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
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.”