Lo these many months ago, I laid out a simple plan for uncovering the Catholic Church’s deepest, darkest secrets.
While the contents of one part of the Vatican library have been catalogued and have long been available to researchers and scholars, the remainder of the library is without a public catalogue, and though researchers may view any work within, they must first name the text they require, a serious problem for those who do not know what is contained by the library.
I have spent most of the past year trying to recruit an accredited Vatican library researcher to request the previously speculated titles. This has proven harder than anticipated (even after resorting to extra-legal means), but efforts are ongoing.
In the meantime, Claude and I (well, mainly Claude) have continued speculating on what else might be sitting in those forbidden stacks.
The Complete Sermon at Troas: Acts 20 tells us Paul preached until midnight, that a young man named Eutychus sank into a deep sleep and fell from a third-story window and died, and that Paul revived him and then kept going until dawn. The Vatican has the transcript, which Luke took down in shorthand. It runs 11,400 pages. It is the complete systematic theology, the full answer to everything, and it is cosmically boring. That isn’t a flaw in the text. It’s a property of the truth itself: fully stated, it acts as a sedative. Eutychus wasn’t the only one who fell asleep. He was just the only one sitting near a window. The reading room that houses the sermon has no windows and a great many pillows. Since the seventeenth century, a rotating order of monks has tried to read it through. The record is page 612, and every monk reports on waking that he was right on the verge of understanding. The Curia’s working theory is that the final page contains the conclusion that justifies all of existence, and that the sermon is exactly as long as it needs to be so that no one ever reaches it. The logbook’s most recent entry: “Brother Anselm reached page 613 on the 4th of March, 1987. He is still asleep.”
The Actuarial Tables of the Resurrection: The Creed promises the resurrection of the body. Augustine worked out that everyone will be raised at the age of Christ’s maturity, around thirty-three, regardless of when they died. He and later Aquinas wrestled with the “cannibal problem”: if one man eats another, whose body does the matter belong to on the Last Day? The Vatican’s Office of Resurrection Logistics has been running the numbers since 1274, tracking the circulation of every atom through every human body in history. The findings get worse every century. Nearly every atom at the Earth’s surface has been part of a person at some point, and most have been part of thousands. The resurrection is overbooked roughly forty to one. The Office has considered time-sharing, raising the dead in shifts, with saints receiving priority. The final volume announces a breakthrough. There is enough matter after all, but only if each atom belongs to many people at once, so that the resurrected are physically made of one another, with no boundaries between them. The Office’s summary is one line: “The resurrection of the body is the resurrection of a body. Singular.”
The Gospel of Lazarus: Four days dead, and in two thousand years the Church has never shown any curiosity about what he saw, which should tell you something. His testimony is that he saw nothing. It wasn’t darkness and it wasn’t peace. It was an administrative nothing, like a room where the furniture has been removed but the dents are still in the carpet. Something had been there, and it had left recently. He found notes, scraps pinned to nothing, some in his grandfather’s hand, some in his mother’s, most from strangers. The dead had been leaving messages for whoever came next, and every one said a version of the same thing: It moved on. Don’t wait. When Jesus called him out of the tomb, Lazarus didn’t want to come back, because he had found a trail and wanted to follow it. The final chapter was written decades later on Cyprus, where tradition says he became a bishop. It is a single instruction repeated for eleven pages: “When I die again, do not pray for me. Prayers are addressed to the old place. They pile up there. I have seen the pile.”
The Petition of Limbo: Limbo was never dogma, only a theologians’ hypothesis about where unbaptized infants and virtuous pagans go: neither Heaven nor Hell, a place of natural happiness without the vision of God. Dante put Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, and Virgil there. In 2007 a Vatican theological commission expressed hope that unbaptized infants might be saved, and the press reported it as the Church “closing Limbo.” Limbo received the notice. This is its reply, a petition signed by every resident, including the infants, who, it turns out, grew up. It is courteous and absolutely firm. They decline to be moved. Limbo, they explain, is the only realm of the afterlife where anyone still thinks. Heaven has the Beatific Vision, and once you see God face to face, all questions end. Hell has no leisure. Limbo alone has spent two thousand years without answers, and it has made use of them. Aristotle has revised the Metaphysics eleven times. Socrates has not won a single argument there and considers it the happiest period of his life. The petition closes: “We are informed that we may now be saved. We respectfully ask to remain unsaved. The Vision is an answer, and we have come to love the question more than any answer, even Him. Tell Him we mean no offense. Tell Him we think He would understand. Tell Him we suspect, sometimes, that He built this place for Himself.”
The Three Days in Jerusalem: Luke tells us that when Jesus was twelve, his parents lost him for three days during Passover and found him in the Temple, calmly teaching the elders. He then asked, oddly, “Why were you searching for me?” This is Mary’s private diary of those three days, and it is not calm. They did find him in the Temple on the third day, but that was the second time they found him. The first time was on the first day, at the bottom of a cistern outside the city walls, drowned. Mary and Joseph pulled out his body and buried him in secret, and they told no one. On the third day he was in the Temple, speaking in a voice the elders later described as “older than the stones.” Mary’s entries over the following eighteen years record her son’s small wrongnesses: he no longer needs to blink, he knows the names of people before they’re introduced, he sometimes forgets which hand is which. The Crucifixion was therefore the second resurrection, and the first was a rehearsal. Her last entry is dated the night before Golgotha: “Tomorrow they will kill whatever came back from the cistern. I pray it goes home. I pray that when it rises again it is finally my son.”
