Rome Vatican Quotes

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).2 More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets- rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives in the burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections.

Simone: I finally found Daisy in this grand, massive hotel room overlooking Vatican City in Rome. In Rome! I had to fly halfway around the world and back to find her. And when I did, she was completely bombed, naked except for a pair of underwear. And she had chopped her hair off into this shaggy bob. Daisy: That was a great haircut. Simone: It was a really good haircut. Daisy: I've always said, 'The Italians know hair.

I believe that it is dangerous for a young person simply to go from achieving goal after goal, generally being praised along the way. So it is good for a young person to experience his limit, occasionally to be dealt with critically, to suffer his way through a period of negativity, to recognise his own limits himself, not simply to win victory after victory. A human being needs to endure something in order to learn to assess himself correctly, and not least to learn to think with others. Then he will not simply judge others hastily and stay aloof, but rather accept them positively, in his labours and his weaknesses.

St. Maximus the Confessor: “In no way will I say anything of my own, but what I have learned from the Fathers, altering nothing of their teaching.

THOMAS EDISON HAILED HIM AS THE “GENIUS OF THE MODERN age”; Gandhi, as a “superman.” Winston Churchill pledged to stand by him in his “struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.” Newspapers in Rome, host to the Vatican, referred to him as “the incarnation of God.” In the end, people who had worshipped his every move hung his corpse upside down next to his mistress’s near a gas station in Milan.

The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.

Vatican city is an independent state created by the Lateran treaty of 11th Feb 1929 which was signed by Pope Pius XI, the holy see and the Italian government.  It covers an area of 108 acres on the hill west of the Tiber river. It is separated from the rest of Rome by high walls on all sides except at the Piazza of St Peter. 

My group had a papal audience at four. I couldn’t miss it, not only because no one stands up the pope but also because he and my father had been friends for years. They had met when my father was studying medicine at the University of Rome and Paul VI, then the young Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was chaplain of an anti-Fascist student group. In his pre-pontiff days, he would visit us whenever church business brought him to the States. Somewhere I still have the photograph of his cat, taken on the balcony of his Vatican apartment, that he sent to me when I was nine or ten. He had to give the cat away when he was elected pope, and I had written to say how sad it was that the pope could not keep a pet.

On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).2 More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

But after Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, told the New York Times that he expected celibacy to be discussed at the gathering of U.S. cardinals in Rome, the Pope quickly shot down that possibility. “The value of celibacy as a complete gift of self to the Lord and his Church must be carefully safeguarded,” the Pope told a group of visiting Nigerian bishops.

When Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory,” wrote George Armstrong, the respected Rome correspondent for London’s Guardian. “The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be.

From Venice to Rome, Paris to Brussels, London to Edinburgh, the Ambassadors watched, long-eared and bright-eyed. Charles of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, fending off Islam at Prague and Lutherism in Germany and forcing recoil from the long, sticky fingers at the Vatican, cast a considering glance at heretic England. Henry, new King of France, tenderly conscious of the Emperor's power and hostility, felt his way thoughtfully toward a small cabal between himself, the Venetians and the Pope, and wondered how to induce Charles to give up Savoy, how to evict England from Boulogne, and how best to serve his close friend and dear relative Scotland without throwing England into the arms or the lap of the Empire. He observed Scotland, her baby Queen, her French and widowed Queen Mother, and her Governor Arran. He observed England, ruled by the royal uncle Somerset for the boy King Edward, aged nine. He watched with interest as the English dotingly pursued their most cherished policy: the marriage which should painlessly annex Scotland to England and end forever the long, dangerous romance between Scotland and England. Pensively, France marshalled its fleet and set about cultivating the Netherlands, whose harbours might be kind to storm-driven galleys. The Emperor, fretted by Scottish piracy and less busy than he had been, watched the northern skies narrowly. Europe, poised delicately over a brand-new board, waiting for the opening gambit.

No one there could possibly have missed its significance. No church in England had ever been disgraced with such a thing. From the shape of the dome, the Corinthian columns – every detail had suddenly fallen into place – this was clearly, if not a copy, then the very brother of that infamous dome that hung over what every Puritan knew was the great house of iniquity itself. “Dear Lord!” he cried. “It’s just like St Peter’s – at the Vatican. It’s the church of Rome.” And, in terror, he ran out of the workshop.

Carafa, as Pope Paul IV, established the Index of Forbidden Books, banned all women from entering the Vatican, burnt volumes of Talmud and Kabbalah, threw the Jews of Rome into the ghetto, drained the Church’s savings while overtaxing the faithful in order to enrich his nephews and mistress, tortured and burned homosexuals in public, ordained two nephews (ages fourteen and sixteen) as cardinals, and banned the potato—recently brought to Europe from the New World by Sir Francis Drake—as a fruit of lust sent by Satan.

A year before Bramante’s death, in 1513, Pope Julius II commissioned Raphael to decorate the Vatican apartments and Michaelangelo to paint the Sistine chapel.    In 1527 Rome was sacked by the army of the holy Roman empire led by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the work once again ground to a halt. Over the next twenty years very little was done and then in 1546 Pope Paul II persuaded an elderly Michaelangelo to complete the building. Michaelangelo reverted back to the original plan of Bramante’s to create a church of Greek style cross plan.

One of the accusations made against the Pope is that he did not give a public and obvious denunciation of anti-Semitism during the Holocaust. It's a valid issue but one that is often discussed with too little understanding of the reality of 1940s Europe. Such explicit condemnations of Nazi anti-Semitism were not really made in London, Washington, or Moscow, but it's always assumed that Rome should somehow have been different, in spite of the fact that the Vatican was surrounded by Nazi or pro-Nazi troops and that millions of Roman Catholics lived under Nazi occupation whereas London, Washington, and even Moscow were relatively cocooned and the latter even comparatively safe.

