Dark Mysteries of the Vatican (14 page)

E
nergized 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.”

While Vatican astronomers search the skies in the hope of learning about the secrets of the universe, archeologists have been exploring beneath the Vatican to learn more about the origins of the Church. Excavations began in June 1939. They found that two levels below St. Peter’s Basilica lies an excavated Roman graveyard full of mausoleums, frescoes, inscriptions and stucco decorations. It was here in the 1940s that experts uncovered the bones of a tall man whose grave had been venerated in early times. Many thought they were the bones of St. Peter, believed to have been martyred in Nero’s Circus nearby. But
Time
magazine noted, “What the excavators found was a looted grave, so despoiled (probably by the Saracens in 846) that much of it was a featureless hole. There was no trace of the bronze casket in which tradition said Constantine had placed St. Peter’s relics. All that remained, buried at the rear of the grave niche, were a few bones. The Vatican has said only that they are human, that there is no skull among them, and that they are those of a powerfully built person of advanced age but undetermined sex.”

In June 1968, Pope Paul VI announced that bones unearthed during the excavations under St. Peter’s Basilica were, in his judgment, those of Peter the Apostle. “The relics of St. Peter,” he declared, “have been identified in a manner which we believe convincing.”

He based his conclusion on “very patient and accurate investigations” by “worthy and competent persons.”

Vatican archeologists also believed that they identified the tomb of St. Paul in the Roman basilica that bears his name. A sarcophagus was identified in the basilica of St. Paul. The sarcophagus was discovered during excavations carried out in 2002 and 2003 around the basilica, in the south of Rome.” The tomb that we discovered,” said archaeologist Giorgio Filippi,” is the one that the popes and the Emperor Theodosius (379–395) saved and presented to the whole world as being the tomb of the apostle.”

The discovery was made by a team composed exclusively of experts from the Vatican Museum. They had undertaken their exploration in response to a request from the administrator of St. Paul’s basilica, Archbishop Francesco Gioia. During the Jubilee Year 2000, the archbishop noticed that thousands of pilgrims were inquiring about the location of St. Paul’s tomb. The excavation effort was guided by nineteenth century plans for the basilica, which was largely rebuilt after a fire in 1823. An initial survey enabled archeologists to reconstruct the shape of the original basilica, built early in the fourth century. A second excavation, under the main altar of the basilica, brought the Vatican team to the sarcophagus, which was located on what would have been ground level for the original fourth-century building.

The Catholic World News Service reported that under the altar a marble plaque was still visible. Dating back to the fourth century, it bore the inscription: “Apostle Paul, martyr.”

As an archeologist, Filippi said that he had no special curiosity to learn whether the remains of St. Paul were still inside that sarcophagus. He said that the tomb should not be opened merely to satisfy curiosity, but he had no doubt that St. Paul was buried on the site, “because this basilica was the object of pilgrimages by emperors; people from all around the world came to venerate him, having faith that he was present in this basilica.”

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI gave his approval to plans by investigators to examine the interior of the ancient stone coffin. They were given permission to remove a plug with which the coffin had been sealed so an endoscopic probe could be inserted and the contents viewed.

While excavations were being carried out inside Vatican City in 2003 for an underground garage to ease the Vatican’s parking problems a 2,000-year-old burial ground was discovered. The necropolis, which traces pagan Rome to the birth of Christianity, contained more than forty elaborately decorated mausoleums and 200 individual tombs. Headstones, including one that belonged to a slave of Nero, urns and elaborately decorated frescoes and mosaic floors were uncovered on the site.

The historical importance of the find was described as second only to the necropolis below St Peter’s Basilica. The
Guardian
of London reported that Giandomenico Spinola, director of the project, described the necropolis as being in an excellent condition because it had been protected by a landslide at the end of the second century. Most of the tombs dated between the era of Augustus (23
B.C.–A.D
.14) to that of Constantine (306–337).

