Secret Archives of the Vatican, The
Maria Luisa Ambrosini & With Mary Willis
Number of quotes: 15
Book ID: 269 Page: 23
Section: 5D
Peter thought that he had plunged into the most sinful of Babylons, and “from Babylon” dates the first of the papal encyclicals, warning that Christians must respect the public peace and established order.
Quote ID: 6789
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 269 Page: 27
Section: 3B
The great thinker and writer Hippolytus, the antipope, apparently had free access to the court of Alexander Severus. He dedicated his The Resurrection to the Empress Mamaea, and the Emperor decided to erect a statue of Christ in the imperial palace, near those of the ancient gods and of giants of human thought such as Homer, Socrates, and Plato.
Quote ID: 6790
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 269 Page: 29
Section: 2D1
Even before the year 100 Clement had asserted the Roman Church’s claim to the leadership of the Christian world, in a very long letter remarkable for its literary quality.
Quote ID: 6791
Time Periods: 13
Book ID: 269 Page: 40
Section: 2C,4B
Here Pope Damasus, who died in 384 at the age of eighty, and who was born when the last persecutions were raging, erected a memorial stone to commemorate his father who, coming to Italy as a stranger from Spain, had advanced through the various ranks from employee to priest. The Pope says, in his own verses:Here my father, employee, reader, levite, priest,
Advanced in merit and in deeds.
Here Christ honoured me with the supreme power
Of the Apostolic Seat.
I have built new roofs for the archives,
And added columns at the left and right
That the name of Damasus may live through the
Centuries.
Quote ID: 6792
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 269 Page: 46
Section: 2E3
Alaric had promised Pope Innocent to respect the persons and property that were gathered in the basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul, and to order that churches not be sacked. Even though the basilicas and the buildings around them were crowded beyond capacity, most of the population and treasure had to remain outside. The basilicas of Saints Peter and Paul were respected – Alaric said he didn’t want to quarrel with the apostles – but the Lateran was sacked and partly destroyed. And the Lateran held much of the archives.
Quote ID: 6793
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 269 Page: 57
Section: 3A1,4B
The legalization of Christianity, and the fact that it had become the state religion, had brought into the church men of deep culture. The patristic writings have class; they make most of the religious writing of later periods look, in a literary sense, like trash. Cassiodorus realized that the Church was living on its intellectual capital, and that much of this capital had been inherited from the pagan world. He set his monks to copying both pagan and Christian manuscripts. (That is, the monks in the monastery of pleasant ponds and limpid baths; the ones in the ascetic monastery he left to their prayers.)PJ note: Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (c. 485 – c. 585),[1] commonly known as Cassiodorus, was a Roman statesman and writer, serving in the administration of Theoderic the Great, king of the Ostrogoths. Senator was part of his surname, not his rank.
Quote ID: 6794
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 269 Page: 64
Section: 3F
The young patrician Gregory was the son of a noble house that had already given two popes, and would give three saints, to the Church. He had begun a brilliant career in the hierarchy of the empire; promoted from one office to another he finally became Prefect of the City. But his life, like Rome’s, was shadowed by the Lombard invasion.
Quote ID: 6795
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 269 Page: 65
Section: 3F
Gregory and his family, like many Christians of these years, thought that the world was coming to an end. “I do not know what is happening in other parts of this world: what I know is that in this land in which we live, the end of the world has announced itself openly.”. . . .
Gregory left politics, tore off the pallium of silk and gold, the high boots of red leather with moon-shaped buckles. He became a monk and retired into a part of his palace – emptied now of furniture, of comfort, and of servants – and there he prayed and fasted to expiate the sins of the consuls that had conquered the world. His old father, the lord of Gordiano, giving his vast fortune to the Church and the poor, became a priest, and his mother, Lady Sylvia, entered a convent.
Pastor John notes: John’s note: to escape?
. . . .
For five years they waited for the last day. Instead there arrived news of the massacres carried out by the king of the Lombards, and of the death of relatives and friends, as the great Italian families were systematically destroyed.
. . . .
He was routed out from the religious life by the death of Pope Pelagius in the plague, and his election by acclamation as Pope Gregory I.
It was a time of flood: the Tiber was even washing away the Church’s granaries where wheat to feed the poor was kept. It was a time of plague: Gregory commented that one could see the celestial arrows striking the Romans. It was a time of war: the absence of the emperor left a power vacuum that only the Church could fill, and the new pope, both a priest and a ruler, was caught in the pacifist dilemma. He met the situation by holding a march, not of protest but of penitence. The secular city was to disown herself, to be born again as a holy city.