The process of disintegration described earlier with regard to the rites of initiation is apparent here, again, with regard to the theology of initiation and membership. In Augustine, membership was located within the threefold unity of faith, Baptism, and “Catholic peace” or Church unity. In Suárez, who refers back to Augustine but misunderstands him, it was faith, righteousness, and baptismal character. In Benedict XIV, who refers back to Suárez, it is now only baptismal character, which—it is important to stress—depends only upon “the proper form and matter” (validity). The initial, more restrained sacramental minimalism of Augustine has undergone such a “development of doctrine” as would be unrecognizable to Augustine himself.

These theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).2 More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

The category of validity allows for ecclesiastical lines to be crossed, even if there is no communion between ecclesial bodies. It allows Rome to recognize “valid” sacraments even outside its own self-understanding of the Church (i.e., the Church is only the Roman Catholic Church): Eastern Christians who are in fact separated in good faith from the Catholic Church, if they ask of their own accord and have the right dispositions, may be admitted to the sacraments of Penance, the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick. Further, Catholics may ask for these same sacraments from those non-Catholic ministers whose churches possess valid sacraments, as often as necessity or a genuine spiritual benefit recommends such a course and access to a Catholic priest is physically or morally impossible. (Vatican II, Orientalium Ecclesiarium, 1964) For the Orthodox, communion and all the sacraments exist only within one ecclesiastical communion. That is, Orthodox Christians may only receive the sacraments from Orthodox clergy. Likewise, Orthodox clergy may only give the sacraments to Orthodox Christians. (In cases of emergency, non-Orthodox are welcome to convert in order to receive the sacraments.)

In any event, should you doubt that your knowledge of Western history is distorted by the work of these distinguished bigots, consider whether you believe any of the following statements: The Catholic Church motivated and actively participated in nearly two millennia of anti-Semitic violence, justifying it on grounds that the Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion, until the Vatican II Council was shamed into retracting that doctrine in 1965. But, the Church still has not made amends for the fact that Pope Pius XII is rightfully known as “Hitler’s Pope.” Only recently have we become aware of remarkably enlightened Christian gospels, long ago suppressed by narrow-minded Catholic prelates. Once in power as the official church of Rome, Christians quickly and brutally persecuted paganism out of existence. The fall of Rome and the ascendancy of the Church precipitated Europe’s decline into a millennium of ignorance and backwardness. These Dark Ages lasted until the Renaissance/Enlightenment, when secular scholars burst through the centuries of Catholic barriers against reason. Initiated by the pope, the Crusades were but the first bloody chapter in the history of unprovoked and brutal European colonialism. The Spanish Inquisition tortured and murdered huge numbers of innocent people for “imaginary” crimes, such as witchcraft and blasphemy. The Catholic Church feared and persecuted scientists, as the case of Galileo makes clear. Therefore, the Scientific “Revolution” occurred mainly in Protestant societies because only there could the Catholic Church not suppress independent thought. ► Being entirely comfortable with slavery, the Catholic Church did nothing to oppose its introduction in the New World nor to make it more humane. Until very recently, the Catholic view of the ideal state was summed up in the phrase, “The divine right of kings.” Consequently, the Church has bitterly resisted all efforts to establish more liberal governments, eagerly supporting dictators. It was the Protestant Reformation that broke the repressive Catholic grip on progress and ushered in capitalism, religious freedom, and the modern world. Each of these statements is part of the common culture, widely accepted and frequently repeated. But, each is false and many are the exact opposite of the truth! A chapter will be devoted to summarizing recent repetitions of each of these statements and to demonstrating that each is most certainly false.

POEM – MY AMAZING TRAVELS [My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures] My very first trip I still cannot believe Was planned and executed with such great ease. My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man, He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan. I got my first long vacation while working as a banker One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner. She visited my father and discussed the matter Arrangements were made without any flutter. We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany, In each of those places, there was somebody, To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places, It was a dream come true at our young ages. We even visited Holland, which was across the Border. To drive across from Germany was quite in order. Memories of great times continue to linger, I thank God for an understanding father. That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more, I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe. Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo, Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando. I was accompanied by my husband on many trips. Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit. Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah, Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla. We sailed aboard the Creole Queen On the Mississippi in New Orleans We traversed the Rockies in Colorado And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico. We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome, The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum. To explore the countryside in Florence, And to sail on a Gondola in Venice. My fridge is decorated with magnets Souvenirs of all my visits London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome? Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born. CN Tower in Toronto so very high I thought the elevator would take me to the sky. Then there was El Poble and Toledo Noted for Spanish Gold We travelled on the Euro star. The scenery was beautiful to behold! I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina, Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines, Places I love to lime. Of course, I would like to make special mention, Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean. Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas Two ships which grace the Seas. Last but not least and best of all We visited Paris in the fall. Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin Amazing places, which made my head, spin. Copyright@BrendaMohammed

Leonardo da Vinci, was brought to the Vatican in 1513 by the new pope, Leo X, and given a list of commissions to create for the greater glory of the pope and his family. After three years of living in the papal palace and exploring Rome, the great Leonardo had produced almost nothing. The furious Pope Leo decided to have a surprise showdown with the capricious artist and intimidate him into completing some of his commissions. In the middle of the night, surrounded by several imposing Swiss Guardsmen, the pope burst through the door to Leonardo’s private palace chambers, thinking to shake him out of a sound sleep. Instead, he was horrified to find Leonardo wide awake, with a pair of grave robbers, in the midst of dissecting a freshly stolen corpse—right under the pope’s own roof. Pope Leo let out a nonregal scream and had the Swiss soldiers immediately pack up Leonardo’s belongings and throw them and the divine Leonardo himself outside the fortress wall of the Vatican, never to return again. Shortly afterward, Leonardo decided it was probably healthier to get out of Italy and move to France, where he spent the rest of his days. This, by the way, is why the great Italian genius’s most famous oil paintings, including the Mona Lisa, are all in Paris, in the Louvre museum.

