Papal Letters from the Past

By Otto Friedrich

Voltaire: "Allow me very humbly to kiss your holy feet"

"Content the King in the matter of marriage," the petition pleads, "in order to avoid the ills that may befall the church if his will is contested." The petitioners were right. King Henry VIII of England had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn and wanted a son and heir by her. He was determined to put aside his wife, Catherine of Aragon. But when Catherine appealed to Pope Clement VII, the Pope ordered Henry to halt his annulment proceedings. Henry, as the 75 bishops and courtiers warned in their petition to Rome, would not allow his will to be contested. When the Pope refused, the King of England broke with Rome.

The Reformation that befell the English church is nearly half a millennium past by now. Henry and Catherine have long crumbled into dust. But the 2-ft. by 3-ft. parchment petition, headed Sanctissimo in Christo and bemedaled with ribbons and the 75 red wax seals of the petitioners, looks as imposing as it did on the day in 1530 when it arrived on Pope Clement's desk. It was long filed away in the Vatican, but 100 years ago, the church opened its ancient archives to selected scholars. This year, to commemorate that date, the Vatican has put 236 of its choicest treasures on public display. Many of the documents are as notable for their exquisite calligraphy and design as for their historic significance. Until the end of the year, from 10 a.m. till noon, curious visitors can also see:

P: A letter written in 1246 by Genghis Khan's grandson and heir, the Grand Khan Kuyuk, grandiosely inviting Pope Innocent IV and "the kings of the West" to a summit conference at Karakorum.

P: A letter of 1535 in which Pope Paul III hires "our beloved son, Michelangelo" as architect, sculptor and painter for the unfinished church of St. Peter's. As part payment, the Pope grants the young painter all the tolls from a Po River ferry crossing near Piacenza for life.

P: A letter of 1745 in which the distinctly anticlerical skeptic Voltaire, praising a book written by Pope Benedict XIV, writes "allow me very humbly to kiss your holy feet and to ask with the deepest respect your benediction."

P: A miscellany of letters from Napoleon, Copernicus, Erasmus, Rossini, Queen Christina of Sweden and Mary Queen of Scots. Not included is the legendary erotica collection widely rumored to be hidden somewhere in the Vatican Archives.

The oldest specimen in the current Vatican exhibit is a Liber Diurnus Romanorum Pontificum that dates from the late 8th century and establishes regulations, worthy of the Pentagon, for the preparation and maintenance of ecclesiastical documents. But the exact origin of the Vatican Archives is unknown. As early as 303 Emperor Diocletian decreed that everything accumulated until that time be destroyed. In 410 the Visigoths stormed Rome, and the city burned for three days. The Vandals sacked it in 455, the Saracens in 846.

In 1309 the papacy moved temporarily to Avignon. Clement V, a French Pope who was elected by a French faction, thought his court would be safer there than in Rome. Toward the end of the 14th century, Gregory XI returned to Rome, but it took 445 years to retrieve all of the documents from Avignon. There are obvious gaps around 1527, when Rome was being plundered by the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Not until 1611 did Pope Paul V order all the dispersed collections of church papers to be gathered into one central archive. Said he, in a decree written in 1612: "We order you, custodian of our archives, under pain of our displeasure ... to allow no one whatever, on any excuse, to consult these books." Hardly had the papers been assembled when Napoleon seized the whole collection and carted it off to Paris. It was restored to Rome after the Congress of Vienna.

Today the archives are in the Apostolic Library, in the same building as the Vatican Museum. By 1950 the library extended onward and outward to include some 30 miles of shelf space. These shelves are crammed with thousands of bound volumes and huge leather boxes, most of them 3 ft. high and up to 10 in. thick. Each box contains scores, even hundreds of documents.

One apparently insoluble problem: Vatican experts have only an approximate knowledge of where anything is. The effort to catalogue the papal treasures has been going on for more than 300 years now, and archivists still speak with awe of Cardinal Josephus Garampi, who managed, before his death in 1772, to inscribe more than 1.5 million catalogue entries, in strictly alphabetical order, in 124 large folio volumes. But since the millions of documents were all arranged by their places of origin rather than by subject matter, the problems of cross-indexing stretch toward infinity. And the staff numbers only 30. "If this were Germany," sighs one archivist, "we would have at least 300."

Perhaps the most poignant of the documents is a letter from Galileo to the Holy Office. It was written after the Inquisition had convicted Galileo of heresy in 1633, forcing him to sign a declaration that he "abjured, cursed and detested" the Copernican theory that the earth rotates around the sun. Under house arrest outside Florence, as he was to remain for the last eight years of his life, Galileo almost pathetically pleaded his innocence: "I am not of this opinion, and have not been of the opinion of Copernicus, since I was ordered to abandon it. Besides I am in your hands. You may do as you please."

The main purpose of the Tower of the Winds, built just before Galileo's time, was to house the Vatican's own astronomy laboratory, known as the Meridian Room. Here the progress of the light of the sun, on its eternal course around the earth, was measured as it entered through a slit in the wall. By the mid-1500s, the Julian calendar worked out by astronomers in Alexandria in 45 B.C. had fallen grievously into error. The spring solstices, for example, kept occurring two weeks early. So the same Vatican that denied Copernican theory used data compiled by a Jesuit in the Tower of the Winds to draw up the Gregorian calendar that was issued in 1582 and named for Pope Gregory XIII. Though the calendar makers devoutly believed that the sun moves around the earth, their computations proved remarkably accurate. The calendar errs by only one day in every 3,323 years.

-- By Otto Friedrich.

Reported by Walter Galling/Rome

With reporting by Walter Galling

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