A monument to Pope Leo XI, a Medici, in white marble, by Alessandro Algardi (1645–1646), took much longer to create than Leo XI reigned. Seventy years old and rather frail when he was elected, he was the 232nd pope and died just twenty-six days into his reign (April 1–27, 1605). Born in Florence, he was the last of the Medici family’s popes. His mother, Francesca Salviati, was a daughter of Giacomo Salviati and Lucrezia de’ Medici, a sister of Leo X, while his father, Ottaviano, was a more distant scion of the Medici family. King Henry IV of France, who had learned to like Leo XI when he was papal legate at his court, is said to have bank-rolled promotion of his election. When Leo took sick after his coronation, he was importuned by many members of the Curia to make one of his grandnephews a cardinal, but Leo had such an aversion to nepotism that he refused. When his confessor urged him to grant it, he dismissed him and sent for another. Because of the brevity of his papacy, the Italians called him Papa Lampo (Lightning Pope).

Algardi also memorialized Pope Leo I, who saved Rome from Attila when the Mongolian conqueror, King of the Huns, was ready and waiting to cross the Po River with his horde and attack the city. Leo, in papal robes, entered Attila’s camp, stood before Attila, and threatened him with the power from St. Peter if he did not turn back and leave Italy unmolested. When Attila agreed to turn back, his servants reportedly asked him why he had capitulated so easily to the Bishop of Rome. Attila answered that all the while the Pope was speaking, there had appeared in the sky above the Pope’s head a vision of St. Peter with drawn sword.

A papal tomb not found in the Vatican is that of Pope Alexander VI.

Historian Elizabeth Lev wrote that generally in the history of the papacy, Pope Alexander VI does not make it into the list of the top ten, twenty or thirty. She wrote, “Alexander became to the papacy what Nero is to the Roman empire, the Pope critics love to hate.” Born Roderigo Borgia in 1431 near Valencia, Spain, he rose to the rank of cardinal with the help of his uncle Pope Callistus III, then, as a favorite of Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain, he was elected Pope in 1492 while Columbus was discovering America in the employ of the same Spanish sovereigns. Contemporaries viewed this election with much trepidation, Lev noted, because all the contracts and titles related to the vast enterprise of the New World would be in Spanish hands.

Alexander did little to court public opinion, exasperating many by leading an openly licentious life and favoring his children, particularly Cesare Borgia, who was accused of several murders during Alexander’s pontificate and was protected if not abetted by his father. Alexander VI fathered seven children, including Lucrezia and Cesare Borgia, by at least two mistresses. Such was Alexander VI’s unpopularity that when he died, perhaps by poisoning, perhaps from the plague, in 1503 at the age of seventy-two, the priests of St Peter’s Basilica at first refused to accept his body for burial. He died on August 18, 1503, in the twelfth year of his pontificate. He was buried on August 19 in the church of Santa Maria della Febbre, Rome, and his body was transferred in 1610 to the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato in Rome.

More than four centuries after the dome of St. Peter’s basilica was completed, the Vatican announced the discovery of a long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome, possibly his last design before his death. Drawn in blood-red chalk for the stone cutters who were working on the basilica, it was done in the spring of 1563, less than a year before his death at age ninety. The sketch was found in the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s, which contains the basilica’s offices.

The newspaper
L’Osservatore Romano
said most sketches by Michelangelo for the stone cutters were destroyed or lost in the cutters’ workplaces, but this one had survived because a supervisor used the back of the sketch to make notes of problems linked to the stone’s transport through the outskirts of Rome. Michelangelo finished the dome and four columns for its base before he died in February 1564. Three weeks before he died, when he was nearly eighty-nine, he went up the dome to inspect it.

The construction of the basilica, whose cupola defines Rome’s skyline, spanned several working lifetimes of some of the Renaissance’s most celebrated artists and architects. Vatican historians note that the first architect of the basilica, Donato Bramante, died eight years after the cornerstone was laid. Other architects, including Raphael, followed, until Pope Paul III turned to Michelangelo in 1546, thirty-two years after Michelangelo had put his last brush stroke on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

Also in 2007, the Associated Press reported that a 450-year-old receipt found in the same archive provided proof that Michelangelo had kept a private room in St. Peter’s Basilica while working as the pope’s chief architect. Going through archives for an exhibit on the 500th anniversary of the basilica, researchers from the Fabbrica di San Pietro came across an entry for a key to a chest located “in the room in St. Peter’s where Master Michelangelo retires.”

“We now know that Michelangelo definitely had a private space in the basilica,” said Maria Cristina Carlo-Stella, who runs the Fabbrica, in an interview with the Associated Press. “The next step is to identify it.”

The ink-scripted entry contained in a parchment-covered volume listing the expenditures of the Fabbrica for the years 1556–58, referred to the payment of ten scudos to the blacksmith who forged the key, but offered no details about the chest or the location of the room.

