Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (13 page)

“T
hank God we have a Pope who has decided to confront the devil head-on.”

So said Father Gabriele Amorth, the official exorcist of the Rome diocese, when he heard a report in 2007 that Pope Benedict XIV would soon undertake a new campaign to combat demonic possession.

An expert on the subject and author of a popular book on exorcism and demonic possession, age seventy-five and a priest for fifty years, Amorth spoke as “the undisputed leader of Rome’s six exorcists…and honorary president-for-life of the International Association of Exorcists.”

“I speak with the Devil every day,” he said to an interviewer while “grinning like a benevolent gargoyle. ‘I talk to him in Latin. He answers in Italian. I have been wrestling with him, day in day out, for fourteen years.’”

Born in 1925 in “Modena, northern Italy, the son and grandson of lawyers,” he joined the Italian resistance as a teenager in World War II. “Immediately after the war, he became a member of Italy’s fledgling Christian Democratic Party. Giulio Andreotti was president of the Young Christian Democrats, Amorth was his deputy. Andreotti went into politics and was seven times prime minister. Amorth, having studied law at university, went into the Church.”

“From the age of fifteen,” he recalled, “I knew it was my true vocation. My speciality was the Madonna. For many years I edited the magazine
Madre di Deo
(
Mother of God
)…. I knew nothing of exorcism—I had given it no thought—until June 6, 1986, when Cardinal Poletti, the then Vicar of Rome, asked to see me. There was a famous exorcist in Rome then, the only one, Father Candido, but he was not well, and Cardinal Poletti told me I was to be his assistant. I learnt everything from Father Candido. He was my great master. Quickly I realized how much work there was to be done and how few exorcists there were to do it. From that day, I dropped everything and dedicated myself entirely to exorcism.”

In 2008, he said to the website Petrus that a “new Vatican document would call for the designation of exorcists in every Catholic diocese around the world…. But Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office, flatly denied the Petrus report. The papal spokesman said, ‘Pope Benedict XVI has no intention of ordering local bishops to bring in garrisons of exorcists to fight demonic possession.’”

Taking note of these conflicting statements, the Catholic World News service reported, “The topic of exorcism commands considerable public interest in Italy, and Father Amorth has frequently generated attention with warnings about the unchecked spread of diabolical influence. In a new course on the topic, being offered by Rome’s pontifical university Regina Apostolorum, Father Paolo Scarafoni warned that while Satanic cults were making inroads in society, and the influence of the devil was real, he reported that most suspected cases of demonic possession could be explained by other factors.”

On January 26, 1999, the Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal Jorge Arturo Medina Estevez, had revealed a revised Roman Catholic ritual for driving out demons. Although he stressed that few people were actually possessed by demons, and that “only one in every 5,000 reported cases is an actual demonic possession,” John Paul II reaffirmed that the Devil exists and was at work in the world.

According to the
New York Times
, Pope John Paul II acted “in an apparent effort to placate liberal Catholics embarrassed by a practice that seems to echo medieval superstition” by urging those performing exorcisms to “take pains to distinguish between possessed people and others suffering from forms of mental or psychological illness.” The
Times
noted that exorcism is the “ancient practice of driving the Devil from people believed to be possessed. It remains a source of theological debate and in recent years, despite its renewed popularity in the United States and elsewhere, the Church has sought to play down its significance without shaking the foundations of belief in a personal source of evil in the world.”

“In a Latin text titled,
De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam
(
Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications
), the Vatican cautioned that exorcists “first of all, must not consider people to be vexed by demons who are suffering above all from some psychic illness.”…

“By issuing the text, which replaced a 1614 version, the Vatican reaffirmed the existence of the Devil…. The eighty-four-page document, which Pope John Paul II approved before he departed for a visit to North America, contained the prayers and rites for driving out devils, but also for cleansing places and things of demonic influence….

“Cardinal Medina Estevez…said genuine possession could be recognized by various criteria, including the use of unknown languages, extraordinary strength and the disclosure of hidden occurrences or events. He also mentioned a ‘vehement aversion to God, the Blessed Virgin, the saints, the cross and sacred images.’ [He] acknowledged that many modern Catholics no longer believed in the Devil, but he called this a ‘serious fault in religious education,’ adding that the existence of the Devil ‘belongs to Catholic faith and doctrine.

