Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more Read online

  Tales from the Vatican Vaults

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  Tales from the Vatican Vaults

  edited by

  David V. Barrett

  ROBINSON

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Robinson

  This collection, concept, introduction and all linking material copyright David V. Barrett, 2015

  All stories copyright their individual writers © 2015

  ‘The Tale of Pope Joan’ by David V. Barrett was first published in a different form in Narrow Houses Volume Three: Blue Motel, edited by Peter Crowther, Little, Brown 1994

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-47211-165-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-47211-170-8 (ebook)

  Robinson

  is an imprint of

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Tale of Pope Joan, David V. Barrett c. AD 850

  No Peace for the Wicked, K. J. Parker 1032–1048

  Chasing Charlemagne, John Grant c. 1040

  Encounter on the Rhine, Marion Pitman c. 1150

  Songs of Love, J.-M. Brugée c. 1189

  The Dragon Chain, Cherith Baldry 1355

  Bells of the Harelle, Rosanne Rabinowitz 1382–1419

  The Sky Weeps, the Earth Quakes, Jaine Fenn 1541

  The Gifts, Kleo Kay c. 1580

  Windows into Men’s Hearts, E. Saxey 1591

  Documents in the Case of Brother G., Paul Kincaid 1600

  The Hammer of Witches, Mary Gentle 1620

  The Silver Monkey, Dave Hutchinson c. 1690s

  The Watchers, Garry Kilworth 1771

  The Missing Journal of Captain James Cook, Geraldine Warner 1779

  Cooking up a Storm, Jean Marie Ward 1814/1841

  Pio Nono and the Papal Allocution, Damian P. O’Connor 1848

  The Confession, Alex Bell 1889

  Saunière’s Secret, Lionel & Patricia Fanthorpe 1920s

  The Will, KristaLyn Amber 1918–1960s

  Gardening, Stephanie Potter 1930s

  The She, Terry Grimwood 1943–44

  Gargoyles, Douglas Thompson 1948

  The Saint’s Well, Storm Constantine 1959

  The Mountain Wind, Patrice Chaplin 1965

  Miserere, Sarah Ash 1970/1770

  The Island of Lost Priests, Kristine Kathryn Rusch 1975

  Apocryphon, Stephen Marley 1978

  The Writers

  Introduction

  Dedicated to the memory of Pope John Paul, 1978–2010

  This book is being published to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the death of Pope John Paul in 2010.

  Among his many achievements Pope John Paul was the longest-reigning pope, his thirty-two years and two months passing Pius IX by six months. And he was the oldest pope ever, living till just past his ninety-eighth birthday, easily passing Leo III who lived to ninety-three, and remaining sound in mind and body until the end.

  But it is not for these remarkable records that we celebrate John Paul’s papacy. It is the fact that he ushered in an age of liberalism previously unknown in the Catholic Church. We shall recall shortly how he dealt with a number of difficult moral issues, some of which were making the Church of Rome seem out of touch with the modern world.

  *

  First we must repeat our gratitude to Pope John Paul for opening up the deepest, most secret parts of the Archives of the Vatican Library – known colloquially as the Vatican Vaults – to scholars. In doing so he has made available an incomparable wealth of historical material.

  This act was not without risk, as John Paul himself accepted. Even more so than the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library and other caches of ancient documents, who could tell the impact of what might be found in the Vatican Vaults? Certainly there would be skeletons; the Church’s undercover involvement in world affairs throughout the centuries would be laid bare.

  We know already that the Church of Rome has at times been involved in covering up things it did not wish to be known, and at times has blatantly rewritten history. The best known example of the latter must be the Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century forgery which asserted that the early fourth-century Roman Emperor Flavius Valerius Constantine gave the papacy spiritual sovereignty over all other churches, temporal sovereignty over large parts of Italy and landed estates throughout the Middle East for income. The Church continued to use this to assert its temporal rights long after it had been proven to be a forgery.

  As we explore the thousands of documents in the Vatican Vaults, much of the history of the last millennium or more will have to be re-examined; the separation of fact from fiction is one of the hardest tasks facing the scholars. It might take generations of historians and theologians to sift through what is buried in the Vaults, separating out suppressed first-hand accounts from clever obfuscations.

