'Lux in Arcana': the Vatican Secret Archives unveiled ...

The unprecedented exhibition was inaugurated on Wednesday 29th February and features a selection of priceless documents from the Vatican Secret Archives in the City Museum on Rome’s Capitoline Hill.

Organised by the Vatican Secret Archives where these documents are housed, together with Rome’s Mayor and Fine Arts Department, the display features documents on show to the public for the first time ever.

Among the more famous are those pertinent to three trials, that of Galileo Galilei, of the Templars, and of Giordano Bruno.

Others concern the coronation of Popes and the crusades. Rather exceptionally, more recent documents are on show, including some concerning the bombing of Rome’s ‘San Lorenzo’ neighbourhood as well as that of Vatican City in 1943.

The Prefect for the Vatican’s Secret Archives is Bishop Sergio Pagano. In an interview in Italian with Vatican Radio’s Eliana Astorri he explains how this exhibition is timed to coincide with the fourth centenary of the founding of the Secret Archives in the Vatican by Pope Paul V at the beginning of 1612 and is intended to celebrate the cultural research carried out down the centuries both at the service of the Church and of the world.

Bishop Pagano says the Capitoline Museums represent an ideal location for the exhibition as an historic landmark of papal governance for the City of Rome.

Asked about the criteria regarding the documents chosen for the exhibition, Monsignor Pagano replies that the selection was dictated by various elements from preciousness to category.

Documents in fact, range from the birch bark American Indians used to write to Pope Leo XVI, to ancient parchments.

Another selection criteria he adds, was that of highlighting the universality of the Church through documents regarding councils, pacts, concordats and synods in an effort to illustrate the life of the Church throughout its history. Yet another selection criteria surrounds the pastoral work carried out by Roman Pontiffs in the governing of the Church and testimonies how on the path towards civilisation, the word Church was once synonymous with culture. Suffice to think of the role of the papacy in the founding of universities and within the world of printing and publishing.

One last word, all the documents in the exhibition bear the stamp “Archivio Secreto Vaticano”. But as the word secret should really be translated from the Latin as private , perhaps the wording of this exhibition which runs until September should really be “ Archivio Privato Vaticano”, the private archives of the popes .

A programme written and produced by Veronica Scarisbrick...