Celebrations for the Vatican Secret Archives’ 400th anniversary continue.
Celebrations began with the "Lux in Arcana” : The Vatican Secret Archives Reveals Itself" exhibit and are continuing with a convention entitled “Religiosa Archivorum Custodia”, on the changes that have taken place over the last thirty years.
The convention is being held between today and Wednesday in the Saint Pius X Hall, in Rome’s Via della Conciliazione.
In an interview with the Vatican daily broadsheet L’Osservatore Romano, the prefect Mgr. Sergio Pagano explains how the Vatican Secret Archives are “a living institution undergoing continuous expansion as a result of the flow of material being deposited by the Roman Curia and papal diplomats around the world.
“Popes were always convinced that archive documents were, on the one hand, a valuable tool for government and are therefore also a legal tool (since they can prove ownership and reign titles),” the cardinal archivist Raffaele Farina explained.
On the other, “as the most advanced archive studies show, as these documents accumulate, they become a reflection of the activities, imagery, movements and in general, the life of the institution that produced them – in this case the Catholic Church and more specifically the Roman Popes and the Roman Curia.”
In L’Osservatore Romano, Mgr. Pagano goes through the various phases of development of the Secret Archives - a whole 400 years of them – starting with the donation of three rooms by Pope Paul V in 1610, where all contemporary documents were transferred to.
These rooms “grew 400-fold, he explained, with the holding capacity increasing from approximately 200 linear metres (the capacity of the original first three rooms) to 84 kilometres worth of documentary material; from the Sistine Hall level, the Vatican Secret Archive was forced to expand to the upper floor (called Chigiana) and therefore to other parts for the Apostolic Palace. Under Paul VI it was extended further, to the Cortile della Pigna (Pine Courtyard), an underground archive.”
At the convention, there will be a presentation of the contributions of Archive officials and an account will be given of the work carried out over the last thirty years with old and new funds.
Thanks to new donations and purchases and the reorganisation of old funds (for example funds from the Napoleonic era and current funds from the Secretariat of State), a number of changes have taken place.
For the first time, another category of new, temporarily locked funds will also be presented: the vast archive of the Pontifical Commission for sacred art in Italy, established in 1924 and operating since 1988. The hard work that has gone into the reorganisation of the Second Vatican Council archive will also be mentioned.
Among the new material found in the Vatican Secret Archives, is the documentation on the Church’s work in helping prisoners captured across Europe during the Second World War. L’Osservatore Romano wrote that “right from the early days [of the Second World War], the Vatican Secretary of State started receiving numerous requests for news about the Polish population from various parts of Europe. At first, the Holy See set up a correspondence network through its representatives in the various European States; it then issued a formal statement, saying it was creating an Office to make research easier.”
The Vatican newspaper explains that “The office, which was coordinated and directed by Montini, the substitute for Ordinary Affairs of the Secretariat of State, was entrusted to Mgr. Alessandro Evreinoff, a Russian Archbishop who was a polyglot and diplomatic expert. He was assisted by his secretary Fr. Emilio Rossi, a priest serving in the Diocese of Rome.”