Consider the recent papal visit and apology. Again, I recognize that some people were able to find peace in hearing the pontiff's words. But, for many, his words fell far short. Where was the acknowledgement of genocide against Indigenous Peoples through these schools? Yes, he spoke those words later, but not directly to the people who suffered it. Further, it cannot be ignored that the Catholic Church has failed to meet its financial obligation to survivors and its failure was officially sanctioned by the federal government and the courts. The Catholic Church is one of the richest, if not the richest, corporations in the world. It is worth billions and billions of dollars. I remember visiting the Vatican Museum in Rome. The art and artifacts alone are worth billions of dollars without even considering the vast worldwide holdings of the Catholic Church. I will never forget seeing Nero's bathtub, a huge, circular stone edifice made of material that no longer exists on earth. The bathtub is described as "invaluable beyond calculation." So why not just sell off the tub and meet their obligations to survivors? It is beyond comprehension how the Catholic Church can express remorse while refusing to abide by the terms of the settlement they originally agreed to and still expect their words to be taken seriously.

In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55

Although Zolla no longer associated with Julius Evola, he nevertheless arranged for me to meet Italy’s most famous crypto-traditionalist writer who was a very controversial figure because of his espousal of the cause of Mussolini during the Second World War. I had already read some of Evola’s works, many of which are now being translated into English and are attracting some attention in philosophical circles. But based on the image I had of him as an expositor of traditional doctrines including Yoga, I was surprised to see him, now crippled as a result of a bomb explosion in 1945, living in the center of Rome in a large old apartment which was severe and fairly dark and without works of traditional art which I had expected to see around him. He had piercing eyes and gazed directly at me as we spoke about knightly initiation, myths and symbols of ancient Persia, traditional alchemy and Hermeticism and similar subjects. While he extolled the ancient Romans and their virtues, he spoke pejoratively about his contemporary Italians. When I asked him what happened to those Roman virtues, he said they traveled north to Germany and we were left with Italian waiters singing o sole mio! He also seemed to have little knowledge or interest in esoteric Christianity and refuse to acknowledge the presence of a sapiental current in Christianity. It was surprising for me to see an Italian sitting a few minutes from the Vatican, with his immense knowledge of various esoteric philosophies from the Greek to the Indian, being so impervious to the inner realities of the tradition so close to his home.

As far as he was concerned, Testaccio, not the Via del Corso or the Piazza del Campidoglio, was the real heart of Rome. For centuries animals had been brought here to be butchered, with the good cuts going to the noblemen in their palazzos and the cardinals in the Vatican. The ordinary people had to make do with what little was left---the so-called quinto quarto, the "fifth quarter" of the animal: the organs, head, feet, and tail. Little osterie had sprung up that specialized in cooking these rejects, and such was the culinary inventiveness of the Romans that soon even cardinals and noblemen were clamoring for dishes like coda all vaccinara, oxtail braised in tomato sauce, or caratella d' abbachio, a newborn lamb's heart, lungs, and spleen skewered on a stick of rosemary and simmered with onions in white wine. Every part of the body had its traditional method of preparation. Zampetti all' aggro were calf's feet, served with a green sauce made from anchovies, capers, sweet onions, pickled gherkins, and garlic, finely chopped, then bound with potato and thinned with oil and vinegar. Brains were cooked with butter and lemon---cervello al limone---or poached with vegetables, allowed to cool, then thinly sliced and fried in an egg batter. Liver was wrapped in a caul, the soft membrane that envelops a pig's intestines, which naturally bastes the meat as it melts slowly in the frying pan. There was one recipe for the thymus, another for the ear, another for the intestines, and another for the tongue---each dish refined over centuries and enjoyed by everyone, from the infant in his high chair to the nonnina, the little grandmother who would have been served exactly the same meal, prepared in the same way, when she herself was a child.

Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.

Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly notorious. All those involved accepted Christ’s divinity and His gospel of compassion and love. However, they disagreed about the nature of this love. Protestants believed that the divine love is so great that God was incarnated in flesh and allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified, thereby redeeming the original sin and opening the gates of heaven to all those who professed faith in Him. Catholics maintained that faith, while essential, was not enough. To enter heaven, believers had to participate in church rituals and do good deeds. Protestants refused to accept this, arguing that this quid pro quo belittles God’s greatness and love. Whoever thinks that entry to heaven depends upon his or her own good deeds magnifies his own importance, and implies that Christ’s suffering on the cross and God’s love for humankind are not enough. These theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).2 More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence. God

