Dark Mysteries of the Vatican

by H. Paul Jeffers

  The Catholic Church does have all records that passed through the Vatican in the Library at the Vatican, including every letter written by the Popes. Some contain questionable decisions made by past popes. The Archives also contain letters to the popes, including communications from England on the subject of King Henry VIII’s demands for papal approval of the dissolution of his marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon so Henry could wed Anne Boleyn.

  A misconception surrounding the Papal Tiara suggests that the words Vicarius Filii Dei (Latin for “Vicar of the Son of God”) exist on the side of one of the tiaras.

  This story centers on a widely made claim that when the letters are given numbers based on alphabetical sequence and are added, they total 666, described in the Book of Revelation as the number of the Beast (the Antichrist) who wears multiple crowns. This claim has been made by some Protestant sects who believe that the Pope, as the head of the Roman Catholic Church is the Beast or the False Prophet. The Vatican notes that a detailed examination of the tiaras shows no such decoration, and that Vicarius Filii Dei is not among the titles of the Pope. The Vatican states that the closest match is Vicarius Christi (“Vicar of Christ”), which does not add up to 666.

  A popular myth holds that there was once a Pope Joan. A claim that a woman held the papacy first appeared in a Dominican chronicle in 1250. It soon spread in Europe through traveling friars. The time period for this claim is traditionally given as AD 855–858, between the reigns of Leo IV and Benedict III, but this is impossible because Leo IV died on July 17, 855, and Pope Benedict III was elected two months later (September 29). Jean de Mailly, a French Dominican at Metz, placed the story in 1099 in his Chronica universalis mettensis, which dates from around 1250, and gave what is almost certainly the earliest authentic account of a woman who became known as Pope Joan.

  In Vatican lore there are two versions of the Pope Joan legend. In the first, an English woman, called Joan, went to Athens with her lover to study there. In the second, a German woman called Giliberta was born in Mainz. This “Joan” disguised herself as a monk, called Joannes Anglicus. In time, she rose to the highest office of the Church. After two or five years of reign, Pope Joan became pregnant, and during an Easter procession, she gave birth on the streets when she fell off a horse. She was publicly stoned to death by the astonished crowd. According to the legend, she was removed from the Vatican archives. As a consequence, popes in the medieval period were required to undergo a procedure wherein they sat on a special chair with a hole in the seat. A cardinal would have the task of putting his hand up the hole to check whether the pope had testicles. In a seventeenth-century study, Protestant historian David Blondel argued that “Pope Joan” was a fictitious story that may have been a satire that came to be believed as reality.

  While the popularity of the legend is mysterious, to Vatican historians there is no doubt it is legend. There are no contemporary references to a woman pope, and there is no room in the acknowledged papal chronology to fit her in

  During the reign of Paul VI, rumors flew in Rome and throughout Italy that he was homosexual. It was whispered that when he was the Archbishop of Milan, he was caught by police one night wearing civilian clothes and with what was called “not so laudable company.” Vatican insiders claimed that for many years he had a special friendship with a redhaired actor. This man made no secret of his relationship with the future pope. The relationship allegedly continued and became even closer. After Cardinal Montini became Pope Paul VI, an official of the Vatican security forces alleged that “this favorite of Montini” was allowed to come and go freely in the pontifical apartments, and that he was seen taking the papal elevator at night.

  Although the United States has been a predominately Protestant nation, the papacy has drawn the attention of every president in the last half of the twentieth century. The first papal audience with a president occurred shortly after the end of the First World War, when Woodrow Wilson was received at the Vatican by Pope Benedict XV in 1919. The next wasn’t for forty more years, when President Dwight Eisenhower saw Pope John XXIII in Rome.

  President Kennedy had an audience with Pope Paul VI on July 3, 1963, within days of Paul VI’s coronation. Since then, every president has met with the pope at least once, often more. President Lyndon Johnson was host to Paul VI during a papal visit to the United States. Jimmy Carter hailed John Paul II as the pontiff toured six American cities in the fall of 1979 as a “messenger of brotherhood and peace.” On October 6, Carter became the first president to welcome a pope to the White House.

