Vatican archives testify that in the centuries after Leo the Great saved Rome from Attila’s sacking Huns, Lucius III instigated the Inquisition; Pope Innocent III “exercised effective political control over all Italy and much of Europe to bring the temporal power of the Papacy to its high-water mark; Leo X…excommunicated Martin Luther and proved incapable of dealing with the Reformation; Alexander VI (a Borgia) practiced simony and nepotism and failed in his master plan to conquer and unify Italy; Pius VII signed a Concordat with Napoleon and restored Catholicism to France; Leo XIII issued an encyclical, Rerum Novarum, that first diagnosed for Roman Catholics the sickness of contemporary society and called on them to cure it-unsuccessfully.”
As one historian notes, the Roman Catholic Church is humanity’s oldest continuing institution, spanning two millennia. For centuries, the church has been happy to operate away from the public eye, but a written record of the Church and most of its papal history can be found in the Vatican’s immense archives, including Clement V’s dissolution of the Knights Templar and the assertion by the director of the Vatican’s observatory that if there are intelligent beings beyond the bounds of Earth, they are, like us, the handiwork of God.
Among the dark secrets that some people believe may be held by the Vatican ’s present ruler are those that set the date for the end of the world as we know it, the fulfillment of the prophesies of the book of Revelations, and the return of Christ.
CHAPTER 14
Myths, Rumors, and Presidents
The late Jesuit priest, scholar, Vatican insider, and best-selling author Malachi Martin said, “Anybody who is acquainted with the state of affairs in the Vatican is well aware that the prince of darkness has had and still has his surrogates in the court of St. Peter in Rome.”
From 1958 until 1964, Martin served in Rome where he was a close associate of, and carried out many sensitive missions for Pope Paul VI. Released frm his vows of poverty and obedience at his own request (but still a priest), he ultimately moved to New York and became a best-selling writer of fiction and nonfiction. In his first reference to a diabolic rite held in Rome in his 1990 nonfiction best-seller about geopolitics and the Vatican, The Keys of This Blood, he wrote, “Pope Paul had come up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963.”
Indeed, Pope Paul VI had alluded somberly to “the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary.”
In 1996 in Windswept House: A Vatican Novel, Martin vividly described a ceremony called “The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer” supposedly held in St. Paul’s Chapel in the Vatican on June 29, 1963, barely a week after the election of Paul VI. In the novel, before he dies, a Pope leaves a secret account of the situation on his desk for the next occupant of the throne of Peter, a thinly disguised reference to John Paul II.
According to The New American magazine, Martin confirmed the ceremony did indeed occur as he had described. “Oh yes, it is true; very much so,” he said. “But the only way I could put that down into print is in novelistic form.”
A symbol of Satan was said to be a bent crucifix with a repulsive or distorted figure representing Christ. Historians note that it was a sinister symbol used by sixth century Satanists and black magicians and sorcerers in the Middle Ages to represent the “mark of the beast.” During the reigns of both Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, a papal staff with the Twisted Cross was continually held before adoring masses of Catholic faithful, who were unaware that they were adoring a symbol that was once the sign of the Antichrist. This crucifix is also carried by Benedict XVI.
“There is a greater openness towards the devil,’ said Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican ’s Chief Exorcist, to the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2008.
Father Pedro Barrajon, a priest in Rome, stated, “Satanism and the occult are in fashion. The overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation of Italy has an estimated 800 satanic cults, with more than 600,000 followers. But Rome, home to Vatican City and the pope, is where the fiercest spiritual battle is taking place.”
A persistent and false belief is that the Vatican Library contains the world’s largest collection of pornography, that the Vatican holds many secret documents the Catholic Church doesn’t want the world to see, and that the archives hold thousands of papers that would question the power and authority of the Church.
It is sometimes claimed by non-scholars that some of these directly refer to Jesus, such as the execution order for Jesus signed by Pontius Pilate, or items that were personally written by Jesus, explaining to his followers how to conduct the formation of the Catholic Church after his death, or even the exact date of his return to judge mankind. There has been only one document attributed to Jesus himself. It is known as the Letter of Christ and Abgarus. Scholars generally believe that it was fabricated, probably in the third century AD. There is no evidence that Jesus wrote anything during his life, except unknown words inscribed in dust on the ground when he was questioned about a woman caught in adultery.
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.