If the claims of the papacy cannot be proven from what we know of the historical Peter, there are, on the other hand, several undoubted facts in the real history of Peter which bear heavily upon those claims, namely: 1. That Peter was married, Matt. 8:14, took his wife with him on his missionary tours, 1 Cor. 9:5, and, according to a possible interpretation of the "coëlect" (sister), mentions her in 1 Pet. 5:13. Patristic tradition ascribes to him children, or at least a daughter (Petronilla). His wife is said to have suffered martyrdom in Rome before him. What right have the popes, in view of this example, to forbid clerical marriage?  We pass by the equally striking contrast between the poverty of Peter, who had no silver nor gold (Acts 3:6) and the gorgeous display of the triple-crowned papacy in the middle ages and down to the recent collapse of the temporal power. 2. That in the Council at Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–11), Peter appears simply as the first speaker and debater, not as president and judge (James presided), and assumes no special prerogative, least of all an infallibility of judgment. According to the Vatican theory the whole question of circumcision ought to have been submitted to Peter rather than to a Council, and the decision ought to have gone out from him rather than from "the apostles and elders, brethren" (or "the elder brethren," 15:23). 3. That Peter was openly rebuked for inconsistency by a younger apostle at Antioch (Gal. 2:11–14). Peter’s conduct on that occasion is irreconcilable with his infallibility as to discipline; Paul’s conduct is irreconcilable with Peter’s alleged supremacy; and the whole scene, though perfectly plain, is so inconvenient to Roman and Romanizing views, that it has been variously distorted by patristic and Jesuit commentators, even into a theatrical farce gotten up by the apostles for the more effectual refutation of the Judaizers! 4. That, while the greatest of popes, from Leo I. down to Leo XIII. never cease to speak of their authority over all the bishops and all the churches, Peter, in his speeches in the Acts, never does so. And his Epistles, far from assuming any superiority over his "fellow-elders" and over "the clergy" (by which he means the Christian people), breathe the spirit of the sincerest humility and contain a prophetic warning against the besetting sins of the papacy, filthy avarice and lordly ambition (1 Pet. 5:1–3). Love of money and love of power are twin-sisters, and either of them is "a root of all evil." It is certainly very significant that the weaknesses even more than the virtues of the natural Peter—his boldness and presumption, his dread of the cross, his love for secular glory, his carnal zeal, his use of the sword, his sleepiness in Gethsemane—are faithfully reproduced in the history of the papacy; while the addresses and epistles of the converted and inspired Peter contain the most emphatic protest against the hierarchical pretensions and worldly vices of the papacy, and enjoin truly evangelical principles—the general priesthood and royalty of believers, apostolic poverty before the rich temple, obedience to God rather than man, yet with proper regard for the civil authorities, honorable marriage, condemnation of mental reservation in Ananias and Sapphira, and of simony in Simon Magus, liberal appreciation of heathen piety in Cornelius, opposition to the yoke of legal bondage, salvation in no other name but that of Jesus Christ.

Interestingly, Dominus Iesus, following the Letter Communionis Notio of 1992, did, in fact, attribute the title “particular churches” to the Local Orthodox Churches. Ocáriz’s explanation of what this attribution means shows even more clearly the divergence that exists between the two views of the Church. He claims that this attribution is based not upon the real, Eucharistic presence of Christ but upon “the real presence of the Petrine Primacy (and of the Episcopal College) in of the ‘one and undivided’ episcopate—a unity that cannot exist without the Bishop of Rome.” Further, he writes: "Where, on account of apostolic succession, a valid episcopate exists, the Episcopal College with its Head is objectively present as supreme authority ( even if, in fact, that authority is not recognized ). Furthermore, in every valid celebration of the Eucharist, there is an objective reference to the universal communion with the Successor of Peter and with the entire Church, independent of subjective convictions." As the supreme and final criterion of full ecclesiality the Pope is seen not only to supplant the Eucharistic Presence of the Lord Himself, but to be present as “supreme authority” in the Eucharistic Synaxis of those not in communion with him, even if this is against their will. Whereas, for the Orthodox, the ever-present and existential reality manifested by the Holy Spirit at every Eucharistic gathering is dogmatic truth and a unity in truth freely espoused, for the Latins it is the “objective reference to the universal communion” with the Pope “independent of subjective convictions.

Yet on Christmas Day 1958 Pope John stepped forth from the Vatican and became the first pope since 1870 to make pastoral visits in his own diocese of Rome. He visited two hospitals followed on the next day by a visit to a prison. There, he told the hardened but now weeping inmates that he was their brother, and he embraced a murderer.

First, in keeping with Joseph Ratzinger’s vision of a “church for the little people” (and in the interests of helping pay off the sex abuse lawsuits), all Apostolic Nunciatures would be closed, their properties sold and their papal nuncios recalled to Rome, where they would be asked to seek alternative employment. All foreign ambassadors would be sent home. Finally, the Holy See would submit two resolutions to the UN General Assembly: the first seeking to dissolve its status as a non-member state permanent observer, the second requesting status as a non-governmental organization.

The Mystery Becoming a Modern Reality On February 11th, 1929, the Lateran Accords were signed, and for the first time in history the Vatican City was declared a sovereign city-state, so that it is now both a city and a country, with a ruler over it, the Bishop of Rome, the Pope. It is the smallest[250] independent state that is internationally recognized in the world. It is called a sacerdotal-monarchical state, because it is both a religious body and it has a single ruler over it. From that time on, people have gone to, or been welcomed to, the Vatican to have a “private audience” with the pope. What people did in various forms for centuries has finally in the modern world become a political reality. Rome has ambassadors to other countries, and most of the nations of the world have their ambassadors to Rome. God told us in the mystery of that woman. She was not any ordinary city. “And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 17:18)

Much water has flown under Tiber's bridges, carrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII. The essentials, I know, remain firmly entrenched and I find the post-Conciliar Mass simpler and generally better than the Tridentine; but the banality and vulgarity of the translations which have ousted the sonorous Latin and little Greek are of a super-market quality which is quite unacceptable. Hand-shaking and embarrassed smiles or smirks have replaced the older courtesies; kneeling is out, queueing is in, and the general tone is rather like a BBC radio broadcast for tiny tots (so however will they learn to put away childish things?) The clouds of incense have dispersed, together with many hidebound, blinkered and repressive attitudes, and we are left with social messages of an almost over-whelming progressiveness. The Church has proved she is not moribund. ‘All shall be well,’ I feel, ‘and all manner of things shall be well,’ so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.

The Vatican remained the crossroads in the plot to kill Hitler: all roads truly led to Rome, to the desk with a simple crucifix overlooking the fountains on St. Peter’s Square.

In 1968, the United Bible Societies (UBS) and the Vatican entered into a joint agreement to undertake hundreds of new interconfessional Bible translation projects around the world, using functional equivalence principles. Again, Nida was one of the principals on this collaborative work.”[122] Now that the Greek text and the interconfessional committees and projects were set up, the rest followed like clockwork. In 1968-77 a new, “Critical Text” Hebrew Old Testament, called the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, began to be jointly published at Rome and by the United Bible Societies. So from this date, Roman Catholics, Protestants and Baptists had the same Hebrew text, as well as Greek text. The Reformation Bible was officially discarded in favor of a single, manmade Greek and Hebrew text.

