Vatican celebrates its 400th anniversary with an secret archives exhibit that sheds light! Mar 4, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012 at 09:42AM
Vatican Secret Archives marks 400th anniversary By Catholic News Service
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ROME - Working with the city of Rome, the Vatican Secret Archives is celebrating its 400th anniversary with an exhibit designed to shed light not only on its holdings, but on some of the myth and mystery surrounding its collection of millions of documents. "Lux in Arcana: The Vatican Secret Archives Reveals Itself" opened at Rome's Capitoline Museum Feb. 29 and is scheduled to remain open until Sept. 9.Vatican archives' officials and exhibit curators said about a hundred original documents are being displayed outside the Vatican for the first time. The secret - or, more accurately, "private" - archives were founded by Pope Paul V in 1612. Since 1881, they have been opened to scholars conducting research.
The documents in the exhibit include the "Privilegium Ottonianum," signed by Pope John XII and Emperor Otto I in 962, establishing the Papal States; the letter that members of the English Parliament wrote to Pope Clement VII in 1530 asking him to annul the marriage of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon; selections of documents from 1616 to 1633 related to the trial of Galileo Galilei; a letter written on silk in 1650 from Empress Helena Wang of China to Pope Innocent X; and a letter on birch bark from the Ojibwe people of Grassy Lake, Ontario, written to Pope Leo XIII in 1887. The exhibit also includes some fragments collected behind St. Peter's Basilica from an Allied bomb that fell nearby in 1943, and the report of a Vatican policeman who was on duty that night. In the preface to the exhibit catalogue, Cardinal Raffaele Farina, archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church, said the exhibit would introduce visitors to the archives' "service to the church and to culture, carried out over four centuries with a tireless work of safekeeping, cataloging and care" using the most advanced technology available. Bishop Sergio Pagano, prefect of the archives, told Vatican Radio that the documents in the exhibit were selected to give people an idea of the historical range of the archives' holdings, the diversity of materials preserved and the global reach of the Vatican's interests and concerns.
A preview of the official video for the exhibition-event Lux in Arcana -- The Vatican Secret Archives
Filmed inside the Vatican Secret Archives, it shows rooms and bunkers in the Archive of the Popes, together with some of the 100 original documents that will leave the Vatican City for the first time in history. 12 centuries of history, 400 years of life, 85 kilometres of shelving: the world's most famous Archive reveals itself in the extraordinary halls of Rome's Capitoline Museums. Conclaves, heresies, popes and emperors. Crusades, excommunications, ciphered letters. Manuscripts, codices, ancient parchments. An exceptional and once-in-a-lifetime chance to learn History through its sources. February-September 2012.
In celebration of the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Vatican's secret archives, the Catholic Church has put about 100 of the secret documents on display at the Capitoline Museums. The collection includes a request to annul one of Henry VIII's marriages, an 11th century document stating that the Pope ruled the world, notes from a 14th century trial of the Knights Templar, and a papal envoy's 1941 request for aid for Jewish prisoners. The exhibition will continue until September, when the Church will return the documents to the Vatican archive. Vatican expert Marco Politi said this about the exhibit, "It is the first time there is a such great exhibition with so many treasures of the past. There will be documents of Michelangelo, documents of the Middle Ages when the Pope pretended to be monarch of the Universe, documents from the native Americans written on bark, letters from China written on silk."
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