course, be well versed in the use of a Swiss Army Knife, which clearly anyone can get from basic Swiss military training.

You can tell if someone’s apart of the Swiss Guard by their blue, red, orange and yellow uniforms. And they mainly man checkpoints and help out with ceremonies.

Historical background

From the start of the Vatican archives, when all they housed were the pope’s letters and papers, there wasn’t really any kind of system. But when Innocent III came along all of that changed. When printing was invented in the late 15th century, the pope decided to get things in order by setting up a library whose entire function was to hold papal papers. Try saying that five times fast.

A bloke named Owen Chadwick wrote a book on the Vatican Archives, where he says that in 1484, the library has almost 4000 volumes. That’s a lot of letter writing.

Even though this is nothing compared to the amount in the archives today, back then it was the biggest library in all of Italy.

But like all great libraries, hard times weren’t too far away. In 1527, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V wasn’t too happy with the Pope at the time, Clement VII, so he sacked Rome, and looted the papal library by tearing up the parchments when they were short of litter for their horses.

It wasn’t until 1612, that Pope Paul V had the bright idea to separate the library from the archives. But this didn’t really do anything in terms of organisation, both were a hot-mess and with no catalogue existing for either. So if you wanted to find something, good luck.

Good luck not just because of the mess, but because access to these documents was extremely difficult. Each person in charge had different rules about who was allowed to see the documents.

This could be because of all the secrets the papers were holding, or, and this is what I think is more realistic, the Popes were just embarrassed about their horrendous record keeping.

Chadwick says in his book:

The creation of a central archive owed nothing to the notion of helping scholars to write history. It was a business transaction intended to make the administration more efficient.

Once in power, Napoleon decided he would take over and attempt an organisation of the century. So between 1810 and 1813, he had the papers sent to Paris, where he coincidentally had dreams of making Paris the centre of learning and culture.

Sadly Napoleon didn’t actually get around to doing anything with the papers, and so once Napoleon had been banished to his island, Pope Pius VII, who was around from 1800 to 1823, took his papers back and set about attempting to organise, or at the very least catalogue them.

But Pius wasn’t really that into the catalogue after all, because once it became apparent that the cost of getting all the papers brought back to Rome was just going to be too much, he said, to hell with it, we’ve got enough, get rid of the rest.

So naturally, bits were sold off to people who could use paper for non-writing activities, and whole bunches were burnt. Lucky for some they found their way over to Universities, like the Bibliotheque Nationale that ended up at Trinity College.

The moving back and forth of these papers, destroyed any sort of order they may have been in before, with Chadwick noting:

The archives hardly recovered until 1883 or 1890 the order which they possessed before the French confiscated them.

The concept of scientific history is fairly new, only really coming into vogue in the 19th century. And what better place to focus your archival research, than the archives of the Popes. One of the pioneers of this kind of history was G.H. Pertz, who was attempting to create a collection called the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

In 1822, Pertz was allowed to get started on analysing 1800 documents from the papal archives that were relevant to the German history he was studying. Keeping in mind that these 1800 documents were one small part of the larger 24 000 that made up the papal archives.

Because the rules are so strict about the archives in general, again that embarrassment about the state of things, Pertz wasn’t actually allowed to go into the archives. He had to wait for some poor bloke to bring stuff out to him, and then he could go through the papers that were before him.

His research, and perhaps how he had to conduct his research had Pertz writing:

There is no better defence of the papacy than to unveil its inward being. If weakness is shown up, you can reckon on a more friendly judgement through historical understanding than if, as often until now, it is all kept secret and men are left to suspect what they will.

The secrecy

The secrecy of the Vatican archives is actually a mistranslation of that pesky language, Latin. So the Vatican archives is actually called the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum. But where one might see ‘secretum’ and instantly think, ‘that’s obviously secret’, it actually translates more to ‘personal’ or ‘private’. Which kinda explains a lot if you sit and think about it for a minute.

As we already know, the primary objective of the Vatican archives was not to hide away religious secrets, even though that’s what pop culture has turned it into (Dan Brown). The original goal of the archives was one spot to house all of the Holy See’s paperwork and really anything in writing relating to the Pope. And maybe even a couple treasures that have been around since the 8th century.

But perhaps where the whole ‘secrecy’ thing came in, is when, around the 17th century, it was thought that common people were to corrupt to know what was happening with the Pope and his friends, and so any letters or correspondence between the Pope and those high society circles he travelled in should be kept private. And by private I mean behind a heavy wooden locked door in a tiny country within a larger country within the Roman Empire.

Something that those 17th century know-alls may not to be best pleased with, is that since the late 19th century, the archives have actually slowly, ever so slowly, started to become open to scholars. Not the general public just yet, nothing moves fast with religion, but dedicated scholars is definitely a good start.

