The Last Inquisition of the Papal States
and the Last Pope-King

The Last Inquisition took place in the years 1823-1846. It was not on the same scale as the previous Inquisitions simply because this was limited to the Papal States and the population itself limited the carnage. However the brutality of it and the fear it engendered in the populace was to bring to an end the Holy Roman Empire. In the end the Beast that had been created by the democratic processes set in motion in Europe was to turn on and reject the whore of the Holy Roman System

The Story of the Inquisition and the end of the Holy Roman Empire under the Pope Kings was told  most eloquently by the late Malachi Martin, who had been a Jesuit Priest and perhaps the most famous Roman Catholic historian and writer of the late twentieth century. This story comes from the work Decline and Fall of the Roman Church, published twice, the latest being Secker and Warburg, London, 1982. It is published here in the public interest and for translation. It is recommended that the book be purchased and read in its entirety for the important information it contains.

Comments on Malachi Martin's The Last Pope-King

[Martin deals with the end of the structure commencing from the events of August 1870 which saw the total removal of power of Pius IX. The end of the Inquisition had ceased in 1846 with the death of his predecessor Gregory XVI. This pope Pius IX was to lose the temporal power of the Roman Church but it was not in 1870 that the end of the persecutions came for the people of Rome and the Papal States but in 1850 with the plebiscite we see Martin mention below. The politico-military manipulations did not cease finally until 1870 but the real end of the Holy Roman Empire was in 1850 exactly 1260 years after it had begun in 590 under Gregory I. Perhaps the last gasp of this pope between 1850 -1870 were to make up for the interference in the active power of the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire after the French  Revolution had limited its activities and Napoleon had disbanded it in 1806. It had only been reconstituted in 1815 as a German Confederation under Austrian presidency. These eleven missing years might have been given back tokenism over this later period. We will see the case develop during Martins comments here for the rise of the church sponsorship and involvement with the fascists due to the social conditions and socialist movements in Europe. When Fascism failed because it was so dangerous to the very fabric of society itself and the British Commonwealth and the United States of America virtually alone saved the freedom of Europe and the entire world we see the Roman Church political system involve itself in the cold war situation and assist to bring down the Soviet Union in this still ongoing power struggle. In order for Europe to raise this fascist beast again it had to work to undermine the British Commonwealth and when ready it will rise again to destroy the English speaking world and establish this horror once again. This section is useful in understanding the end of the prophesied time times and half a time or 1260 years of the church in the wilderness and the ongoing horror of the mindset that saw nothing wrong with establishing the Inquisition and then supporting the fascists and the entire process of extermination of categories of humans it saw as opposing its power as a temporal kingdom. We se here in this chapter of Martin's work the mindset that simply moved from Inquisition to Holocaust in the space of a few decades and will move to that position again as soon as temporal power allows it to do so.]

On the morning of August 19, 1870, seventy-year-old Pope Pius IX gets up two hours earlier than usual in his Vatican apartments. The sun is barely above the horizon, reddening and gilding the blue of a cloudless sky. His valet throws open the central window. Rome is still asleep. Across the way, Pius can see the papal flag fluttering over the Quirinal Palace. In between and all around, the steady sunlight, silent and peaceful, is creating a pastel of brown, ochre, cream, gray, white, and maroon, as walls, tiles, roofs, marble monuments reflect the new day's smile.

This day and tomorrow are going to be very busy days for him. And he knows exactly what is going to happen. Today and tomorrow, as sovereign pontiff, ruler of the papal states, regent of all princes and powers and governments on earth, he is going to enact a drama of political suicide. In two acts. This Monday will witness the first act.

Pius IX and his chief advisor, Leonardo Cardinal Antonelli, are dominated and directed by that rugged, granite-hard, weather-beaten Roman memory of an authority that has outlived all its enemies. But both Pius and Antonelli realize what is happening: this day will witness the last act of Pius as pope-king. Since the first pope-king, Leo in the fifth century, there have been 210 pope-kings. After more than 1,420 years of successful survival, who better than they could know that their long reign is about to end? Besides, this last of the pope-kings has already played his trump card. The world at large will take at least one hundred years, perhaps two, perhaps more, to understand the significance of that trump. Pius together with 535 bishops from all over the world played that card one year and one month ago, on July 18, 1869.

