Exhibicion de los Archivos Secretos del Vaticano

Vatican’s Secret Archives on display in Rome exhibition

Posted on July 6, 2011 by pjwalker911|



The Vatican archives date back more than 1,000 years Photo: AP


An appeal by the English Parliament asking the Pope to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon will be among 100 priceless documents from the Vatican’s Secret Archives to go on display in an unprecedented exhibition in Rome.


Telegraph | Jul 5, 2011
By Nick Squires, Rome

The parchment document, which bears the red wax seals of more than 80 English lords, cardinals and bishops, was sent to Pope Clement VII in 1530 but failed to resolve the dispute, which eventually led to religious schism and the founding of the Church of England.

It will be displayed alongside documents from the heresy trial of Galileo Galilei, whose scientific theories attracted the hostility of the Catholic Church in the early 17th century.

One of the most unusual documents is a letter written on birch bark in 1887 by the Ojibwe Indians of Ontario, Canada, to Pope Leo XIII.


Other previously unseen documents relate to Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of not doing enough to speak out about the Holocaust during the Second World War.
The Vatican has until now stubbornly resisted calls from historians and Jewish groups to release papers from Pius XII’s controversial papacy, from 1939 to 1958.

The documents, stamped with seals which read ‘Archivio Segreto Vaticano’, are among tens of thousands that are kept in the Secret Archives, a fortresslike building tucked behind St Peter’s Basilica, its approach lined with Swiss Guards in ceremonial uniform.

The archives, which date back more than 1,000 years, will go on show in a special exhibition in Rome’s Capitoline Museums from February to September next year.
It will be the first time they have been allowed out of the Vatican vaults.

The exhibition, “Lux in Arcana: The Vatican Secret Archives Revealed”, will commemorate the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Secret Archives in their present form.

Last year the Vatican allowed a publishing company to compile a lavishly-illustrated book about the archives, in a bid to dispel the myths and mystique created by works of fiction such as Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.

The archives provide one of the key settings in Brown’s thriller, in which Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon, played in the 2009 film by Tom Hanks, races against time to stop a secret religious order, the Illuminati, from destroying the Vatican.


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