Vatican palace has been the official residence of the Popes since 1377. The original building was built in AD 319 by the Roman emperor Constantine who built a basilica over the tomb of St Peter himself, the first bishop of Rome. In the fifteenth century the building looked as if it would collapse and in 1452 the reconstruction was begun. The whole project soon ran out of money though and it was abandoned for over 50 years until 1506 when Pope Julius II gave instructions for the entire area of buildings to be demolished and the new St Peter’s to be built.

Pope Demotes U.S. Cardinal Critical of His Reform Agenda By JIM YARDLEY ROME — Pope Francis on Saturday sidelined a powerful American cardinal who has emerged as an unabashed conservative critic of the reform agenda and the leadership style that the Argentine pontiff has brought to the Roman Catholic Church. In an expected move, Cardinal Raymond L. Burke was officially removed as head of the Vatican’s highest judicial authority, known as the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. He was demoted to the ceremonial position of chaplain for the Knights of Malta, a charity group.

As related in the novel, Russia’s second-largest budget expenditure—after the military—is devoted to restoring the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s seen as a means to a spiritual renewal for the country, a way of instilling national pride. But there remain darker shades to this funding, one tied to the Tikhvin Icon, one of Russia’s most sacred treasures. The story of the icon’s history—vanishing from Constantinople and reappearing to Russian fishermen—is held as holy proof that Russia is destined to be the Third Rome, the future spiritual center of the world, with the Trinity Lavra as its new Vatican City. This belief is one of the main reasons that a vocal number of the Russian Orthodox Church, including its patriarch, sanction Russia’s military conquest of other countries. But that is not Russia’s only ambition.

The powers of this present darkness tickled President Obama’s Muslim sympathies to serve a larger global agenda—the New World Order promoted by Rome and the United Nations.

Thomas Edison hailed him as the "genius of the modern age”; Gandhi, as a “superman.” Winston Churchill pledged to stand by him in his “struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.” Newspapers in Rome, host to the Vatican, referred to him as “the incarnation of God.” In the end, people who had worshipped [Benito Mussolini's] every move hung his corpse upside down next to his mistress’s near a gas station in Milan.

Vatican, City, Rome. What a wonder.

Several times Affonso sent his appeals for an end to the slave trade directly to the Pope in Rome, but the Portuguese detained his emissaries to the Vatican as they stepped off the boat in Lisbon. Affonso’s despair reached its depth in 1539, near the end of his life, when he heard that ten of his young nephews, grandsons, and other relatives who had been sent to Portugal for a religious education had disappeared en route. “We don’t know whether they are dead or alive,” he wrote in desperation, “nor how they might have died, nor what news we can give of them to their fathers and mothers.” We can imagine the king’s

I am asked how it is that I can refuse orders which come from Rome. Indeed, these orders do come from Rome, but which Rome? I believe in the Eternal Rome, the Rome of the Sovereign Pontiffs, the Rome which dispenses the very life of the Church, the Rome which transmits the true Tradition of the Church. I am considered disobedient, but I am moved to ask, why have those who are issuing orders which in themselves are blameworthy been given their authority? The Pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the priests have been given their authority for the purpose of transmitting life, the spiritual life, the supernatural life, eternal life, just as parents and society as a whole have been given their authority to transmit and protect life. The word "authority" itself is from the Latin, "auctoritas', and "auctor" which means "author", author of life. We have authority insofar as we transmit and sustain life. We are not authorized to transmit death, society is not permitted to pass laws which authorize abortion, because abortion is death. In like manner, the Pope, the cardinals, the bishops, and the priests exist as such to transmit and sustain spiritual life. Unfortunately, it is apparent that many of them today no longer transmit or sustain life, but rather authorize spiritual abortion.

These theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).

What is most astonishing, most alarming is the fact that although these deficiencies were obvious to a layman like myself, with no specialized theological knowledge, almost every Catholic hierarchy in the world pronounced in favour of the ARCIC Statements. The gravity of this fact cannot possibly be exaggerated. Can there have been such a virtually universal failure of the Teaching Church (Rome excepted) since the Arian heresy?

The Church has been playing tricks on people for the past two thousand years and now it's my turn to play some tricks on the Church.

In 1879, the English theologian John Henry Newman addressed “liberalism in religion” in his so-called “Biglietto Speech,” given in Rome on the occasion of his being named a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. His analysis of the subject—the “one great mischief” that he had resisted for fifty years—remains unsurpassed.4 The directness of Newman’s assault on liberal religion surprised many people. He had been seen as ill at ease with the Catholic Church’s direction during the pontificate of Leo’s predecessor, Pius IX, and his misgivings about the opportuneness of the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) were well known. But those who had followed Newman’s thought over the course of his career would have recognized the opposition to liberalism that had been there from the beginning. In his Biglietto Speech, Newman identified a number of doctrines of liberal religion: (1) “that there is no positive truth in religion,” (2) “that one creed is as good as another,” (3) that no religion can be recognized as true for “all are matters of opinion,” (4) that “revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective faith, not miraculous,” and (5) that “it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.

Meerkoldreef University Tilburg, assassination Pope Francis.