Before this century, whenever an external and secular power threatened the papacy, popes regularly had recourse to some other secular power as the right arm of their defense - Silvester I in the fourth century, Leo III in the eighth century, Gregory VII in the eleventh century, Clement VII in the sixteenth century. They sought help from this world below. Now, in this supreme hour, in 1869, there was no more help from any secular quarter, no temporal power to turn to. All the major powers and many lesser powers of Pius's day have decided the papacy must go. The authoritative London Times has already written its lugubrious obit in which it will shed crocodile tears over "the final passing of this venerable institution." Pius knows this. Antonelli knows it. Everybody knows it.

So Pius and his bishops sought help from above. If the secular world would strip the papacy of its temporal power as a prelude to suppressing it totally, then the papacy would reach for a power the secular world could never touch. The power of the spirit. The power Jesus guaranteed to Peter the Apostle. On that July 18, 1869, the bishops declared that the pope was infallible and that he was the titular head of all and any Christianity that might exist on the face of this earth-what Catholics call the pope's primacy. Infallibility and primacy: the trump card.

Papal infallibility means that a pope, when teaching matters of faith and morals for all the faithful, cannot err and is to be obeyed. Papal primacy means that no other bishop in all Christianity and no gathering of bishops or theologians-much less of layfolk-can supersede or set aside the teaching authority and jurisdiction of a pope.

No one should forget in what frame of mind and with what intention Pius and his bishops chose this particular moment to define papal infallibility and papal primacy. Cardinal Manning of. England, leading light at the First Vatican Council, clearly expressed that frame of mind and that intention.

"European powers," Manning wrote, "are dissolving the temporal power of the Vicar of Christ . . . because they are no longer Christian ... . . and, in so doing, they are striking out the keystone of the arch which hangs over their own heads. This done, the natural society of the world will still subsist, but the Christian world will be no more."

As to that intention, it was clear. The peace of Europe is broken: never again, it may be, to be restored, till the scourges of war have gone their circuits among the nations. . . . The head of the Church, be he in Rome or in exile, free or in bondage, will be all that the Vatican Council has defined: supreme in jurisdiction, infallible in faith."

Now, on this August morning of 1870, with this irrevocable step taken, Pius and his advisors are ready for what is to follow. After his private Mass and a light breakfast, Pius is at his desk. He puts the finishing touches on a speech, composes a letter to be sent to all governments, reads some documents left for him the previous evening. At 7:30 A.M., Antonelli enters Pius's study, a sheaf of papers, some books, and the morning edition of Osservatore Romano in his hand. Tall, bony, distinguished-looking, Cardinal Antonelli has always refused, for personal reasons, to be ordained a priest. He is a lay cardinal. Antonelli gives Pius a summary of all foreign dispatches and telegrams and letters. Minor details such as the death of novelist Charles Dickens, an announcement that Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet would have a first Roman playing in the coming September-these Pius puts aside.

It is the war between Prussia and France which occupies him. The German armies are besieging Metz and Chalons. The French armies are falling back everywhere. It looks like a Prussian victory before the end of the year. All French troops are leaving Rome today. Finally, the latest figures on foreign investments, the condition of Rome's municipal financing, and of food supplies in the city are discussed. Pius and Antonelli pore over the latest messages from Bleichröder. Bleichröder, Bismarck's financial advisor, takes care of Vatican investments in one sector. Then the two men turn to the day's program

"How many men have we?" Pius asks. 7

"Barely four thousand. Badly led. Badly armed," is Antonelli's answer, and he adds: "General Kanzler is a pessimist."

One dispatch informs them that General Raffaele Cadorna, commander of the Italian national army, is advancing on Rome with 60,000 troops One day's march from Rome's walls! They are going to attack within thirty-six hours.

"Tell Kanzler to make only a show of resistance. One breach of the walls, and we surrender." These are Pius's instructions.