Pope Leo XIII was the first to allow visits to the Archives in 1881 with the opening of the records of Galieo’s trail. You know, the guy who was put on trail because he had the guts to say that the Earth orbited the Sun instead of the other way round. How scandalous.

I make fun, but back then, it was, quite literally, the scandal of the century. Speaking out about something that wasn’t religion approved was like committing treason, in fact that’s exactly what it was. They just called it heresy back then.

You might be shocked at how much power the Pope had over something as trivial as what is orbiting around what. But we need to remember that our current understanding of religion, and even our modern sense of where religion and the Pope stand in the grand scheme of things is very different to the way they felt basically anytime before what we would call the ‘modern era’.

While religion today does have quite a big influence in certain parts of life and to a certain extent politics and lawmaking. Back then, in the 16th to 18th centuries. The Pope and what the Bible said was law and politics. And Popes had a much greater influence than what Pope Francis has today.

Once the Roman Empire had collapsed, all that was left standing was the Pope and papacy, and it was the Pope that stood between Italy and invaders from the North and East. We’re talking Turkish raids and invasions by German Emperors. So to Italian culture, the Pope was King.  

But Leo’s whole reason for opening the archives up was to prove that the papacy and to a certain extent the church in general weren’t the bad guy. As had been implied several times throughout history.

So in 1879, Leo brought in Josef Hergenrother, a Church historian from Wurzburg and basically put him in charge of the archives, making him a cardinal at the same time.

It was Leo who wanted the archives open so that anyone could come in and basically fact check all those pesky rumours about the church. Leo strongly believed that the truth would set the Church free and perhaps show just how much the papacy had done for everyday Italians throughout history.

Leo even wrote:

The first law of history is not to dare to utter falsehood; the second, not to fear to tell the truth.

But like with all things, there were hiccups. Some of the content in the archives were letters to and from kings and other leaders. And some countries really didn’t want the word of their former leaders coming out. So were able to put a hold on the release of certain material.

Once instance being that in 1916, the German Foreign Office really didn’t want anything related to King Frederick the Great of Prussia getting out. Ignoring the fact that he had been dead since 1786.

But it seems that Leo has a friend in Francis, the current pope, who in 2017, decided that he would unseal and release for the public a set of ancient scrolls that had been sitting around in the archives for centuries.

These special scrolls are supposedly meant to have been encased in marble and buried in 463 AD, purely because they

contain the true name of God as communicated to Moses in the Book of Exodus.

Pope Francis said that the reason he was having the scrolls released was because he felt the Church needed to have

greater transparency

when it came to stuff hidden away in its archives.

The Church first became aware of these special scrolls in the 5th century while Jerusalem was under siege. And it was Pope Hilarius, (don’t laugh, that’s his real name) who decided that the true name of God should never be spoken, or even seen and therefore was removed from all Church literature. The reason Hilarius was so worried about God’s ‘true’ name getting out there is quite the mystery, but Greg Burke, the Vatican Spokesman does say this:

In keeping with tradition, each successive Pope since Hilarius has been made aware of the Lord’s name.

In the week following Francis’ announcement that the content of the scrolls would be released, there were more than 2 million enquiries to the Vatican Press Office about what the name is. But unfortunately the name is yet to be known to the general public and is still a mystery.

It’d be hilarious if his name was something like Barry or Craig. And even funnier if it was something like Sharon or Kate. Can you just imagine?

A much more recent controversy that has been brought into the spotlight. Is Pope Pius XII’s role throughout the Second World War. In March 2020, Francis allowed the release of papers relating to Pius XII to researchers.

The reason this was so high profile, is because some believe that Pius XII knew about what has happening in Nazi concentration camps, he knew about the Holocaust and he didn’t do anything. He didn’t speak out, he didn’t condemn Hitler or the Nazi party. And understandably people are angry. Someone of such a high social standing, especially someone who is head of a church should have exposed what was happening in those camps and sought to bring an end to the atrocities.  

Something we need to keep in mind is that we are a much more connected world than we were during the Second World War. We have social media, 24-hour news coverage. Nothing happens anywhere in the world without the rest of us knowing about it. This wasn’t the case during back in the 1940s. They had limited TV news coverage. Their main source of information was the radio, and you couldn’t pull that out of your pocket and check it whenever you wanted. So information that was floating around about the concentration camps and the Holocaust was few and far between, so if there is evidence that Pius knew about what was going on and turned a blind eye, that would definitely cause big problems.

Bishop Sergio Pagano, the current prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Archive, (the new unambiguous name of the Vatican Secret Archive), said about the release of the papers:

Obviously the dramatic question of the Shoah and therefore of Jews immediately appears. We know the history of this persecuted people and of the Shoah, and therefore we very much understand that the Jews are expecting a great deal from these documents.