Quote ID: 6796
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 269 Page: 66
Section: 3F
As they neared Saint Peter’s, tradition says that the Archangel Michael appeared above Hadrian’s tomb, sheathing his sword to show that the plague was over. Thus the great tomb, with its memories of Hadrian and the boy, became the Castle of the Angel – Castel Sant’Angelo – that would later hold the most precious of the archives.. . . .
“Rome has been abandoned to save Perugia. With my own eyes I saw Italians with ropes around their necks like dogs, taken away by the Lombards to be sold as slaves in France.”
. . . .
The popes were the most important owners of land and mines in Italy. Sardinia was practically a papal property. So was Sicily, a grain-producing area not yet eroded by the destruction of its forests. The coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, with its silver and iron mines, was largely in the hands of the Church.
Quote ID: 6797
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 269 Page: 67
Section: 3F
There are also letters to the barbarians. The Lombard civilization was flourishing, and Gregory hoped to bring the Lombards, already Arian, into the Roman Church. Their queen was Theodolinda, a Catholic, beloved by her people, and a woman certain of her power and charm: widowed, she had chosen a husband by saying to one of her warrior nobles, “You need not kiss my hand when you can kiss my mouth.” Gregory writes to Theodolinda on her decision to educate the Crown Prince Adulovald as a Roman Catholic: “You have given your son the armor of the Catholic faith.” In this letter he mentions gifts that he is sending to Adulovald – a golden cross to wear around his neck, containing a splinter of the Cross of Christ, along with a small box of Persian wood containing a New Testament, and for the little princesses, three rings. “I ask you as a favor to give the children these little gifts with your own hands, so that our love towards them may be presented by Your Excellency.”
Quote ID: 6798
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 269 Page: 69
Section: 2E6
Gregory the lawyer, the administrator, the ruler, seems to have seen the injustice of condemning a soul to eternal torment for temporal sin, and elaborated Augustine’s idea of purgatory. But hell he pictured in all its medieval horror. With Gregory the North African light leaves the Church and the European winter begins.
Quote ID: 6799
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 269 Page: 71
Section: 3F
Gregory also planned to build up a corps of young English clergy (the “native preachers” of modern missionary work) to take the place of Roman and French missionaries and avoid eventual nationalistic conflict. His method of recruiting them was very direct: he wrote to the presbyter Candidus, “Going as you are to administer the patrimony of the Roman church in Gaul, we desire that with money you receive from it you buy English boys seventeen or eighteen years of age, so that they can offer themselves to God in the monasteries. But since these little slaves that you will find may be pagans, I want you to send a priest along with them, so that if, during the journey, they should get sick, he can christen them before they die.”
Quote ID: 6800
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 269 Page: 72
Section: 2E4
The Celtic Church remained separate until the major confrontation between Celtic and Roman Christianity sixty years later, when the Synod of Whitby decided for the Roman date of Easter, on the ground that Saint Peter outranked Saint Columba. But it was hundreds of years before all of the recalcitrant Irish and British clergy submitted to Rome in regard to all the details of the faith.
Quote ID: 6801
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 269 Page: 79
Section: 2D1,3A4C
The same day the Pope sent a second letter to Pepin, to the princes Charles and Carloman, and to the Frankish people, written as if by Saint Peter himself: “I, Peter, Apostle of God, that consider you as adopted sons for the defense of Rome and the people entrusted to me by God, implore you for help."Pastor John notes: What!?
. . . .
When Charles had come to Rome the Pope had gone thirty miles to meet him at the gray lake of Bracciano. The papal procession, singing psalms and praises of the king, had included not only children bearing palms and olive branches, but the Roman army. The papacy had sought and accepted the dangerous gift of temporal power.
Pastor John notes: !!!!!!
Quote ID: 6803
Time Periods: 37
Book ID: 269 Page: 88
Section: 3A2A,3A4C
Returning to Rome by sea, John encountered an Arab fleet. He immediately gave orders to attack, and the Arabs fled, leaving eighteen ships in the hands of the Pope. In them were six hundred Christian slaves. The return of the seventy-five-year-old Pope to Rome was a triumph like Caesar’s.Pastor John’s note: evil, John VIII
. . . .
The most shocking of these crimes was that against the body of Pope Formosus (891-896). As pope, Formosus had committed the political error of favoring the German party and offending the Spoletine party that dominated the Roman provinces. He achieved a natural death, but the vindictiveness of his enemies led Pope Stephen to try his corpse, dead for nine months. “Like a bloody beast he had the corpse of Pope Formosus brought into the meeting.” The “putrid cadaver” in its papal robes was formally tried, condemned, mutilated, and thrown into the Tiber.
Quote ID: 6804
Time Periods: ?
End of quotes