When the facts of slave labour and especially the slave trade from Africa began to filter through to the Vatican chambers in Rome, popes began to express their concern. This was good. The popes began to criticise the exploitation of the native peoples. But unfortunately, they did not examine the principle of slavery itself. Thus Pope Paul III, in 1537, condemned the indiscriminate enslavement of Indians in South America. But when challenged, he confirmed ten years later that both clergy and laity had the right to own slaves. A century later, in 1639, Pope Urban VIII criticised unjust practices against the natives, but did not deny the four 'just titles' for owning slaves. Pope Benedict XIV condemned the wholesale enslavement of natives in Brazil — without denouncing slavery as such, nor the importation of slaves from Africa.

and, more generally, Febris, whom the Christians laughed to scorn, little knowing that in the Vatican quarter their fellow-Christians would one day honour a 'Madonna delle Febbri'.

Burckhardt was a Swiss professor of history who had spent the winter of 1847–48 in Rome. While there he read a book published from an old manuscript recently discovered by an Italian cardinal in the Vatican Library and first printed in 1839 as Vitæ CIII Virorum Illustrium, or The Lives of 103 Illustrious Men. The author of this work, according to the volume’s editor, was Vespasiano Fiorentino—“ Vespasiano the Florentine”—about whom, in 1839, almost nothing was known.

The Roman Catholic Church remains headquartered at Vatican City in Rome, a few blocks from the ruins of the colosseum where ancient Roman authorities once fed Christians to the lions.

In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).

The following weekend, Eric called my family and asked if we could come over to his apartment. When we got there, there was a brand-new synthesizer keyboard for me with a bow on it. And Robin Williams. I didn’t know until that moment that Robin Williams was to play the part of the King of the Moon. I was a huge fan of Mork & Mindy and I felt weak with happiness to get to be in his presence. I spent the day with Robin and Eric. Robin programmed himself doing different voices on all the effects keys, so I could play whole songs entirely in his voice. That day we walked around Rome, ate gelato, and went to the Vatican and St. Peter’s Square while Robin did impressions of the Pope and kept me laughing all day. From that day forward, both Eric and Robin seemed to have an agenda to make light moments for me. When it was possible, when the world around us wasn’t exploding and crumbling and freezing, they made up games for me, sang songs, and treated the set as a playground.

residence in Rome. Soon the unthinkable was happening, as Margaret exclaimed in a May 6 column for the Tribune—“the soldiers of republican France, firing upon republican Rome!”—firing on St. Peter’s, their cannonballs directly striking the Vatican.

The Last Hundred Kilometers Once you get to Rome, you will probably want to receive a testimonium, a certificate of completion of the pilgrimage. To get a testimonium, you must prove you have walked or cycled the required distance.  Your proof is your credenziali or Pilgrim Passport that has been stamped at each of the places you have stayed.  The Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi (ORP) offers testimonia to pilgrims who have walked at least the last 100 kilometers from Montefiascone. If you prefer to receive a testimonium from the Vatican, you must either walk the last 140 kilometers from Acquapendente or cycle the distance from Lucca to Rome, over 400 kilometers.

Though Pius acted discreetly, he did not hide Hitler's attack plan under the proverbial bushel basket. During the second week of January 1940, a general fear gripped Western diplomats in rome as the pope's aides warned them of the German offensive, which Hitler had just rescheduled for the 14th. On the 10th, a Vatican prelate warned the Belgian ambassador at the Holy See, Adrien Nieuwenhuys, that the Germans would soon attack in the West. ... Pius had in fact already shared the warning, while shielding the source. On 9 January, Cardinal Maglione directed the papal agent in Brussels, Monsignor Clemente Micara, to warn the Belgians about a coming German attack. Six days later, Maglione sent a similar message to his agent in The Hague, Monsignor Paolo Giobbe, asking him to warn the Dutch. That same month, Pius made a veiled feint toward public protest. He wrote new details on Polish atrocities into Radio Vatican bulletins. But when Polish clergy protested that the broadcasts worsened the persecutions, Pius recommitted to public silence and secret action.

I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold me for sitting up late, reading your letters, as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me. You posted them first in London, wearing furs and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety. I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day, where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones. This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I see you as a young girl in a good world still, writing three generations before mine. I try to reach into your page and breathe it back… but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack. This is the sack of time your death vacates. How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past me with your Count, while a military band plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last, a pleated old lady with a crooked hand. Once you read Lohengrin and every goose hung high while you practiced castle life in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce history to a guess. The count had a wife. You were the old maid aunt who lived with us. Tonight I read how the winter howled around the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound of the music of the rats tapping on the stone floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone. This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne, Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn your first climb up Mount San Salvatore; this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes, the yankee girl, the iron interior of her sweet body. You let the Count choose your next climb. You went together, armed with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed by the thick woods of briars and bushes, nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated with his coat off as you waded through top snow. He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled down on the train to catch a steam boat for home; or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome. This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue. I read how you walked on the Palatine among the ruins of the palace of the Caesars; alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July. When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. I read how your student ticket admitted you into the private chapel of the Vatican and how you cheered with the others, as we used to do on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll, float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors, to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional breeze. You worked your New England conscience out beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout. Tonight I will learn to love you twice; learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face. Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.

Still, Rome was horrified by all this. The Vatican had “Christianized” the teachings of Aristotle, and not Plato. It preached that redemption could come only through the One Church. These Florentine ideas about the individual, about Art and Science, about universality, and about Greek and Jewish love were anathema and blasphemy…

Faced with the enormous insult of his burial in Rome, the citizens of Florence finally realized their cultural and spiritual debt to Buonarroti. They hurriedly collected public donations to hire the services of Florence’s best burglars. The two thieves rode to Rome in an oxcart. After sundown, they broke into the church, stole the famous artist’s body, rolled it up with cords, and disguised it as a bale of rags. They put it in the back of the cart and rode like blazes back to Florence, arriving at dawn. The joyous Florentines immediately entombed their Michelangelo inside the Basilica of Santa Croce, where his tomb can still be seen today.