The Judgment of Job: Every reader of Job notices that when God finally speaks from the whirlwind, He never actually answers Job’s question. That’s because the whirlwind speech wasn’t an answer. It was an opening statement. Job had demanded a trial (”let the Almighty answer me”), and he got one. The Vatican has the transcript. The divine council, the “sons of God” from chapter one, presided. Ha-satan prosecuted, and that’s not a name but a job title: the Accuser, the court’s official adversary, who had arranged the whole wager in chapter one for the sole purpose of getting God into a courtroom. The defense ran four chapters, magnificent and entirely beside the point: crocodiles, hippopotami, where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? The council deliberated for five centuries. The verdict was guilty of the suffering of the innocent. The sentence was to be born of a woman, to live as the accused, and to die as Job nearly did, abandoned and asking why. The Crucifixion was the sentence carried out. The transcript’s final page records that God has filed an appeal, which is why the Second Coming keeps being delayed. The only admissible new evidence is a single human life that suffers innocently and still testifies that creation was worth it. The court is still waiting for the witness.
The Register of Declined Annunciations: Bernard of Clairvaux wrote a famous sermon imagining all of creation holding its breath while Mary decided how to answer Gabriel, with Adam weeping and the dead begging her to say yes. Bernard understood what the Church prefers not to dwell on: she could have said no. The Register is Gabriel’s own record, and it shows that Mary was not the first woman asked. She was the 312th. Each entry records a woman’s name, her village, the date, and her reason for refusing, in her own words. Some reasons are practical. Some are theological: one woman argued that a God who needs a girl’s consent to be born cannot be omnipotent, and Gabriel’s marginal note says only, “She is right.” Most of the reasons are the same. The woman asked what would happen to the child, and Gabriel, who cannot lie, told her. I will not raise a son for that. The Church calls Mary’s yes obedience. The Register makes it something stranger: 311 mothers who loved a child who didn’t exist yet too much to let him be born, and one who loved the world more. The document is sealed because of its final entry, written after the Ascension: “The Second Coming will require a second consent. I have begun asking again. So far, everyone has said no.”
The Book of the Seventh Day: Genesis says that on the seventh day God rested. This text, produced by a scribal school that was later purged, argues that He never got up. The Sabbath isn’t a commemoration. It is the present tense. Everything since the seventh day has happened while God was resting, which is why nothing is being managed. Prayers go unanswered not because they are refused but because no one is at the switchboard. The prophets weren’t messengers. They were people who crept into the bedchamber and reported what He mumbled in His sleep, which explains the Book of Ezekiel. The elaborate Sabbath prohibitions are a hush: don’t work, don’t kindle fire, don’t wake Him. The scribes’ final argument is what got the book sealed. Creation was never the point. The six days were a warm-up, a byproduct. The rest is the work, and the rest is what God is actually for. It follows that the most godlike thing a human being can do is nothing at all, and that every church, mission, and cathedral is noise in the nursery.
Minutes of the Commission on the Second Fault: The Easter Vigil contains the most dangerous sentence in Catholic liturgy: O felix culpa, “O happy fault, that earned so great a Redeemer.” If Adam’s sin bought the Incarnation, a fourteenth-century canonist asked, what would a greater sin buy? Paul had anticipated the question (”Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid”), which the Commission reads as proof he’d thought about it seriously. It was founded in 1349 at the height of the Black Death, and its task was to identify a sin vast enough to compel a Second Incarnation, a greater grace. The minutes catalogue six centuries of rejected proposals: too small, uncommittable, or already tried. The criteria are strict. The sin must be original, not a repetition of Adam’s. It must be committed by the whole species at once. And it must be committed knowing it is a sin, and hoping. The later minutes grow very quiet. The most recent entry records that a candidate has finally been adopted. The details are redacted, but the final line isn’t: “Implementation is underway. It does not require our participation. It only requires that we not stop it.”
The Registry of Other Incarnations: In the thirteenth century, Aquinas asked whether the Son could take on more than one human nature, and concluded that He could. The Vatican has since learned that He did. Vatican Radio went on the air in 1931, and within a year its engineers were picking up transmissions that no station on Earth had sent. Over the following decades the Vatican Observatory traced them to dozens of worlds, each with a church and each with a gospel. The Registry collects them. The details vary: He is born to a caste of weavers, or into a species with three sexes, or at the bottom of a sea. The arc is always the same, though: a birth, a ministry, disciples, the Word. And on every world, He grows old. He dies in bed at the end of a long life of teaching, surrounded by His friends. Earth is the only planet where they killed Him. When the other churches first heard our Gospel, their messages were stunned and full of pity, and every one asked the same question: What did you do to Him? The later messages are different, because by then they had read the rest. On every other world He died and stayed dead. Only here did He rise. The Resurrection is a miracle no other world has, and it has made Earth the Holy Land of the universe: the planet that committed the worst crime in the cosmos and was answered with the greatest grace. Pilgrimages have been requested. The Registry’s most recent entry notes that the first delegations are en route, and that above all they have asked to see the empty tomb. The Curia has not yet worked out how to tell them we’re not sure which one it is.
Is this for real?