Antonelli reads a last series of dispatches from Austria, Russia, Spain, Portugal, England-reactions to what he had told the assembled diplomatic corps in Rome two days ago, namely that their governments had an obligation "to cooperate by their intervention to reestablish his Holiness in his See and in the capital of his dominions guaranteed by all the treaties which form the basis of European public law." Now, all the answering dispatches are negative: no help, no intervention. Pius is alone.

Antonelli pauses, then cautiously: "Should we not read the king's letter again?" A shadow crosses Pius's face as he remembers. In late July, King Victor Emmanuel of the new, utterly new Italian republic, sent Count Ponza di San Martino to Pius with that letter. "Acquiesce in the occupation of Rome. Your Holiness," the letter said. "Italians are one now, are a nation. Rome is their capital." The letter went on to describe the conditions. A quid pro quo: Pius and his successors would be confirmed as owners of the Vatican, of the surrounding buildings and streets. The pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, and a narrow strip of land running down to the Adriatic Sea would be theirs. The pope would receive cash indemnity for the loss of land and property and an annual income of not less than 2 million lire. Pius remembers the letter well and bitterly. "A beggar's remnant" . . . "salaried servant of the state" ."make the Pope a penurious campesino (dirt-farmer)" ."our dignity and sovereignty" . . . "never" . . . "never". . . . He again utters all the phrases with which he assaulted Count Ponza. Then to Antonelli: "No! No!" He does not need to read the letter again.

"Ebbene, Santità (Antonelli's favorite way of ending an unpleasant interlude), please glance at the translation of Karl Marx."

Pius stares a moment, then puts his hand on one of the books Antonelli had brought him. They had been over this ground before. Secretly, Pius felt Antonelli may have been right all along. One day in 1848, Antonelli had come to him with a document just published: The Communist Manifesto, composed by this Karl Marx and a fellow-German, Friedrich Engels.

"I fear, Your Holiness," Antonelli had said, "I fear this is what is going to happen. The old order, our order of things is finished. It may take one year. It may take one hundred, two hundred. But I fear it is ended. All of it."

[The passing of the old order did indeed come with the rise of the new orders of Europe and Russia under a social upheaval with competing notions and ideologies. The Roman Church simply would not adapt to the new situation. That was to take a series of disasters and a failed Holocaust. Martin could have made much more here of the circumstances that led to the church inspired struggles in Europe that were to a rise in the twentieth century. He misses this opportunity again a little further down in this chapter of his work. He could have then taken the real struggle up to the present time and placed it under John Paul II and the murder of John Paul I for his attempted dispersal of the patrimony of Constantine and the wealth and structure of the church which had hamstrung the Roman Church and finally destroyed it. He is aware of this problem and makes much mention later in the book but avoids the Holocaust issue for his own reasons. His last work may well have made a great impact on the final controversies of the church and the European and Russo Asian powers. Perhaps we will never know the real power of what it was he was to have published and which the world may never know due to his death.]

Pius now looks at the cover of Das Kapital. It is only Volume One. "Let's wait until the second one appears. Then we can make a proper assessment of the whole thing." Pius turns away and begins writing.

At 11 AM., Pope Pius is escorted to the Basilica of St. John Lateran. He gets out of his carriage, kneels for a few moments at the bottom of the Scala Sancta, a staircase of twenty-four steps. Christians believe that these were the original steps up which Jesus climbed, all bloodied from his scourging, to be judged by Pontius Pilate. They had been brought to Rome in the fourth century.

Pius then commences to climb the staircase in the traditional way of a penitent-on his knees, knee by knee, step by step. At the top, after a few more moments of prayer in the basilica, he is helped down to his carriage and returns to the Vatican. The crowds are sullen. There are few cheers.