SUCCESS, IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID, means different things to different people. Measured by the throngs of visitors who are moved to make personal pilgrimages to Rome and the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel is a success beyond compare—a place that some have suggested should be listed as one of the wonders of the world. But there is another way to determine whether a human effort has achieved its goal. It is important to take note of what its creators sought to accomplish. We need to know not only what the Sistine Chapel is today, but also what it was meant to be by its founders. Would they feel their chapel is a success today? As

SUCCESS, IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID, means different things to different people. Measured by the throngs of visitors who are moved to make personal pilgrimages to Rome and the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel is a success beyond compare—a place that some have suggested should be listed as one of the wonders of the world. But there is another way to determine whether a human effort has achieved its goal. It is important to take note of what its creators sought to accomplish. We need to know not only what the Sistine Chapel is today, but also what it was meant to be by its founders. Would they feel their chapel is a success today? As we have seen, the chapel has been altered, expanded, decorated, and yes, even partially defaced down through the ages. It has undergone not only structural alterations but also philosophic and theological modifications. Unlike Saint Paul, the Sistine never became “all things to all men,” but it has spoken with many voices and preached many different messages. Its strongest messages undoubtedly come from Michelangelo, the man most responsible for the Sistine’s enduring fame. However, his messages—“things seen and unseen”—have been obscured, misinterpreted, censored, overlooked, and forgotten over the centuries, only to come back to light in our time. Buonarroti once prayed, “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.” We have to ask: would he feel that he accomplished his goal with his frescoes? For Michelangelo, could the Sistine be considered a success?

Almost exactly five hundred years ago, a tormented soul named Michelangelo built a very narrow bridge in the middle of the air in the middle of a chapel in the middle of Rome. This resulted in a masterwork that would change the world of art forever.

In early 1506 a peasant had been fixing up his vineyard near the Colosseum when he accidentally opened up a hole in the ground. There, he discovered a large statue of humans being slaughtered by giant serpents. Word reached the Vatican almost immediately. Experts were sent for, including Michelangelo. The statue was identified as the long-lost Laocoön, the most beloved statue in pagan Rome, thought destroyed by the barbarian hordes in the fifth century. It was originally commissioned by the victorious Greeks after they destroyed Troy. It shows the moment of death of Laocoön, the high priest of Troy, being killed by supernatural snakes sent by the Greek gods to prevent him and his sons from warning the Trojans not to bring the famous Trojan horse inside the city walls. Laocoön is best known for his warning: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” After the serpents killed him and his sons, the Trojans did indeed bring the giant wooden horse into their city. When the hidden Greek soldiers came out of its hollow belly that night, it spelled the end of both Troy and the Trojans. Later, when the victorious Roman legions brought a close to the Greek Empire, they brought home the Laocoön as one of their favorite war trophies.

Historians are fairly certain that Buonarroti spent much time in the Jewish parts of Rome, using the authentic features of real Jews for his images. We can see the proof of that here. Except

THE VATICAN The very name Vatican comes from a surprising source. It is neither Latin nor Greek, nor is it of biblical origin. In fact, the word we associate with the Church has a pagan origin. More than twenty-eight centuries ago, even before the legendary founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, there was a people called the Etruscans. Much of what we think of as Roman culture and civilization actually comes from the Etruscans. Even though we are still trying to master their very difficult language, we already know a great deal about them. We know that, like the Hebrews and the Romans, the Etruscans did not bury their dead inside the walls of their cities. For that reason, on a hillside slope outside the confines of their ancient city in the area that was destined to become Rome, the Etruscans established a very large cemetery. The name of the pagan Etruscan goddess who guarded this necropolis, or city of the dead, was Vatika.

Whoever’s idea it was, the new Palatine Chapel was designed to replace the ancient Jewish Temple as the New Holy Temple of the New World Order in the New Jerusalem, which would from this time forward be the city of Rome, the capital of Christendom.

The floor is a fifteenth-century revival of medieval Cosmatesque mosaic style. The Cosmati family developed their unmistakable technique in Rome in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This decorating style was a fantasy of geometric shapes and swirls in cut pieces of colored glass and marble (much of which was “recycled” from pagan Roman palaces and temples). Stunning examples of authentic Cosmati floors and decorations can be found in some of the oldest and most beautiful churches, basilicas, and cloisters in Rome and southern Italy.

In a crypt beneath the ground-floor level of the church are the tombs of Saints James and Philip, two of the apostles going back to the life of Jesus. Deeper still, if we were allowed to dig beneath the crypt, we would soon come upon remains of ancient Imperial Rome, beneath that, Republican Rome, and finally, perhaps some of Bronze Age Rome. This makes the church a metaphor for the entire Eternal City: a place of layer upon layer of history, of accumulations of countless cultures, of confrontations between the sacred and the profane, the holy and the pagan—and of multiple hidden secrets. To understand Rome is to recognize that it is a city swarming with secrets—more than three millennia of mysteries. And nowhere in Rome are there more secrets than in the Vatican.

Unlike many of her sister goddesses, Cybele did not lose her power to the gods of an invading people. Her vanquisher was already within the city walls. In the shadow of her temples, a new Eastern mystery cult gained strength. It stemmed from a monotheistic patriarchal tradition and rejected the notion of female deities, female prophets, female equality. Its devotees were bound to the exclusive worship of one male god. With the ascendancy of Christianity, Cybele’s great temple in Rome was destroyed. On the exact spot where the Phyrgianum once stood, Christians built the basilica of the Vatican. This was the beginning of the end of the ancient tradition of spiritually powerful women drummers.

To most Christians, this probably seems overtly heretical, but its infiltration into Roman Catholic thought and the dangerous alien-christ implications it brings with it has infiltrated the highest levels at Rome—including the papacy.

Monks from the Grottaferra Abbey near Rome, charged with restoring one of the Vatican's obscure Leonardo da Vinci notebooks in the late zg6os, unwittingly revealed a blockbuster scribble that had been, according to Marinoni, locked away for several hundred years.