But, as there always is to any story, there’s a second side. There are people who believe that while Pius didn’t call out what was happening. He knew that he couldn’t stop it. So behind scenes he went about attempting to save those that he could, by encouraging people to offer shelter to Jews and to do what they could against the Nazi influence throughout the German occupation of Rome.

Millions of pages were released by the Vatican, but once again the shocking state of the whole thing has hampered getting any real answers. With those few selected scholars having to literally wade through everything. And it’s believed that the answer to what Pius actually did throughout the Second World War, won’t be known for years.

Another massive scandal that has come out in recent times is the accusations of sexual abuse within the Church. And it’s believed that documents within the Archive could confirm many of these cases. But what’s made things even more difficult, is that while the Vatican has its own archives, each individual diocese also has private archives that isn’t available to the public. Another roadblock is that the Vatican Archives wait a good 75 years before releasing anything, and you can’t just ask the Church to open the archives, because the Church doesn’t actually own the archives, that’s actually the Pope, so everything released is at the Pope’s discretion.  

You might be thinking, ‘easy, just sue them and get them to release the papers that way’. But it’s that not that simple either. The Church is basically like a sovereign nation and so can pretty much do what it wants.

Which is just great for anyone actually needing anything from the Church.

The secrets

If you’re ever lucky to get to see the files that are available for mere human eyes, then you would actually have some pretty cool historical documents to go over.

A big one for Catholics is the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Which is the belief that the Virgin Mary, since her own conception has been free of that pesky thing known as ‘original sin’. Which itself is the belief that all humans, every single one of us, are born with sin, therefore needing the father, or his son to come down and save us all. The Archives have a document that Pope Pius IX signed on the 8 December 1854, where he officially declared that Mary has no ‘original sin’. This document is called the Ineffabilis Deus.

Another big important document is the Inter caetera, which is a papal bull by Pope Alexander VI that basically split up the new world between Spain and Portugal. It was in 1493 that this was declared after Christopher Columbus had ‘discovered’ his little bit of land, and that is pretty much the reason why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the rest of South America speak Spanish.

If you’re wandering around in the archives, you’ll probably also come across a petition by Henry VIII from 1530, where he basically orders Pope Clement VII to give him an annulment so that he can split with Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The petition actually held over 80 signatures from high ranking Englishmen. As we well know, the Pope refused and that is why we have the Church of England.

Something we touched on earlier is the 1633 trial of Galileo, the astronomer who was condemned as a heretic for his belief of the workings of the solar system. Interestingly, Galileo had already been given a warning about voicing his knowledge in 1616, but had managed to get himself off by saying he was just exploring the idea and didn’t actually believe it. But at his trial in 1633, this unfortunately didn’t work a second time and Pope Urban VIII found Galileo:

Vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, or having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the centre of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the centre of the world.

I’m not about to go into everything that is wrong with this statement. But you get what I mean about the Church always having to be right. It was long believed that Galileo had had a pretty rough go of it while he was dealing with the church. Claims of endless imprisonments and torture were widely believed by everyone, including European scholars. But once the record of his trail was made public, which happened in 1867, they actually found that the church was pretty lenient. Galileo’s imprisonment was only for 22 days, where he was actually quite comfortable, he was never tortured, even though it was threatened, but it’s not actually clear whether Galileo realised he was being threatened with torture, so one could argue that even threatening didn’t work.

Something that I think is extra cool, is a letter written by the Grand Empress Dowager Helena Wang of China to Pope Innocent X. The letter’s written on a silk scroll, and the Empress, who had converted to Catholicism, was asking the Pope for help when the Qing Dynasty had forced her to escape to Zhaoqing. The really sad thing about this one is that the letter never actually reached the Pope. He died before the messenger was able to give it him.

Along the same vein, is a letter written by Pope Clement XII addressed to the Seventh Dalai Lama, which asked him for protection for Franciscan missionaries that were stuck in Tibet while the Qing dynasty was doing its thing.

1863 was a big year for Pope Pius IX when he received two letters from America. One from Abraham Lincoln and the other from Jefferson Davis. Interestingly, neither of these men were Catholic, but were eager to have the Pope side with them. Lincoln requested that Rufus King be accepted as the US representative to the Vatican, and that Davis told the Pope about the horrors of the war, and wanted what was known as ‘the South’ to be recognised as their own country. While the Vatican didn’t go that far, it came pretty close, especially when the Pope addressed Davis as the ‘President of the Confederate State of America’. A confederate general, Robert E. Lee believes that the Pope was the only world leader to address him in this way.