The account of the discovery noted that a frescoed room with a cozy fireplace, part of the area in the left wing of the basilica where the archives are housed, had traditionally been called “la stanza di Michelangelo” (Michelangelo’s room). On an upper floor, overlooking the main altar, it is connected to the ground floor by a small winding marble staircase, suggesting that the room afforded the artist secrecy and an escape route from envious fellow artisans. But research showed the room was part of renovation done after Michelangelo’s death, and that the space did not exist during Michelangelo’s time at the Vatican.

“”The theory is very romantic and conspiratorial, but totally unfounded,” said Federico Bellini, an art historian who worked in the archive department.

Originally the Fabbrica, whose documents date from as far back as 1506, was in the right wing of the basilica, already built at the time of Michelangelo. It was known that artisans had been allotted lodgings there, leading experts to direct their search for Michelangelo’s studio to that area.

The Associated Press article noted, “One detail the expenditure does reveal is that Michelangelo had requested a very expensive key. According to Simona Turriziani, a Fabbrica archivist, ten scudos in the 1550s was more than the monthly salary of many of the artisans working on the basilica.”

I
n the spring of 1916 in the town of Fatima, Portugal, three shepherd girls, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisca Marto, were visited three times by what they thought was an angel. He “told them he was the guardian angel of Portugal and urged them to pray and prepare themselves. The next spring, eight months after the angel’s final visit, the Virgin Mary began to speak to them. Lucia had just had her tenth birthday, Francisco would turn nine in June, and Jacinta was seven. On May 13, 1917, they took their sheep to a small hollow known as a
Cova da Iria
(Cove of Irene). And there around noon, a beautiful lady appeared near an oak tree, telling them to say the Rosary every day, ‘to bring peace to the world and an end to the war.’ She promised to visit them again ‘on the thirteenth of each month’ for the next five months.’

“By 1917, a figure who identified herself as the Virgin appeared to them and eventually delivered a message for humankind. The children became a focus of worldwide interest, and in October of that year, the Virgin’s presence seemed to be confirmed for many others when a crowd of 70,000—mostly Catholics and some skeptics—saw the sun appear to zigzag in the sky as the Virgin again addressed the children.

“I looked at the sun and saw it spinning like a disc, rolling on itself,” said a farmer, Antonio de Oliveiro. “I saw people changing color. They were stained with the colors of the rainbow. The sun seemed to fall down from the sky. The people said that the world was going to end. They were afraid and screaming.”

Maria Candida da Silva said, “Suddenly the rain stopped and a great splendor appeared and the children cried, ‘Look at the sun!’ I saw the sun coming down, feeling that it was falling to the ground. At that moment, I collapsed.”

The Reverend Joao Menitra reported, “I looked and saw that the people were in various colors, yellow, white, blue. At the same time, I beheld the sun spinning at great speed and very near me. I at once thought: I am going to die.”

“Fatima almost immediately became a global pilgrimage site.

“The message delivered there remained a mystery as the children refused to reveal the content of the vision. Two of them died in childhood during an epidemic; but in 1941, Lucia, the survivor by then a nun, released a description of the first two ‘secrets’ from the Virgin that made headlines all over the world. One was a vivid vision of Hell; the other was a prediction that World War I would end, but if people continued to offend God, a worse one would break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI.”

Regarding the first secret’s vision of Hell, Lucia said, “Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent.”

This vision lasted but an instant, Lucia said, “Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.”

“The second secret was a statement that World War I would end and supposedly predicted the coming of World War II, should God continue to be offended and if Russia did not convert. The second half requested that Russia be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart.

In 1941, a document was written by Lucia at the request of Jose da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, to assist with the publication of a new edition of a book on Jacinta. “When asked by the Bishop of Leiria in 1943 to reveal the secret, Lucia struggled for a short period, being ‘not yet convinced that God had clearly authorized her to act. However, in October of 1943 the bishop of Leiria ordered her to put it in writing. Lucia then wrote the secret down and sealed it in an envelope not to be opened until 1960, when ‘it will appear clearer.’…

“In June of 1944, the sealed envelope containing the third secret was delivered to Silva, where it stayed until 1957, when it was finally delivered to Rome.”

“To ensure better protection for the ‘secret.’ the envelope was placed in the Secret Archives of the Holy Office on April 4, 1957.

