The Lost Testament

8

Many people think the Vatican City is living in the past. The fact that the official language is still Latin — a dead language that is spoken by no other nation anywhere else in the world — the medieval weapons carried by the Swiss Guard, the burning of incense, using different coloured smoke to signal the choosing of a new pontiff, and the ancient robes worn by the senior clergy who attend the Pope, all hark back to the Middle Ages. What they don’t realize is that these facts deliberately conspire to suggest that both the Vatican and the papacy are essentially mediaeval in nature, an anachronism.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the chanting and the piety and the centuries of tradition and custom, the papacy of the twenty-first century is every bit as modern as any multinational corporation or Western government, and with good reason. The Catholic Church has had more than its fair share of problems over the last century. Some were self-inflicted, like the assistance given at the end of the Second World War to help wanted Nazis to escape from the ruins of Germany and establish themselves in new lives and with new identities elsewhere in the world. The whole question of resistance to birth control also showed that the Vatican, and most especially the then Pope, was completely out of touch with reality, by promoting unlimited expansion of the human race at a time when the world was already grossly overpopulated.

Perhaps most worrying of all for the Vatican were the fundamental criticisms of religion itself, whether from academic sources or from popular books — especially criticisms of Christianity and Roman Catholicism. The basis of the problem was that science had now been able to explain virtually everything from the creation of the universe itself right through to identifying the most fundamental particles, the very building blocks of every kind of matter.

In Australia, just to look at a single nation that particularly concerned the Church, belief in Christianity fell from over 95 per cent of the population to just over 60 per cent in the twentieth century alone, and the fastest growing ‘religion’ on that continent was, in fact, atheism.

And while Christianity, though still the world’s largest religion, was in possibly terminal decline, other religions that shared no part of the Christian ideal, such as Islam, were beginning to grow.

The portents for the future were not good, and successive occupants of the Throne of St Peter had been made very aware that the last thing the Church needed was any other damage to the core beliefs of Christianity. And it was the growth of the single largest communication medium in history, the Internet, which had provided them with the tools they needed to detect any such undesirable ripples of doubt.

At the end of the twentieth century, the governments of Western Europe and America had created a global monitoring system known as Echelon, a way of eavesdropping on telephone conversations, faxes and electronic mail transmissions from almost anywhere in the world. The purpose of Echelon was entirely laudable: the detection of potential terrorist activity before it could be turned into a devastating reality. To achieve this, the security services of the world employed a program known as the Echelon Dictionary, a vast list of words that the monitoring system was created to detect, and which it was hoped would lead to the surveillance, and if necessary the arrest and imprisonment, of potential suicide bombers and members of terrorist groups.

The Vatican, for all its enormous wealth and influence, possessed neither the resources nor the legal authority to create such a global monitoring system. But some years earlier, as the first handful of computers began to be connected to the fledgling network that would soon begin to grow exponentially into the Internet, a group of far-sighted and technologically literate priests working at the Vatican had seen the potential of the new information resource and also realized that it could be a useful — perhaps even an essential — tool to help guarantee the future of the Church.

Like every large organization, there were a fair number of skeletons in the Vatican’s closets, documents and objects which, if they ever saw the light of day, would cripple — or at least very severely damage — the Church’s credibility. And it made sense that anyone who discovered even a hint about any such dark secret would very probably use an online search engine to research the topic. A kind of early-warning system was needed.

So the Vatican approached the emerging companies operating the search engines and explained the concerns the Church had. And, because almost all of the owners of these companies were American, a nation with far more than its fair share of fundamentalist Christians, getting agreement to install monitoring software had proved to be surprisingly easy.

The result was a loose and informal arrangement with the providers of all of the major search engines on the Internet. Somewhat like the Echelon Dictionary, the Vatican’s monitoring system — known to the handful of indoctrinated senior clerics in the Holy See as ‘Codex S’, a nod to perhaps the most important single extant book in the Christian world, the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible handwritten in Greek — was programmed to detect certain words being entered into the search engines, particularly when two or more of those words were entered together. The date and time would be noted, and the search term recorded, the information then being fed back to the Vatican.

As a further refinement, when any such search term was entered, the monitoring software would also locate the precise Internet address of the initiating computer. Every computer that accesses the Internet is allocated either a permanent or a temporary address — this is essential to ensure that responses go to the right place — and also geographically locates that computer. So by this fairly simple method, the Vatican was informed every time any search that might be considered dangerous to it was entered on any computer in the world, as long as one of the principal search engines had been used.

Early that morning, in a large open-plan office in a building in a part of the Vatican to which the public, and almost all of the staff of the Holy See, never had access under any circumstances, a speaker system attached to a desktop computer emitted five short beeps, indicating a hit from the monitoring system. The room was unmanned for most of the time, but a log was maintained at each of the workstations and these were combined into a master electronic document that was inspected at least once a day.

Late that evening, a senior member of the Vatican staff inspected the log and immediately saw the two words that had triggered the response by the monitoring system. His orders were clear, and he followed them straight away. He printed a hard copy of the entry and then ran a simple program that identified the precise geographical location of the computer from which the search had been generated, translating the Internet address into a street address.

Then he left the room, secured the door behind him, and made his way quickly through the corridors and passages of the building to the Secret Archives. There, he went straight to the office occupied by the Prefect in charge, Father Antonio Morini, and placed on his desk a sealed envelope containing the printouts.