Vatican Apostolic Archive

In the first century of Christianity, the Church was already assembling a sizable collection of records. Known alternately as the Holy Scrinium or the Chartarium, it normally travelled with the current pope.[7] The vast majority of these documents are now lost, but we know of them through references in contemporary and later works.

In later centuries, as the Church amassed power, popes would visit heads of state to negotiate treaties or make political appearances around Europe. Popes would also have multiple places of residency. When they travelled for diplomatic or other purposes, they would take their archives with them, since they needed it for administrative work. This resulted in some loss of items.[7]

Initially, the archival materials of the Church were stored at the Lateran Palace, then the official papal residence.[7]

By the 11th century, the archives of the church were devolved to at least three separate sites: the Lateran, St. Peter's Basilica, and the Palatine palace.[7] Between the 11th and the 13th centuries, a large part of these archives disappeared.

When the Popes moved to Avignon, the process of transporting their archives took twenty years, all told. The various places where the archives were kept along the way were sacked by the Ghibellines three separate times, in 1314, 1319, and 1320.[7]

Antipopes also had their own archives. The Western Schism resulted in two sets of papal archives being developed at once; this rose to three during the era of Pisan antipope John XXIII.[7] The disparate archives of the rival papal claimants were not fully reunited in the Vatican's archives until 1784.[7]

During the 1404 sack of the Vatican, papal registers and historical documents were thrown into the streets, and Pope Innocent VII fled the city. His successor, Pope Gregory XII, supposedly sold off a large number of archival materials in 1406, including some of the papal registers.[7]

In 1612, Pope Paul V ordered all Church records assembled in one place.[7]

In 1855, Augustin Theiner, prefect of the Archive, began to publish multi-volume collections of documents from the archive.[5] His predecessor Marino Marini had produced an account of Galileo's trials that failed to satisfy scholars who saw it as an apology for the Inquisition. Beginning in 1867, Theiner and his successor granted individual scholars access to the manuscripts relating to the trial of Galileo, leading to an extended dispute about their authenticity.[12] Scholarly access was briefly interrupted following the dissolution of the Papal States in 1870, when archive officials restricted access to assert their control against competing claims by the victorious Italian state.[13]

In 1879, Pope Leo XIII appointed as archivist Cardinal Josef Hergenröther, who immediately wrote a memo recommending that historians be allowed to access to the archive.[13] Access had remained limited out of concern that Protestant researchers might use their access to slander or embarrass the Church. Hergenröther's approach led to Pope Leo ordering a reading room constructed for researchers; it opened on 1 January 1881.[14] When the German Protestant historian Theodor von Sickel, in April 1883, published the results of his research in the archive that defended the Church against charges of forgery,[lower-alpha 3] Pope Leo was further persuaded. In August 1883 he wrote to the three cardinals who shared responsibility for the archives and praised the potential of historical research to clarify the role of the papacy in European culture and Italian politics. He announced that the archives would be open to research that was impartial and critical. In an address to the Görres Society in February 1884, Pope Leo said: "Go to the sources. That is why I have opened the archives to you. We are not afraid of people publishing documents out of them."[15][16]

In 1979, historian Carlo Ginzburg sent a letter to the newly elected Pope John Paul II, asking that the archives of the Holy Office (the Roman Inquisition) be opened. Pope Benedict XVI said that letter was instrumental in the Vatican's decision to open those archives.[17]

Though the archive has developed policies that restrict access to material by pontificate, with access granted 75 years after the close of a pope's reign, popes have granted exceptions. Pope Paul VI made the records of the Second Vatican Council available not long after it ended. In 2002, for example, Pope John Paul II allowed scholars access to documents from the historical archives of the Secretariat of State (Second Section) pertaining to the Holy See's relations with Germany during the pontificate of Pope Pius XI (1922–39) in order "to put an end to unjust and thoughtless speculation" about the Church's relationship with the Nazi Party.[18]

Following the success of the 2008 film Angels & Demons adapted from the Dan Brown novel of the same name, which depicts a visit to the Archive, the Vatican opened the Archives to a select group of journalists in 2010 to dispute the film's treatment.[19]

In 2018, Pope Francis ordered the Vatican Archive to open documents which would assist in a "thorough study" concerning former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was accused of sexually molesting seminarians and having affairs with young priests.[20][21]

Pope Francis announced on 4 March 2019 that materials relating to Pope Pius XII will be opened on 2 March 2020. Francis said that Pius's legacy had been "debated and even criticized (one might say with some prejudice or exaggeration)", that "The Church is not afraid of history", and that he anticipated "appropriate criticism". [22] In addition to assessing Pius's response to the Holocaust, the archives of the papacy of Pope Pius XII should point to much broader shift in global Christianity from Europe to the global South.[23] Since 2006, members of the archives department have been organising the estimated 16 million pages of documents, to get them ready for viewing by researchers.[24]

In 2017, a project based in Roma Tre University called In Codice Ratio began using artificial intelligence and optical character recognition to attempt to transcribe more documents from the archives.[36][37] While character-recognition software is adept at reading typed text, the cramped and many-serifed style of medieval handwriting makes distinguishing individual characters difficult for the software.[38] Many individual letters of the alphabet are often confused by human readers of medieval handwriting, let alone a computer program. The team behind In Codice Ratio tried to solve this problem by developing a machine-learning software that could parse this handwriting. Their program eventually achieved 96% accuracy in parsing this type of text.[39]

• Blouin, Francis X., Jr.; Coombs, Leonard A.; Yakel, Elizabeth; Carlen, Claudia; Gill, Katherine J. (1998). Vatican Archives: an inventory and guide to historical documents of the Holy See. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509552-9.
• Borromeo, Agostino (2003). L'inquisizione : atti del Simposio internazionale, Città del Vaticano [The inquisition: proceedings of the international Symposium, Vatican City] (in Italian). Biblioteca apostolica vaticana. ISBN 88-210-0761-8.