“According to the records of the Archives, the Commissary of the Holy Office, Father Pierre Paul Philippe, with the agreement of Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, brought the envelope containing the third part of the ‘secret of Fatima’ to Pope John XXIII on August 17, 1959. After some hesitation, His Holiness said, ‘We shall wait. I shall pray. I shall let you know what I decide.’

“In fact, Pope John XXIII decided to return the sealed envelope to the Holy Office and not to reveal the third part of the ‘secret.’

“Pope Paul VI read the contents…on March 27, 1965, and returned the envelope to the Archives of the Holy Office, deciding not to publish the text.

“John Paul II…asked for the envelope containing the third part of the secret following the assassination attempt on May 13, 1981. On July 18, 1981 Cardinal Franjo Šeper, Prefect of the Congregation, gave two envelopes to Archbishop Eduardo Martínez Somalo, Substitute of the Secretariat of State: one was a white envelope, containing Sister Lucia’s original text in Portuguese; the other orange, with the Italian translation of the ‘secret.’ [On] August 11, Archbishop Martínez returned the two envelopes to the Archives of the Holy Office.”

“The text of the third secret was officially released by Pope John Paul II in 2000.” He claimed that the third secret was a prediction of the attempt on his life, and that he had been saved because the Virgin Mary deflected the bullet.

Doubters claimed that it was not the real secret revealed by Lucia, “despite assertions from the Vatican to the contrary.”

Along with the text of the secret, the future Pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, published a theological commentary, in which he stated that a careful reading of the text of the so-called third secret of Fatima would “probably prove disappointing or surprising after all the speculation it has stirred.”

No great mystery was revealed, he said, “nor is the future unveiled.”

After explaining the differences between public and private revelations, he cautioned people not to see in the message a determined future event. He said, “The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction. Therefore we must totally discount fatalistic explanations of the ‘secret,’ such as, for example, the claim that the would-be assassin of 13 May 1981 was merely an instrument of the divine plan guided by Providence and could not therefore have acted freely, or other similar ideas in circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be saved from them.”

According to the
New York Times
, speculation over the content of the secret ranged “from worldwide nuclear annihilation to deep rifts in the Roman Catholic Church that lead to rival papacies.

“There were some groups who disputed that the full text of the third secret had been officially published. The most prominent among these was The Fatima Center, which is run by Father Nicholas Gruner, who was suspended as a priest by the Avellino, Italy, diocese. Father Gruner rejected the validity of the suspension and continued to perform the functions of a priest. On November 22, 2006, the Italian author Antonio Socci published
Il Quarto Segreto di Fatima
(
The Fourth Secret of Fatima
) in Italian, which also argued that the Vatican had not formally released the entire Third Secret. These critics…pointed to the fact that Lucia’s vision, as recorded in the officially released text, did not contain any words from Mary, as one might expect, and it said nothing about a crisis of faith in the Church.

“The Vatican maintained its position that the full text of the Third Secret was published in June 2000.” Although the Holy See claimed that publication of the third [and last] of secrets given by the Virgin Mary to three children at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 predicted the 1981 attempted assassination of John Paul II, it was believed by many Catholics and others that the final forecast also gave the date for the Second Coming of Christ, and the end of the world as we know it.

While the New Testament’s book of Revelations by St. John of Patmos is the Christian foretelling of the climax of history and the Second Coming of Christ, the Vatican Archives contain other doomsday prophecies. Johannes Friede (1204–57) provided a glimpse of global warming. He wrote, “When the great time will come, in which mankind will face its last, hard trial, it will be foreshadowed by striking changes in nature. The alteration between cold and heat will become more intensive, storms will have more catastrophic effects, earthquakes will destroy great regions, and the seas will overflow many lowlands. Not all of it will be the result of natural causes, but mankind will penetrate into the bowels of the earth and will reach into the clouds, gambling with its own existence. Before the powers of destruction will succeed in their design, the universe will be thrown into disorder, and the age of iron will plunge into nothingness. When nights will be filled with more intensive cold and days with heat, a new life will begin in nature. The heat means radiation from the earth, the cold the waning light of the sun. Only a few years more and you will become aware that sunlight has grown perceptibly weaker. When even your artificial light will cease to give service, the great event in the heavens will be near.”