Time was in his first year as pope, in 1846, that the crowds in Rome used to unharness the horses and themselves draw his carriage in joy and triumph through the streets. And he had played up to them: demolished the ghetto, expelled the Jesuits, granted a general amnesty, allowed the people to publish a newspaper, permitted the first railway in the papal states, allowed the mob's popular orator and leader, Angelo Brunetti (whom the Romans wittily nicknamed Ciceruacchio because when he opened his mouth to speak you thought Cicero was about to speak divinely but he sounded just like a quacking duck), to harangue him in the Trastevere district: and he even proclaimed a civil constitution. The Fundamental Statute. But all to no purpose. They hate him now. They want to belong to the newly born Italian nation. He, the pope who owns them and Rome, has refused to cede. Hence their hate. Hence Cadorna's army advancing on Rome to liberate it. The hate is on all the faces on either side of his carriage as he proceeds home.

Beneath the Quirinal Palace is the last painful stop before entering the Vatican courtyard. A small cluster of Italians block the way. No weapons, of course. No tricolor flags. No violence. Just silence. Those sullen reproachful faces. Each man's hand is raised and pointing to the Quirinal steps. And in a flash their message is clear to Pius and Antonelli "There," they are saying silently and significantly, in their dreadful mime, "there, as Rossi went, so you too." The silence is deafening.

Rossi was the last of the pope's prime ministers, the only successful one after the failures of Bofondi, Antonelli, Ciocchi, Monriani, Gallietti. Pius can recall how Rossi went: Rossi the aristocrat with nerves of granite stepping out the main doors of the palace, casting one sharp experienced eye down those steps at the knot of surly young men leaning nonchalantly on their canes, each left hand inside each frock coat holding something, all the eyes staring expressionlessly. Then, shoulders squared, head up, hat in hand, Rossi stepping down dignifiedly, his lips moving in death-prayers taught him by his mother fifty-three years before. Halfway down, a sudden halt. A young man leans forward; as quick and sure as the fangs of a serpent, the stiletto severs the carotid artery in Rossi's neck. Rossi falling, tumbling, falling, leaving little pools of red blood, glistening living blood. And, then, for the first time that low roar, the soul of the mob as a beast, growling and threatening with one animal beat. Pius had seen it all from the windows of his study above.

They drive his carriage past those steps at breakneck speed back to the Vatican. Pius remains closeted, receives Antonelli's reports on the approaching army, prays, composes letters of protest, paces to and fro, finally goes to bed.

Act 2 of this last drama of the last pope-king opens one month later on September 19. At 7 P.M., Antonelli comes with two members of Pius's Court and Marcantonio Pacelli, the undersecretary of state. "Holy Father, we think you should leave the city. We cannot guarantee your safety. We must leave immediately. One hour more and all exits are blocked."

"No!" Pius fairly shouts the word. "You both know what happened the last time. We very nearly never got back here again!"

On November 24, 1843, that year of revolutions, the mob had taken over in Rome. Pius remembers how, a week after Rossi's assassination, he put off his papal clothes, donned the garb of a stableman, and fled with Marcantonio Pacelli and Cardinal Antonelli by night in the open carriage of the Bavarian minister, Count de Spaur and his countess, all the way to Naples, staying at Gaeta for nine months, then Pontici for a few more months, while the Romans established a republic, declared him deposed, desecrated the churches, killed priests and nuns, and he, Pius, futilely launched excommunications, petitioned France, Austria, Spain, and Sicily for help to repossess his domains; finally to be humiliatingly restored to Rome on April 12, 1850. A French army took Rome and sent Garibaldi scurrying to the mountains, and Mazzini yelping into Switzerland.

"No," Pius says again, this time more quietly. They all retire for the night. Before they are asleep, the Italian army is camped around the walls of Rome. Escape is now impossible.

On the morrow, the 20th, at 5:30 A.M., the Italian cannons send a first hail of destruction at the walls of Rome. Kanzler's troops respond with a weak volley-a token resistance. The Italian cannons speak again and again and again. Pius says a special Mass at eight o'clock for the diplomatic corps and preaches a sermon holding "the King (Victor Emmanuel) and the Republican Government and ultimately the Great Powers of Europe responsible for this unworthy and sacrilegious spoliation of the patrimony of St. Peter. "As for us," Pius concludes, "we will be a prisoner in St. Peter's until this desecration is over."