Another interesting letter you might stumble across in the archives, is one from Mary, Queen of Scots, who asked the Pope to save her from execution. She had been forced to abdicate her throne, had her son turned against her and was imprisoned for almost 20 years. Queen Liz I, sentenced her cousin to death, under the belief that she had conspired to murder her. And so her letter to Pope Sixtus V is basically her begging for her life. History tells us that the Pope didn’t do anything and Mary was beheaded on 8 February 1587.

The Catholic Church loves a good excommunication. And one of the big ones is Martin Luther. He was a German who wasn’t really a fan of Catholicism and so wrote it all down in what is called his 95 Theses, and it was this document that basically started people down the path of the Protestant Reformation. Pope Leo X wasn’t a fan of Luther’s views and so wrote Decet Romanum Pontificem, which basically kicked Luther out, and kinda worked out for Luther, because he was now free to start his own church.

Pope Innocent III actually issued a papal bull in 1198, which basically launched the Fourth Crusade that would eventually capture Constantinople. While Innocent was all for the Crusade at the beginning, it seemed he had some doubts once Constantinople was captured, even going so far as condemning the brutality of what happened

as an example of affliction and the works of hell.

Minutes of the Knights Templar trials is actually available as well. It’s known as the Chinon Parchment and is absolutely massive. Basically it contains the accusations against the Roman Catholic Military for things like blasphemous behaviour and heresy carried out throughout the Crusades. An archival mistake actually meant that the parchment was lost for centuries (classic Vatican Archives), and it was actually found quite recently, in 2001, when it turned up in a random box. When the contents of the Chinon Parchment were released in 2007, it just brought the Knights Templar back into the spotlight, and actually revealed that Pope Clement V had cleared the whole lot of them of heresy in 1308. Who knew?

Now that we know what is actually in the archives, let’s now turn to what could be in the archives.

The 2000-year-old secrecy surrounding the Catholic Church and its archives has done nothing but fuel wild theories about what they’re hiding. There are even ridiculous ones like magical objects, alien beings and even the devil have been hiding in the archives for centuries.

Moving more in a religious direction, some believe that the Vatican holds the bones of Saint Peter, paintings of the real Jesus and maybe even historical proof that Jesus existed, or didn’t exist. I’m not sure how you prove that someone didn’t exist, but there you go.

The archives today

Walter Brandmuller, the President of the Papal Committee for Historical Scholarship in Rome reckons that today the Archive takes up 75 km of shelf space. Supposedly the documents that cover the years 1923 to 1958, and cover Popes Pius XI and XII, have roughly 3 million pages. If we’re looking at the Archives as a whole, that’s over 12 centuries worth of documents.

Possibly part of the reason why it takes so long for papal documents to be released to the public is that every single page

must be examined, its contents noted, given a number and stamped.

Only once this has been done, can the files been bound and catalogued. And the people completing this exhausting task? Well the Vatican Archives only employ 35 people. That’s right, just 35, and only 11 of those are actually trained archivists. The rest are pretty much service personnel whose job it is to complete admin tasks, microfilming and restoration.

Brandmuller compares this to the Bavarian State Archives that are over in Munich. They have a staff of 170 people. The fact that the Vatican thinks it’s going to get anywhere at anything resembling faster than a snail’s pace with 11 archivists, is laughable. But then, maybe that’s the point.

Actually getting in and seeing the documents can be quite the challenge. It’s not like visiting the library, where you can roam the shelves choosing what to look at with leisure. Browsing is prohibited and before you enter you actually have to tell them what you’re looking for.

Not just anyone can wander in either, you have to be a recognised scholar. If the Vatican is convinced of your scholarly career, then they issue you with credentials. Michael O’Loughlin, in his 2014 article, goes on to say:

Scholars enter through the Porta Sant’Anna, pass Swiss Guards, walk through the Cortile del Belvedere, and present credentials that must be renewed every 6 months. Journalists, students and amateur historians aren’t welcome.

Once inside, the scholars need to request the specific documents that they want to see. But there’s a limit of three documents per day. And you don’t get to see what you’re choosing either, the catalogues you have to choose from can be difficult to navigate, there are 35 000 to choose from, with bits written by hand in Italian or Latin. And if what you’re looking for isn’t in those three documents, then you have to wait until tomorrow to try again, which would be super frustrating if you only had limited time or had come halfway round the world. And don’t even think about taking photos of the stuff, photography is banned, but you are allowed to bring along a computer, so at least that’s something.

Each year about 4 million people walk through the Vatican museums, and in 2010, after the increased interest by the public, which could be put down to Dan Brown’s novels, the Vatican even allowed journalists to go on a tour throughout the Archives.

2012, was a pretty amazing year for the Vatican. In celebration for making it 400 years, they opened an exhibit for the public that displayed 100 documents. The exhibit was called Lux in Arcana. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more like it in the future.

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