In the sixteenth century, Maria Laach Monastery looked ahead four hundred years and said, “The twentieth century will bring death and destruction, apostasy from the Church, discord in families, cities and governments; it will be the century of three great wars with intervals of a few decades. They will become ever more devastating and bloody and will lay in ruins not only Germany, but finally all countries of East and West. After a terrible defeat of Germany will follow the next great war. There will be no bread for people anymore and no fodder for animals. Poisonous clouds, manufactured by human hands, will sink down and exterminate everything. The human mind will be seized by insanity.”

Perhaps the most famous and controversial predictions were made in the eleventh century by an Irishman. Canonized by Pope Clement III in 1190, the first papal canonization of an Irish saint, he was born in Armagh in 1094, ostensibly of noble birth. He was baptized Máel Máedóc (a name that has been Latinized as Malachy) and ordained at age twenty-five. In 1123, his uncle, “the lay abbot of Bangor, resigned in favor of Malachy. In 1125, he was chosen Bishop of Connor and Down…and set to work teaching and proclaiming the Gospel,” established a seminary, and restored churches. In 1129, he became Archbishop of Armagh.

“In 1137, Malachy set out for Rome. On the way, he stayed at Clairvaux and became friends with St. Bernard. When he arrived in Rome, Malachy tried to resign and become a monk at Clairvaux, but Pope Innocent II refused and instead appointed him Papal Legate to Ireland.”

“While on his way to the Vatican in 1139 to assume the post of papal legate for Ireland, he fell into trance and saw a line of papal reigns stretching from the successor to Innocent II and extending through centuries to the last of the line…. Malachy assigned short descriptions in Latin to each pope, referring to a family name, birthplace, coat-of-arms, or office held before election to the papacy…. He wrote poetic descriptions of each of the pontiffs, and presented the manuscript to Pope Innocent II—and it was forgotten until 1590. It has been in print—and hotly debated for both authenticity and correctness, ever since.”

Malachy’s Prohecies: The Last Ten Popes

“The Burning Fire”: Pius X (1903–14)
It has been said that this Pope showed a burning passion for the spiritual renewal of the Church.

“Religion Laid Waste”: Benedict XV (1914–22)
“During this Pope’s reign, [the world] saw Communism move into Russia where religious life was laid waste, and World War I, with the death of millions of Christians.”

“Unshaken Faith”: Pius XI (1922–39)
“This Pope faced tremendous pressure from fascist and sinister powers in Germany and Italy, but he was an outspoken critic of Communism and Fascism which enraged Hitler.”

“An Angelic Shepherd”: Pius XII (1939–58)
This Pope had an affinity for the spiritual world and was a beloved and admired pontiff throughout World War II.

“Pastor and Mariner”: John XXIII (1958–63)
John was a pastor to the world, much beloved, and the Patriarch of Venice. The connection to ‘mariner’ is thus remarkable.”

“Flower of Flowers”: Paul VI (1963–78)
“Paul’s coat-of-arms depicted three fleurs-de-lis (iris blossoms), corresponding to Malachy’s prophecy.”

“Of the Half Moon”: John Paul I (1978–78)
“Elected Pope on August 26, 1978, when there was a half moon…who was born in the diocese of Belluno (beautiful moon) and was baptized Albino Luciani (white light). He became pope on August 26, 1978, when the moon appeared exactly half full in its waning phase. He died in the following month, soon after an eclipse of the moon.”

“The Labor of the Sun”: John Paul II (1978–2005)
“Pope John Paul II was the most traveled Pope in history. He circled the globe numerous times, preaching to huge audiences everywhere he went…. He was born on May 18, 1920. On that date in the morning there was a near total eclipse of the sun over Europe. Prophecy—the 110th Pope is ‘De Labore Solis’ (Of the Solar Eclipse, or, From the Toil of the Sun). Like the sun he came out of the East (Poland).”

“The Glory of the Olive”: Benedict XVI (2005–)
“The Order of St. Benedict has said this Pope will come from their order. Jesus gave his apocalyptic prophecy about the end of time from the Mount of Olives. This Pope will reign during the beginning of the tribulation of which Jesus spoke. The 111th prophesy is ‘Gloria Olivae’ (The Glory of the Olive)…. Saint Benedict himself prophesied that before the end of the world his Order, known also as the Olivetans, would triumphantly lead the Roman Catholic Church in its fight against evil.