At 10 A.M., back in the Vatican, behind barred doors and gates, Pius gets the news: the Italians have breached the Aurelian wall at the Porta Pia; they are pouring into Rome. "It is finished," Pius says, crossing himself. He orders the white flag to be hoisted on the cupola of St. Peter's Basilica. There is a sudden silence as no cannon speaks anymore. Then, imperceptibly at first, but growing more audible, Pius and Antonelli and Marcantonio Pacelli standing on the central balcony of St. Peter's hear that five-syllable cry growing rhythmically as the repeated beats on the syllables grow nearer. "Roma o Morte! (Rome or Death) Roma o Morte!" Garibaldi's war-cry repeated by thousands of throats. Within minutes, they see the first ranks of the invaders running and shouting and waving the Italian tricolor. The three men retire within St. Peter's.

They spend the next ten days just waiting. On all sides, the armies of the republic have them hemmed in. "Antonelli, what do we do?" is Pius's repeated question. "We wait, Holiness. We wait. We both have made our last confession. We wait." Then another repeated question: "Antonelli, where did we act wrongly?" Antonelli wants to explain that this is only the beginning of some profound ending in the old order of things: but he unfortunately mentions Pius's former popularity with the mobs. And this sets Pius off in a regretful reverie. What did all that give him? he wants to know. He always had bad advisors. The very cardinals who elected him pope wanted him to be liberal. So he was. And look what has happened!

"Remember, Holiness," Antonelli breaks in, "long before you became Pope, the damage was done."

[Here we see the Last Inquisition described by Martin in such clear and simple terms. As a Jesuit he saw the reasons for the expulsion of the Jesuits and he himself left that order. The Description of the horrors of the Inquisition in the Papal States of 1823-1846 shows us clearly why the people simply would no longer tolerate the barbarity of the Roman Church system ruling over them.]

Pius was not yet a cardinal on the death of Pius VI. But he remembers the three popes after Pius VII (Leo XII, Pius VIII, and Gregory XVI); they had done the damage. The legacy of Pius VII was a terrible one: oppression, surveillance, a dictatorship. Between 1823 (death of Pius VII) and 1846 (when Pius IX was elected), almost 200,000 citizens of the papal states were severely punished (death, life imprisonment, exile, galleys) for political affiances; another 1.5 million were subject to constant police surveillance and harassment.

There was a gallows permanently in the square of every town and city and village. Railways, meetings of more than three people, and all newspapers were forbidden. All books were censored. A special tribunal sat permanently in each place to try, condemn, and execute the accused. All trials were conducted in Latin. Ninety-nine percent of the accused did not understand the accusations against them. Every pope tore up the stream of petitions that came constantly asking for justice, for the franchise, for reform of the police and prison system. When revolts occurred in Bologna, in the Romagna, and elsewhere, they were put down with wholesale executions, sentences to lifelong hard labor in the state penitentiary, to exile, to torture. Austrian troops were always being called in to suppress the revolts. Secret societies abounded. Assassinations, robberies, crime in general increased.

Pope Leo XII kept cats, about threescore cats, as his pets and rebuilt St. Paul's Church with 60,000 francs from King Charles of France. He also forbade the selling of wine and any woman's dress that went above the ankles. He restored the Inquisition and its torture chambers, hated France and all Frenchmen. Pope Pius VIII was pope for twenty months, suffered from violent torticollis, took long placid walks with members of the diplomatic corps, and literally dropped dead on hearing that Charles X of France had died. Pope Gregory XVI published one book, Triumph of the Church Against the Assaults of Innovators, took two extended tours through the papal states, each costing 400,000 gold crowns, was a renowned Epicurean, created the Egyptian and Etruscan museums in the Vatican, put down a revolution in Rome by wholesale butchery of the rebels, and died suddenly and unaccountably in 1846. Pius IX remembers that he got a full account of it all from Marcantonio Pacelli, who had been head of Gregory XVI's finance department.

"Where did we go wrong, Antonelli?" Pius asks again and again, as he goes over all this. "Give them what they ask, and the papacy is ruined. Refuse it, and they will ruin us. What to do?" Neither today nor on the succeeding days have they any real answer.