The US Capital has been called the “Mirror Vatican” due to the strikingly similar layout and design of its primary buildings and streets. This is no accident. In fact, America’s forefathers first named the capital city “Rome.” But the parallelism between Washington

If any of you medieval monkeys ever try to harm her again, I will wipe your Vatican off the face of Rome!

Institutions in science exist primarily, not to confirm a pre-existing idea, but to disprove such idea - and if they fail to do so, despite repeated attempts, then said idea is accepted as a scientific fact, whereas in religion, institutions exist primarily to preserve and endorse pre-existing ideas, always discouraging scrutiny of any sort. Thus harmful and often inhuman flaws of our medieval past continue to dominate the domain of religion, while science continues to flourish by eliminating its flaws and unfolding new horizons of understanding.

Unfortunately for Henry, Pope Clement VII was at the time imprisoned and under the direct control of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was Queen Catherine’s nephew and unsurprisingly was ardently opposed to Henry’s attempt to dissolve the marriage with his aunt. Henry was now compelled to ask Wolsey to effectuate a solution, and Wolsey obliged by convening an ecclesiastical court to resolve the annulment question. It remains unlikely that the papal legate ever was empowered by the Vatican to grant the annulment. The Pope rejected the authority of such a court to grant Henry his annulment and ruled that a decision would be given only in Rome, where Henry’s hand-picked jury could not pre-ordain a result in his favor. But before the Pope issued such a decision, Queen Catherine’s polite, respectful, formidable and defiant plea before the court secured for itself a place in the legends.  She played deftly the part of a woman wronged and scorned by a philandering, lying husband. It also earned Catherine permanent isolation from the King and her daughter Mary. Henry VIII’s means of extortion were that only if Catherine would accept that her marriage to the King was invalid, she might regain her access to Mary and vice versa. Both refused. Catherine died in 1536, probably of cancer.

The history of Italy, and especially of Rome, is intertwined with the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Rome became tied to Christianity in the years shortly after Jesus’ death. Christians believe that Peter, one of Jesus’ closest followers, went to Rome and may have been martyred there, dying for his faith. The Roman Catholic Church says that Saint Peter’s Basilica, the church at the Vatican, was built in the fourth century directly over Peter’s tomb.

Not only does Rome's pope call himself the vicar of Christ, but the Church he heads claims to be the one true Church and the bride of Christ. Christ's bride, whose hope is to join her Bridegroom in heaven, is to have no earthly ambitions. Yet the Vatican is obsessed with earthly enterprise, as history proves; and in furtherance of these goals it has been, exactly as John foresaw in his vision, engaged in adulterous relationships with the kings of the earth. That fact is acknowledged even by Catholic historians.

Italy – Venice, Rome, Vatican City.

recommend visiting the Colosseum and the Vatican on different days and leaving the afternoon and evening of each day free to wander around and see some of the other amazing sights in Rome. Across two days, I suggest you have lazy lunches in the Monti and the Trastevere, and then have a dinner in the Jewish Ghetto and another in Trastevere (my favorite neighborhood in Rome). People tell me that they really need only one day in Rome.

We will control the land of the Vatican. We will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. —SHEIKH MUHAMMAD BIN ABD AL-RAHMAN AL-ARIFI, Imam of the mosque at the King Fahd Defense Academy

They’d been living together for about a year when they’d taken that trip to Italy. And he had asked her to marry him at the end of it, in Rome, right outside the Vatican. The woman he’d met by chance in a bar had turned out to be an angel who’d been sent to reconstruct his life and make him whole again. Would he disintegrate without her? Could he move on? The clock on the nightstand read 2:37. Randall stood in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. He reached behind

In his autobiography Clerical Error, Kaiser explains that he left the order before ordination because he felt that he could better implement the Jesuits’ goals by working directly for the CIA as Time magazine’s Rome correspondent during the Second Vatican Council. During the soirees he hosted at his posh Rome apartment on Time’s lavish expense account, Kaiser met Malachi Martin, another Jesuit who had also become a double agent. Martin was being paid by both B’nai B’rith and the American Jewish Committee to subvert the Catholic claim that the Jews had killed Christ.

In 1929 the Lateran Treaty was concluded between Mussolini’s Government and the Papacy. In the eyes of the Italian people this gave Mussolini further status. Under the terms of the Lateran Treaty, that part of Rome which comprises the Vatican and St Peter’s became an independent sovereign state governed by the Pope.

There were crudely drawn pictures of Christ and Peter bearing the partial inscription: “Peter pray Christ Jesus for the holy….” The remainder of the inscription was missing.82 These inscriptions, written in the middle of a second-century pagan cemetery in Rome, would have been the ancient world equivalent of Isis graffiti on the White House today, or a cross drawn on the Shrine of Khomeini in Teheran.

History never lies. Books that record it can relate what they understand: truths, lies, half-truths equivalent to lies, speculation, eulogies, historic acts that never happened. Glorious acts last because someone was paid to extol them. There’s no better example than Rome, the Eternal City, the glory of God on eart, where he chose to dwell, without doubt.

I heard of a Bishop Hulda at the Vatican in Rome who was helping Catholic SS officers, so that’s where we went.

In May, another UN panel, the Committee against Torture, criticized the Vatican anew—for failing to report accused priests to police, and for not ensuring compensation for victims. The committee, monitoring Rome’s compliance with an international treaty prohibiting torture, found that the sexual abuse of victims by priests itself amounted to torture. It praised the guidelines adopted by the Church in 2011 instructing its hierarchy to cooperate with civil authorities, but said it was concerned that the Vatican continued to “resist the principle of mandatory reporting.

The city of Rome is called the "city of seven hills" and the Vatican is located within its confinement.  These are the hills: Palatine, Capitoline, Quirinal, Aventine, Esquiline, Viminal, and Caelian.