  In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and John Paul II became allies against the Soviet Union and are credited with winning the Cold War. Reagan began formal diplomatic relations in 1984. Before the establishment of the official contacts, Myron Taylor served during World War II as emissary for President Roosevelt. President Harry Truman’s pick of a WWII hero Mark W. Clark was defeated by the Senate. Between 1951 and 1968, the United States had no official representative accredited to the Holy See. President Nixon changed this when he appointed Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. as his personal representative. President Carter followed with the appointment of former New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Every ambassador to date has been a Roman Catholic.

  The close contact between Reagan and John Paul II continued under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. But George W. Bush became the record-holder in papal visits, with a total of five meetings with two popes, John Paul II and his successor. In June 2008 when he visited Pope Benedict XVI, they spoke in a garden where the pontiff prayed daily, rather than in the library where Benedict greeted most world leaders. This sparked rumors that President Bush might convert to Catholicism. Vatican observers described him as the most “Catholic-minded” president since John F. Kennedy “The rosy legend of a possible conversion of Bush to Catholicism has started to circulate,” wrote Marco Politi, Vatican correspondent of La Repubblica, after the chat in the papal garden. Politi noted that the president’s brother Jeb had converted to Roman Catholicism, as had former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

  The White House called reports of President Bush converting to Catholicism “baseless speculation.” Father Richard John Neuhaus, a prominent Catholic priest who ran the monthly magazine First Things said, “I’d be very surprised.”

  When the Vatican wants to let the world know something, it is most likely to make the announcement in the newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Founded in 1861, it has served as a mouthpiece of Vatican news, reporting the daily routines of popes and providing ample space for their writings, often in Latin. It was also considered a clearing house for semiofficial thinking on touchy issues such as birth control and women in the clergy.

  An article in the Wall Street Journal in October 2008 noted that the paper has long drawn criticism, “often from within the highest ranks of the church.” In 1961, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, then the Archbishop of Milan, penned a stinging critique of the publication on its 100th anniversary. “Even when the headline page is not in Latin, one cannot always say that it provides enjoyable reading,” wrote the future Pope Paul VI. “A serious newspaper, a grave newspaper, but who would ever read it on the tram or at the bar, who would ever strike up a discussion about it?”

  The decades that followed were ones of steady decline. It currently has a circulation of about 15,000.

  In May 2008, L’Osservatore Romano ran an interview with the Vatican’s top astronomer. “If we consider earthly creatures as ‘brother’ and ‘sister,’ why cannot we also speak of an ‘extraterrestrial brother?’” mused Father José Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory. Pressed on whether Heaven might be open to such alien beings, the Rev. Funes said, “Jesus has been incarnated once, for everyone.”

  Perhaps more surprising than a Vatican star-gazer’s openness to the idea of life elsewhere in the universe is that some people believe the darkest Vatican secret is that it has proof such creatures have paid visits to Earth.

  CHAPTER 15

&n
bsp; And God Created Aliens

  Energized by the statement by the head of the Vatican’s observatory that there was no conflict between the tenets of the Church and belief in extraterrestrial life, adherents of the theory that unidentified objects in the sky (UFOs) carry beings from outer space contend that the Vatican has known about them since the 1950s. It is said by UFO exponents, who communicate with each other primarily via the Internet, that Pope Pius XII decided to create a secret information department with a structure similar to the military intelligence departments of the United States and Britain. Its purpose was to gather all possible information regarding the activities of the alien entities and information acquired by the U.S. Air Force in its investigations of UFO reports. The codename for this program was said to be “Secretum Omega.”

  One Internet site asserted that skeletal remains resembling space aliens had been excavated from the basement floor of a centuries old vault under the Vatican Library. According to this report, the discovery occurred because the library was undergoing a major restoration to its underground vaults, containing dirt floors that had not felt a human foot in more than 500 years.