Then on October 2, the victors held a plebiscite: Did the inhabitants of the papal states want to join the Italian republic? There are 46,785 yeas to 47 nays in Rome alone; and, in the whole papal states, there are 132,681 yeas to 1,505 nays. When Pius gets the news, he breaks down.

Eight months later, the Italian parliament passes the Law of Guarantees: the pope is an independent sovereign, the parliament acknowledges; he has personal inviolability and immunity, and liberty to come and go, to hold conclaves, councils, consistories, as he wills. He owns the Vatican, the Lateran, the papal offices, and Castel Gandolfo. He will have an annual revenue of 3,225,000 lire. Pius tore up the copy of the law saying: "We will be a prisoner." He keeps repeating it for years to all and sundry, to Antonelli, to public audiences, to foreign powers, to visiting ambassadors, to the Lord at Mass, to himself in bed at night. He remains shut up in the Vatican. He relies on Pacelli and Antonelli exclusively. Pacelli fulminates about Pius's imprisonment on the editorial page of every edition of the Osservatore Romano which he, Pacelli, founded in 1861. It is Pius's only way to speak to the world.

In 1876, Antonelli falls sick and is dying. Pius IX comes to give him the last rites.

"When, Holiness," asks Antonelli, "when did Your Holiness first know that the Holy See was in trouble?"

"After Pius VIII became Pope," is Pius's answer.

How? Simple: from the diplomatic corps, from the type of useless careerists who replaced the energetic and formidable envoys of previous times. Pius IX has the dying Antonelli even chuckling gently as he runs over the principal envoys to the Holy See in 1829: the bearded Prussian, Baron de Bunsen, dabbling in scientific research and nearly killing himself: the Russian Prince Gagarin perpetually talking of his conquests among the ladies of Rome; the gloomy Spanish misanthrope, Marquis de Salvador, solemn, taciturn, taking long walks by himself, always discoursing with the ghosts of Ferdinand and Isabella about their conquests of the Moors in Spain in the thirteenth century, the Neapolitan Fuscaldo, swarthy and suspicious and tortured by a perpetual fear of being assassinated by some secret society; the Portuguese Funchal, as ugly as a chimpanzee ("as ugly as Cavour," Pius quips; Cavour was prime minister of the new Italian republic, nearsighted, stout, balding, low-sized, with a commonplace appearance), lost in his music day and night. And so on down the line of the diplomats.

"When they sent such idiots, we knew we no longer had any value or dignity for them," Pius concludes.

Only one event before his own death gives Pius IX a moment of enthusiasm. On January 9, 1878, the first king of Italy, Pius' archenemy, King Victor Emmanuel, dies in the Quirinal Palace. And Emmanuel's minister, Crispi, who had vowed an implacable hatred for Pius and the papacy, had to read the official announcement: "His Highness, King Victor Emmanuel, died today fortified by the Sacraments of the Church." The king had asked for a priest before he died. "They have to come back. They have to ask for forgiveness," Pius remarks, as he is reminded of all the other times in history when rebellious Christians had to return. His Roman memory has not given an inch. He still hopes he can recover Rome and the papal states.

But it is not to be. Three weeks after King Victor, the eighty-six-year-old Pius IX, who has been sickening over two months, dies. He receives Filippo Pacelli, son of Marcantonio, for the last time, asks him how things are going at the Consistorial College of which Filippo is dean, and asks how Filippo's two-year-old son, Eugenio, is doing. "He will serve the Holy See well, Filippo. Teach him well," are Pius's parting words.

Just before he dies, Pius says simply: "Let us go into the house of the Lord." It is February 7, and thirty-one years since they made him pope. Over on the Via degli Orsini, the little Eugenio Pacelli notices the tears in his father's eyes and asks: "Why are you sad, Papa? Isn't the Pope gone home to Heaven?"

The real pathos and enduring tragedy of this last of the pope-kings was not his final loss of political power and territory. Rather it was the legacy of bitterness he left in the papacy and the church. He left the whole church repeating, "We've been robbed," for over sixty years.