  Over the last twenty years we have only skimmed the surface. The research team has deliberately been kept small and manageable, rather than opening up the Vaults to an academic free-for-all. There have been papers, monographs and, for a few research assistants fortunate in their choice of supervisors, there have been doctoral theses. I was one of the first of these, and so owe my career as an historian to Pope John Paul.
Two decades later I find myself chairman of the committee which would select and publish a popular edition of some of the material found in the Vaults.

  Like John Paul, we are taking a risk in publishing this book. The accounts span over a thousand years. They cover a wide variety of subjects. Some challenge the foundations of the Christian faith. Others challenge our view of the world, with their revelations of the supernatural or the paranormal, of the spiritual or the alien. All are startlingly different views of the history we thought we knew.

  Can we take all of these as verified history? Of course not. History is not an open book, a clear narrative from Then till Now. There are few certainties, only greater or lesser probabilities. Many of the accounts in this book may be completely factual; others may be fictions and fables which the Church, for whatever reason, wanted to hide. We hope that the notes before and after each one will guide the reader; we have, in many cases, erred on the side of caution.

  As with scholars in all areas of academe, historians disagree with each other. Few of these accounts were a unanimous choice; most are the result of many hours of argument, with passions raised both for and against. This is part of the joy of scholarship, and I would like to thank my fellow committee members for not (quite) coming to blows, and for their enthusiasm and humour in both formal meetings and informal conversations.

  *

  This book is in itself a tribute to Pope John Paul. We must mention here just a few of his reforms during his many years as Pope.

  Probably his first revolutionary action was to throw the moneylenders out of the temple. Within weeks of coming to office he was looking into the corrupt state of the Institute of Religious Works, commonly known as the Vatican Bank, and within months he had required several high-ranking officials, including an archbishop, to resign. The Commission of Enquiry into Financial Mismanagement was the first of several commissions he set up with the explicit mandate to ‘find out where the Church fails, and show us how to make things right’.

  The Commission of Enquiry into Abuse in the Church initially looked into the now-infamous Magdalene Laundry asylums in Ireland and Australia, and quickly closed the few remaining ones. It then turned its attention to the sexual, physical and mental abuse of children by priests, monks and nuns, Pope John Paul refusing to continue the Church’s unspoken policy of quietly covering up both the problem and the scale of it. From the beginning this commission worked closely with both police and social services, ensuring that all who had committed abuse against children would answer for their crimes.

  John Paul was not afraid to challenge long-held practices of the Church, including that of priestly celibacy, which was always a discipline rather than a doctrine. The first stage, early in his pontificate, was to allow already married men to enter the priesthood; later the rules were relaxed further to allow priests, under certain circumstances, to marry and remain as priests.

  This was part of the Pope’s rapprochement with the Anglican communion, his warm relationship with a succession of Archbishops of Canterbury being a constant feature of his long papacy.

  Five years after he became Pope, John Paul brought about a most remarkable, yet at its heart remarkably simple, act of reconciliation between the two Churches. In 1896 Pope Leo XIII declared that all Anglican consecrations of bishops were ‘absolutely null and utterly void’ because there were gaps in their continuity of Apostolic Succession, the laying-on of hands from bishop to bishop over the centuries. The Anglican Church, naturally, disagreed.

  For most people this dispute was as abstruse as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But for bishops and priests it was a major focus of division between the Churches.

  Pope John Paul’s solution, symbolically on Whit Sunday (Pentecost) 1983, was to bring together all the bishops of both Churches in cathedrals around the world in joint services of re-commitment of their faith and re-consecration of their ministry, with all laying hands on each other. Some criticised it as an audacious sleight of hand, and hardline Ulster Protestants called it worse than that, but the way that it was done, with smiles and hugs and slappings on the back as well as the formal laying-on of hands, somehow pulled off the minor miracle that from that day on, all Catholic and Anglican bishops recognised each other as equally valid.

  Undoubtedly the reform with the most widespread effect was John Paul’s relaxation in practice of the Church’s teachings on contraception. Condoms were permitted for the prevention of disease, and the Pill if it was being used to regulate a woman’s cycle or for other medical reasons; contraception was an unwished-for but unavoidable side effect. Again it was a sleight of hand, but one welcomed by millions of ordinary Catholics worldwide, who could continue to do what they had already been doing, but now without sinning.

