Dark Mysteries of the Vatican

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.

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.