Vatican City may have fewer than 1,000 citizens and spans only 110
acres, but it also has a multimillion-dollar budget and an unbelievably
complex history.
Understanding how it all works requires parsing through
centuries of religious texts.
Is the Vatican confusing and mysterious?
Is the pope Catholic?
A look behind the scenes:
1. Regular exorcise!
Baudelaire once said that
"the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he
doesn't exist."
But in modern-day Vatican City, the devil is considered
alive and well. The late Pope John Paul II personally performed three
exorcisms during his reign, and Pope Benedict XVI expanded the ranks of
Catholic-sponsored exorcists throughout the world.
In fact, Father
Gabriele Amorth, the Church's chief exorcist, claims to expel more than
300 demons a year from the confines of his Vatican office, and there are
some 350 exorcists operating on behalf of the Catholic Church in Italy
alone.
Amorth also teaches bishops how to tell the difference between
satanic possession and psychiatric illness, noting that those who suffer
from the former seem to be particularly repulsed by the sight of holy
water and the cross.
2. Where thieves go to prey
With 1.5 crimes per citizen, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world.
It's not that the cardinals are donning masks and repeatedly robbing
the bank, it's just that the massive crowds of tourists make Vatican
City a pickpocket's paradise. The situation is complicated by the fact
that the Vatican has no working prison and only one judge.
So most
criminals are simply marched across the border into Italy, as part of a
pact between the two countries. (The Vatican's legal code is based on
Italy's, with some modifications regarding abortion and divorce.)
Crimes
that the Vatican sees fit to try itself — mainly shoplifting in its
duty-free stores — are usually punished by temporarily revoking the
troublemaker's access to those areas. But not every crime involves
theft.
In 2007, the Vatican issued its first drug conviction after an
employee was found with a few ounces of cocaine in his desk.
3. The worst confessions
Some sins are simply too
much for a local bishop to forgive. While priests can absolve a sin as
serious as murder (according to the Church), there are five specific
sins that require absolution from the Apostolic Penitentiary.
This
secretive tribunal has met off and on for the past 830 years, but in
January 2009, for the first time ever, its members held a press
conference to discuss their work.
Three of the five sins they contemplate can only be committed by the
clergy.
If you're a priest who breaks the seal of confession, a priest
who offers confession to his own sexual partners, or a man who has
directly participated in an abortion and wants to become a priest, then
your case must go before the tribunal to receive absolution. The other
two sins can be committed by anyone.
The first, desecrating the
Eucharist, is particularly bad because Catholics believe that the bread
and wine transubstantiate into the body and blood of Christ. Messing
with them is like messing with Jesus. And then, there's the sin of
attempting to assassinate the pope. That one's pretty self-explanatory.
The meetings of the Apostolic Penitentiary are kept confidential
because they're a different form of confession. The sinner is referred
to by a pseudonym, and only the Major Penitentiary, Cardinal Manuel
Monteiro de Castro, decides how the sin shall be dealt with.
Presumably,
a bunch of Hail Marys doesn't cut it.
4. You can read the Pope's mail
The Vatican's
secret archives haven't been truly secret since Pope Leo XIII first
allowed scholars to visit in 1881.
Today, it's even more accessible.
Outsiders are free to examine the correspondences of every pope for the
past 1,000 years, although there is one catch: Guests have to know
exactly what they're looking for. With 52 miles of shelves in the
archives, the librarians prohibit browsing.
The most famous existing letter is probably Henry VIII's request that
his marriage to Catherine of Aragon be annulled, which Pope Clement VII
denied. Henry divorced Catherine anyway and married Anne Boleyn (and
four other women), leading to Rome's break with the Church of England.
The archives also contain an abundance of red ribbons, which were used
to bind 85 petitions from English clergyman and aristocrats.
5. The Pope liked to text message
During his
tenure, Pope Benedict XVI routinely sent text messages of his homilies
to mobile subscribers around the world, and in 2009, the Vatican opened
up an official YouTube channel to show various papal addresses and
ceremonies.
The Vatican even released an iPhone application that
contains multilingual versions of the Breviary prayer book and the
prayers of daily mass. Most recently, Benedict had joined Twitter
in December, two months before his resignation.
The Vatican's
enthusiasm for technology isn't limited to cell phones and the internet.