  *

  It could all have been so different. If Pope John Paul’s personal secretary had not chanced to go into the Pope’s private rooms late at night to retrieve a book he had left there, and seen the light still on in the Pope’s bedroom, and found the Pope slumped in bed from a heart attack, and called the Vatican physician and an ambulance – we might have lost this most reforming of all popes just a month after he ascended St Peter’s throne. There would have needed to be a second conclave in 1978, and a new pope would have had to be elected. Who can guess what differences there might have been in the years between then and now? But there we are sliding into the realms of alternative history.

  Prof. Francis Atterbury OBE, FRS

  Durham, 2015

  c. 850 CE

  The story of Pope Joan has been believed and denied for around a thousand years. Numerous essays and books have ‘proved’ both the truth and the falsehood of the tale, and many would say that this account can lend no credence to the myth, for reasons which will rapidly become obvious; yet the mass of supporting detail requires that the possibility of its truth not be discounted out of hand.

  This account in tenth-century Italian was in a folder entitled ‘Johanna Anglicus, a woman’, found among the personal papers of Pope Sergius III (904–911 CE) along with several letters, notes and diary entries which make reference to it. From internal evidence and from its prose style, particularly the shifts of tense to heighten the immediacy of emotion, it appears to be a transcription of Pope Joan’s own dramatised oral tale, told by her to her family in or just outside Rome some time in the first few years of the tenth century.

  The Tale of Pope Joan

  David V. Barrett

  It was a time of tribulation, and more. Everything, which had been going so well, so wonderfully, fell apart, flew apart – and most galling of all, I can place little of the blame on anyone other than myself.

  Maybe Antonio, a little – but only a little. It was my carelessness, not his, that nearly lost us everything.

  Oh, I had such power – had priests and princes bowing to me – and lost it through my lusts.

  I wished, often then and sometimes even now, that I had never left Germany, that I had never left my family; that grey, rainy country so different from this sweating, plague-infested Rome; that arguing, fighting, loving, supporting family so different from the arguing, fighting, hating, back-stabbing men of God here.

  But I was very young, in our years, still just nearer to thirty than to forty. It was my time to travel, to find new experiences on my own, but not for myself only: we always bring back what we have learnt and tell it to each other, that we may all share, may all learn.

  Remember this, my children, when you begin to travel.

  We were an English family, though we lived in Mainz. One of my fathers, for reasons I didn’t understand as a child, was a missionary to the Germans. I was brought up in a house of scholarship. From my childhood I knew myself to be a scholar rather than a merchant or a farmer; and I knew also that I could not be tied, as several of my mothers were, to the family home. My birth-mother had left early for her final Wandering, having brought three healthy litters of children into this world and then into adulthood; she’d ha
d enough of fetching and carrying, of cooking and cleaning, of being a wife among many and a mother of many.

  ‘Don’t let yourself get trapped, as I have been,’ she told me. ‘I wanted to study, but I ended my travels too soon and joined this family. A wonderful family, don’t get me wrong, but I have spent too much time thinking of us, not enough of me.’ She went on, my mother, a good deal more than that, but it all meant much the same: she’d been familied too soon, before learning to be herself.

  I must not do the same. She told me, and I knew it for myself.

  I would be a scholar, and there was only one place for that: the Church. No matter that, like all of us, I had no belief in God; I have none now and had none even in that highest position – but then, neither had many of my predecessors, nor many of my successors, I am sure. Here in Rome, at the very centre of the Church, there is less faith than anywhere else in Christendom – and almost no Godliness. It shocked me when I first arrived here, even though I was well aware of how dishonest humans are.

  I did not wish to join a nunnery; there is too much devotion there, and – with some exceptions – too little scholarship. I changed to man’s form and joined the Benedictine abbey at Fulda, near to our home in Mainz.

  Why? Because there, I was among some of the finest minds in northern Europe. I could learn from them, argue with them, study their work first hand, read more books than were collected almost anywhere else, except Rome – and here they are collected but not read, not studied. There is no scholarship here; only fighting for position.

  I listened and studied and learnt, and argued and taught and wrote. And made the beginnings of my reputation.

  From there I went to Athens to extend my studies to Greek literature – and there, unknowingly, I took my next fateful step.

  Each mistake is greater than the one before, each built on all that has gone before. This one seemed so right, so wonderful, so (if I’d believed in God and an afterlife) heaven-sent.