  Another website presented an enlarged, technically enhanced photograph of a purported UFO hovering near the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, taken by a Polish tourist in St. Peter’s Square on June 24, 2006.

  Numerous contributors to UFO chat rooms find evidence of life beyond Earth in the Bible. They interpret the Prophet Ezekhial seeing “a wheel, way up in the middle of the air; the big wheel ran by faith and the little wheel ran by the grace of God, a wheel in a wheel, away in the middle of the air.” These wheels were turning, one wheel within the other. Also cited was Jacob in the book of Genesis seeing a ladder set up on the earth that reached to heaven; and “behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending.”

  UFO believers cited news coverage of Pope John Paul II lying in state that purportedly showed an unidentified flying object over St. Peter’s Basilica.

  Should it prove to be true that the Vatican has secret files on UFOs and beings from outer space, it’s nothing new. In the fifteenth century, Cardinal Nicolo Cusano (1401–1464), philosopher and scientist, said, “We are not authorized to exclude that on another star beings do exist, even if they are completely different from us.”

  While Vatican astronomers search the skies in the hope of learning about the secrets of the universe, archeologists have been exploring beneath the Vatican to learn more about the origins of the Church. Excavations began in June 1939. They found that two levels below St. Peter’s Basilica lies an excavated Roman graveyard full of mausoleums, frescoes, inscriptions and stucco decorations. It was here in the 1940s that experts uncovered the bones of a tall man whose grave had been venerated in early times. Many thought they were the bones of St. Peter, believed to have been martyred in Nero’s Circus nearby. But Time magazine noted, “What the excavators found was a looted grave, so despoiled (probably by the Saracens in 846) that much of it was a featureless hole. There was no trace of the bronze casket in which tradition said Constantine had placed St. Peter’s relics. All that remained, buried at the rear of the grave niche, were a few bones. The Vatican has said only that they are human, that there is no skull among them, and that they are those of a powerfully built person of advanced age but undetermined sex.”

  In June 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that bones unearthed during the excavations under St. Peter’s Basilica were, in his judgment, those of Peter the Apostle. “The relics of St. Peter,” he declared, “have been identified in a manner which we believe convincing.”

  He based his conclusion on “very patient and accurate investigations” by “worthy and competent persons.”

  Vatican archeologists also believed that they identified the tomb of St. Paul in the Roman basilica that bears his name. A sarcophagus was identified in the basilica of St. Paul. The sarcophagus was discovered during excavations carried out in 2002 and 2003 around the basilica, in the south of Rome.” The tomb that we discovered,” said archaeologist Giorgio Filippi,” is the one that the popes and the Emperor Theodosius (379–395) saved and presented to the whole world as being the tomb of the apostle.”

  The discovery was made by a team composed exclusively of experts from the Vatican Museum. They had undertaken their exploration in response to a request from the administrator of St. Paul’s basilica, Archbishop Francesco Gioia. During the Jubilee Year 2000, the archbishop noticed that thousands of pilgrims were inquiring about the location of St. Paul’s tomb. The excavation effort was guided by nineteenth century plans for the basilica, which was largely rebuilt after a fire in 1823. An initial survey enabled archeologists to reconstruct the shape of the original basilica, built early in the fourth century. A second excavation, under the main altar of the basilica, brought the Vatican team to the sarcophagus, which was located on what would have been ground level for the original fourth-century building.

  The Catholic World News Service reported that under the altar a marble plaque was still visible. Dating back to the fourth century, it bore the inscription: “Apostle Paul, martyr.”

  As an archeologist, Filippi said that he had no special curiosity to learn whether the remains of St. Paul were still inside that sarcophagus. He said that the tomb should not be opened merely to satisfy curiosity, but he had no doubt that St. Paul was buried on the site, “because this basilica was the object of pilgrimages by emperors; people from all around the world came to venerate him, having faith that he was present in this basilica.”

