Overview
Few institutions have been so comprehensively misunderstood on the strength of a translation error. The papal archive was known for centuries as the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum, and for most of that time nobody thought this meant anything sinister. In curial Latin secretum carries the sense of private or personal — the sovereign's own papers, as distinct from the public records of the state. The English word secret has drifted a long way from that.
By the twentieth century the drift had done its work. The Secret Archives had become a fixture of thrillers and conspiracy literature, and the assumption in most of that material is not that the archive holds the private correspondence of popes but that it holds the things the Church cannot afford anyone to read.
What Is Actually In It
The holdings are enormous and, by the standards of what is claimed for them, mundane. More than six hundred archival fonds occupy something over 85 linear kilometres of shelving, part of it in a two-storey reinforced vault beneath the Cortile della Pigna known as the Bunker.
The material is what a sovereign institution accumulates across twelve centuries: diplomatic correspondence with every European power, papal account books, records of nunciatures, the acts of tribunals, petitions, and the administrative sediment of a state that never stopped writing things down. The famous items are famous because they are interesting rather than dangerous — Henry VIII's annulment petition, the 1530 letter from English peers, the proceedings against Galileo, correspondence with Michelangelo, a letter from Mary Queen of Scots written before her execution.
The Claims
The conspiracy literature is not short of specificity. The archive is said to hold the suppressed gospels and the documentary evidence of Jesus's marriage and descendants; proof of extraterrestrial contact; the records of the Third Secret of Fátima in unredacted form; the true history of the Templars; and, in a claim that circulates with surprising persistence, the world's largest collection of pornography.
The last is the most easily traced, and its origin is instructive: the Vatican Library and archive do hold material catalogued in restricted classes, as most great libraries do, and the leap from restricted to salacious required no evidence at all.
The Templar claim is the one that has partly resolved. In 2007 the Vatican published the Processus contra Templarios, including the Chinon Parchment of 1308 recording that Pope Clement V had absolved the order's leaders of heresy before political pressure from Philip IV of France destroyed them. The document had been in the archive throughout, misfiled for centuries rather than concealed, and its publication did roughly the opposite of what suppression theories predicted.
The Rules of Access
The archive is open, on conditions that are the actual source of most complaints. Consultation is free, but applicants must hold a university degree or equivalent and be pursuing scientific research; clergy require a licentiate or doctorate. Readers work in a reading room with limited daily seating and must request specific holdings rather than browsing.
The substantive restriction is chronological. Material is available up to the end of the pontificate of Pius XII in October 1958, and everything after that date is closed. This is a longer closure period than most national archives operate, and it is the rule that generates the sharpest and most legitimate criticism — a great deal of the twentieth century that people most want examined falls on the wrong side of it.
In March 2020 Francis opened the Pius XII pontificate itself, releasing the wartime papers that historians had pressed for over decades, in particular those bearing on the Church's conduct during the Holocaust. The material has been under study since, and the resulting scholarship has been mixed rather than exonerating or damning — which is the ordinary condition of archival evidence and among the least satisfying outcomes available to a theory of concealment.
The Renaming
On 22 October 2019 Francis issued a motu proprio titled L'esperienza storica, changing the institution's name to the Archivum Apostolicum Vaticanum, the Vatican Apostolic Archive. His stated reasoning was linguistic: the old title had acquired, in modern usage and particularly outside Italian, an implication of concealment that the Latin never carried, and the resulting misunderstanding had come to obscure the archive's character.
Whether a name change can undo a century of thrillers is doubtful, and the reaction in some quarters was predictable — a body that renames itself to sound less secretive can always be read as a body managing its image. The archive still calls itself the Apostolic Archive, and most of the internet still calls it the Secret Archives.
What Is Left Standing
The reasonable version of the criticism survives the renaming intact, and it is worth separating from the gospels and the aliens. A sovereign institution with a documentary record reaching back to the eighth century sets its own access rules, closes everything after 1958 by its own decision, and is answerable to no external archival authority. That is a real asymmetry, and it does not require anyone to believe a suppressed gospel is on a shelf under the Cortile della Pigna.