[It is here in this section that Martin gives the tie in to the later rise of the Nazi system beginning with the fascists under Mussolini in Italy. The negotiations were conducted and the church saw itself as reemerging from this abyss of the democratic and republican monster that had turned on the Papacy and taken its power. Martin should have made much more of the church involvement here with the Nazi system and we will remedy that limitation in the section dealing with both Lutheran and Roman Catholic involvement in the Holocaust.]

After Pius IX died, three more popes remained '-prisoner" in the Vatican. In 1928, the up-and-coming dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, decided for the sake of national unity that the "Vatican question-' should be solved amicably. After protracted negotiations, in 1929, Mussolini's government and the Vatican of Pope Pius XI signed the Lateran Pacts, thus ending the sixty-year-old official enmity between the Vatican and Italy. Young Eugenio Pacelli, now an archbishop and the highest ranking diplomat in the Vatican, was deeply involved in the process. Mussolini could point to the pacts as proof that he was as Catholic as the pope (this was meant as much for foreign consumption in Spain, France, Germany, and the U.S.A., as for the Italians). The Vatican could now move more freely in the Italian political arena: and immediately it would launch into a new career in the world of international finance.

The Vatican was guaranteed sovereign territorial integrity within the Vatican state, an area equal in size to a substantial golf course and englobing St. Peter's Basilica and Square, the Apostolic Palace with its famed gardens, and other adjoining buildings. Included in that sovereign integrity were extraterritorial possessions-about fifty of them, such as the papal summer villa at Castel Gandolfo, a mountain on which stands the antennae of Radio Vatican, institutes in the city of Rome and elsewhere. Indemnities of over 90 million were paid for the material losses incurred by the Vatican because of the nationalist takeover in 1870.

The successor of the popes today lives in the Apostolic Palace flanking St. Peter's Square, with its 10,000 halls, suites, rooms, and passages, its 12,532 windows, its 997 flights of stairs. Within his city-state, he has thirty squares and streets, two churches, one parish, a railroad station, four post offices, a court of law, two jails, his own coinage and postage stamps, and at least four newspapers and periodicals. The normal population of his state is about 2,000, the vast majority being clergymen. He has a tiny army, the Swiss Guards, and his own police and security forces who work in close collaboration with Italian police and state security. The official colors of his state are white and yellow, the national anthem a piece composed by Gounod. Vatican automobiles carry license plates marked with SCV (State of Vatican City). Within his city-state, the pope has all the offices of his administration, religious, financial, political, diplomatic. And from here he governs the religious life of over 740 million adherents. Over on the Quirinal Hill is the seat of the Italian government with which the Vatican maintains diplomatic relations, as it does with over 110 other sovereign nations.

This then is the visible worldly status of the Roman pope, after all the vicissitudes of greatness and misery, of holiness and unworthiness, of empire and of poverty, over a period of nearly two millennia.

Between the death of Pius IX and our day there have been nine popes. Two of these stand out. Eugenio Pacelli as Pius XII (1939-1958) was the last of the great Roman popes. He was succeeded by Angelo Roncalli as John XXIII (1958-1963), "Good Pope John," as his contemporaries knew him. The surprising aspect of Pope John is that in a short five-year period he undid what every pope since the fourth century had sought and fought to maintain and foment. John's successor, Pope Paul VI, merely completed Pope John's destruction of the old church. And the present pope, John Paul II, is left with a shattered institution waiting at the crossroads of history with only the gravest of doubts and the deepest of problems as his constant companions.

[We see now how the mindset of the Holocaust was already in operation during the previous century in the Roman Church and it had been quelled then by the Republic and the sheer horror of the Roman and Papal State populace. Go now to the Section of the Church Involvement in the Holocaust and see what logically progressed among a people who had forgotten the horrors of not so long ago and allowed their education to be hampered by half truths and lies and the fear of an unknown menace in the Communist system. We also see in an earlier section this extraordinary situation happen in Ireland where the Roman Church had given Ireland to England in the 12th century simply to eradicate the Quartodecimans who were still there after many centuries and we saw that country reduced to ruin and a state of barbarism unequaled in Europe] 

Comments by

Wade Cox

Christian Churches of God