  In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI gave his approval to plans by investigators to examine the interior of the ancient stone coffin. They were given permission to remove a plug with which the coffin had been sealed so an endoscopic probe could be inserted and the contents viewed.

  While excavations were being carried out inside Vatican City in 2003 for an underground garage to ease the Vatican’s parking problems a 2,000-year-old burial ground was discovered. The necropolis, which traces pagan Rome to the birth of Christianity, contained more than forty elaborately decorated mausoleums and 200 individual tombs. Headstones, including one that belonged to a slave of Nero, urns and elaborately decorated frescoes and mosaic floors were uncovered on the site.

  The historical importance of the find was described as second only to the necropolis below St Peter’s Basilica. The Guardian of London reported that Giandomenico Spinola, director of the project, described the necropolis as being in an excellent condition because it had been protected by a landslide at the end of the second century. Most of the tombs dated between the era of Augustus (23B.C.–A.D.14) to that of Constantine (306–337).

  A monument to Pope Leo XI, a Medici, in white marble, by Alessandro Algardi (1645–1646), took much longer to create than Leo XI reigned. Seventy years old and rather frail when he was elected, he was the 232nd pope and died just twenty-six days into his reign (April 1–27, 1605). Born in Florence, he was the last of the Medici family’s popes. His mother, Francesca Salviati, was a daughter of Giacomo Salviati and Lucrezia de’ Medici, a sister of Leo X, while his father, Ottaviano, was a more distant scion of the Medici family. King Henry IV of France, who had learned to like Leo XI when he was papal legate at his court, is said to have bank-rolled promotion of his election. When Leo took sick after his coronation, he was importuned by many members of the Curia to make one of his grandnephews a cardinal, but Leo had such an aversion to nepotism that he refused. When his confessor urged him to grant it, he dismissed him and sent for another. Because of the brevity of his papacy, the Italians called him Papa Lampo (Lightning Pope).

  Algardi also memorialized Pope Leo I, who saved Rome from Attila when the Mongolian conqueror, King of the Huns, was ready and waiting to cross the Po River with his horde and attack the city. Leo, in papal robes, entered Attila’s camp, stood before Attila, and threatened him with the power from St. Peter if he did not turn back and leave Italy unmolested. When Attila agreed to turn back, his servants reportedly asked him why he had cap
itulated so easily to the Bishop of Rome. Attila answered that all the while the Pope was speaking, there had appeared in the sky above the Pope’s head a vision of St. Peter with drawn sword.

  A papal tomb not found in the Vatican is that of Pope Alexander VI.

  Historian Elizabeth Lev wrote that generally in the history of the papacy, Pope Alexander VI does not make it into the list of the top ten, twenty or thirty. She wrote, “Alexander became to the papacy what Nero is to the Roman empire, the Pope critics love to hate.” Born Roderigo Borgia in 1431 near Valencia, Spain, he rose to the rank of cardinal with the help of his uncle Pope Callistus III, then, as a favorite of Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, he was elected Pope in 1492 while Columbus was discovering America in the employ of the same Spanish sovereigns. Contemporaries viewed this election with much trepidation, Lev noted, because all the contracts and titles related to the vast enterprise of the New World would be in Spanish hands.

  Alexander did little to court public opinion, exasperating many by leading an openly licentious life and favoring his children, particularly Cesare Borgia, who was accused of several murders during Alexander’s pontificate and was protected if not abetted by his father. Alexander VI fathered seven children, including Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia, by at least two mistresses. Such was Alexander VI’s unpopularity that when he died, perhaps by poisoning, perhaps from the plague, in 1503 at the age of seventy-two, the priests of St Peter’s Basilica at first refused to accept his body for burial. He died on August 18, 1503, in the twelfth year of his pontificate. He was buried on August 19 in the church of Santa Maria della Febbre, Rome, and his body was transferred in 1610 to the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato in Rome.