“‘Exorcism is based on the faith of the Church,’ said Estevez, ‘which holds that Satan and other evil spirits exist and that their activity consists in diverting human beings from the way of salvation. Catholic doctrine teaches us that the demons are angels who have fallen because of sin, that they are spiritual beings of great intelligence and power, but I would like to stress that the evil influence of the devil and his followers is usually exercised through deceit and confusion. Just as Jesus is the Truth, so the Devil is the liar par excellence. He deceives human beings by making them believe that happiness is found in money, power or carnal desire. He deceives them into thinking that they do not need God, that grace and salvation are unnecessary. He even deceives them by diminishing the sense of sin or even suppressing it altogether, replacing God’s law as the criterion of morality with the habits or conventions of the majority.’”

The Roman Catholic catechism states that “Jesus performed exorcisms and from him the Church has received the power and office of exorcizing. In a simple form, exorcism is performed at the celebration of Baptism. The solemn exorcism, called ‘a major exorcism,’ can be performed only by a priest and with the permission of the bishop. The priest must proceed with prudence, strictly observing the rules established by the Church. Exorcism is directed at the expulsion of demons or to the liberation from demonic possession ‘through the spiritual authority which Jesus entrusted to his Church.’”

In Ephesians 6: 12–13, St. Paul said. “Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Therefore take unto you the armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect.”

In a book published in 2008,
The Sistine Secrets
, authors Benjamin Blech, a rabbi, and Roy Doliner wrote that when Michelangelo began work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling he embedded messages of “brotherhood, tolerance, and freethinking” in his painting to encourage “fellow travelers” to challenge the “repressive” Church of his time. They wrote, “Driven by the truths he had come to recognize during his years of study in private nontraditional schooling in Florence, truths rooted in his involvement with Judaic texts as well as Kabbalistic training that conflicted with approved Christian doctrine, Michelangelo needed to find a way to let viewers discern what he truly believed. He could not allow the Church to forever silence his soul. And what the Church would not permit him to communicate openly, he ingeniously found a way to convey to those diligent enough to learn his secret language.”

Blech and Doliner contended that what “Michelangelo meant in the angelic representations was to mock his papal patron…[by sneaking Jewish symbols that at the time were] unorthodox heresies into his ostensibly pious portrayals…to fulfill his lifelong ambition to bridge the wisdom of science with the strictures of faith. The authors claimed to have unearthed secrets that were hidden in plain sight for centuries.” “The book’s starting point was that there is not one Christian figure or image out of the hundreds of figures in the entire ceiling of the Papal chapel. They asserted that in defiance of Pope Julius III, Michelangelo…changed the original Christian design to an overwhelmingly Judaic subject. [Vatican experts held that] the ceiling emphasized that the choice of subjects simply presented the ancestors of Jesus and theological antecedents to the triumph of Christianity.”

Elected pope in 1550, Julius III looted the papal coffers to renovate his own mansion in Rome. The Villa Giula, as it is known, became the full-time residence of Julius III and the pope oversaw the construction. “Julius III appointed a teenage boy, [Innocenzo Ciocchi Del Monte,] as his first cardinal. Julius had picked up Innocenzo on the streets of Parma when Innocenzo was aged fifteen and a beggar boy. The Venetian ambassador reported that Innocenzo slept with the pope (Pope Julius III). Julius allowed Innocenzo to become richer than the Medicis. Reportedly, Julius made love with cardinals, pages, and young men he fancied….

“Other famous gay popes included, reportedly, Pope Benedict IX, Pope John XII, Pope Sixtus IV, and Pope Leo X.” Writing in 1525, Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) recorded that at the beginning of Leo X’s pontificate “most people deemed him very chaste; however, he was afterward discovered to be exceedingly devoted, and every day with less and less shame, to that kind of pleasure that for honor’s sake may not be named.”

Sixtus IV was one of several popes suspected of being homosexual. The basis of this being the diary of Stefano Infessura (1440–1500) who recorded documented episodes and unsubstantiated rumors. This included accusations of Sixtus awarding benefices and bishoprics in return for sexual favors…. However, an exception was was Giovanni Sclafenato, who was made a cardinal, according to the papal epitaph on his tomb, for ‘ingenuousness, loyalty and his others gifts of soul and body.’”

Pope Paul III was said to have “murdered relatives, including poisoning his mother and niece, to inherit the family fortune…. The most famous anecdote about Paul III’s ruthlessness revolved around a theological dispute between two cardinals and a Polish bishop.” When the argument became tedious, Paul III had all three hacked to death with swords.

Once a man is elected Pope he can only be validly removed from office by resignation or death. There is no impeachment procedure for Popes.

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.

T
he 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.