It has also added solar panels to the roof of the Pope Paul VI
auditorium as part of its commitment to fight climate change.
6. The Vatican has the finest Swiss bodyguards
Nowadays,
the Swiss have a reputation for pacifism, but back in the 1500s, they
were considered an unstoppable military force.
Swiss armies were
renowned for the their mastery of a weapon called the halberd, a deadly
combination of a spear and an axe, and their ground troops were famous
for routinely demolishing legions of enemies on horseback.
After Pope
Julius II witnessed their ferocity in battle 500 years ago, he recruited
a few soldiers to become his personal bodyguards.
Ever since, Swiss
Guards have pledged fidelity to the pope, sometimes dying for the cause.
During the sacking of Rome in 1527, for instance, three quarters of
them were killed while providing cover for Pope Clement VII to escape.
Today, the hundred or so members of the Swiss Guard spend most of
their time bedecked in Renaissance garb, twirling their halberds in
ceremonies or manning checkpoints around the Vatican.
When the Guards
are actually protecting the pope, they wear plain clothes and carry
distinctly modern weapons.
7. The Mafia dipped into the collection plate
In The Godfather: Part III,
a shady deal between the Mafia and the Vatican leads to the murder of
the pope. Was this based on a true story? Possibly.
On the morning of
September 29, 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead, sitting up in his
bed, after only 33 days in office.
Although Vatican officials claimed
the 65-year-old pope died of a heart attack, there was never an autopsy,
and at the time, the Vatican definitely had ties to organized crime.
Sure enough, in 1982, Vatican Bank president Father Paul Marcinkus
resigned from his post after a series of scandals exposed the bank's
ties to the Mafia. Eventually, the bank had to repay more than $200
million to its creditors.
But Marcinkus was never indicted of a crime,
and though he was suspected of being involved in several mysterious
deaths, including Pope John Paul I's, Marcinkus successfully claimed diplomatic immunity in the United States and retired to Arizona in 1990, and died there 16 years later.
8. There's no vice pope
Once a cardinal becomes
the pope, he's the designated leader of the Catholic Church and God's
representative on Earth for the rest of his life — which was basically
the case until Pope Benedict XVI's surprise resignation last month.
(Up
until then, it had been more than 500 years since the last papal
resignation.)
Further, as modern medicine improves, even seriously ill
people tend to stick around longer, meaning that a pope could be alive
but unable to perform his duties for years, as was the case with John
Paul II. What happens then? Well, no one is really sure. A cardinal can
take over the pope's responsibilities as the Vatican's head of state,
but no one else is allowed to carry out his ceremonial duties.
In the
end, many masses and benedictions simply go unperformed until the pope
either passes away or recovers.
9. Faith-based economics
The Vatican needs
several hundred million dollars per year to operate. Its many financial
responsibilities include running international embassies, paying for the
pope's travels around the world, maintaining ancient cathedrals, and
donating considerable resources to schools, churches, and health care
centers.
So where does that money come from?
Catholics pay tithes to
their local parishes and donate about $100 million every year to the
Vatican itself.
But collection plates aren't the Vatican's only source
of money. The city-state also gets cash from books, museums, stamps, and
souvenir shops. (Get your limited-edition Vatican euros!
But that's not always enough.
At the end of 2007, the city-state was
$13.5 million in the hole. Part of the problem was the weakened American
dollar, which translated into less purchasing power.
Another
contributing factor was the lackluster performance of the Vatican's
newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.
To boost subscriptions, Pope
Benedict asked the editor to spice up the layout with more photos and
allowed him to cover world news stories in addition to the traditional
religious fare.
10. Even the ATMS are in Latin
The Vatican Bank
is the only bank in the world that allows ATM users to select Latin to
perform transactions. That's just one symbol of the Holy See's continued
devotion to the language.
Pope Benedict XVI had been particularly
passionate about reviving the language and purportedly held many
informal conversations in Latin. (Pope John Paul II generally spoke
Polish.)
The Vatican's Latin Foundation tries to keep the language relevant by
translating modern phrases into the ancient tongue.
In 2003, they
released an updated dictionary that included the terms "rush hour" (tempus maximae frequentiae) and "dishwasher" (escariorum lavatory).