Holy Secrets (The Secret Archives of the Vatican - Maria Luisa Ambrosini and Mary Willis)

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Product:	The Secret Archives of the Vatican - Maria Luisa Ambrosini and Mary Willis
Date:	03/08/00 (52 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brings across the richness of Church history well.

Disadvantages: Some of the reasoning seems weak.

A very enjoyable book, marrying the history of the Catholic Church with that of the Vatican Archives very happily. It's annoying in places: for example, it tries to partly excuse the practice of castrating young boys for the Vatican choir by asking what current practices will be regarded with equal horror in a century's time: this ignores the very strong possibility that the castration would be seen as far worse than current practices, quite besides seeming to assume that moral values are strictly relative to time and place, which is surely not a position to be espoused by someone who seems to be a fairly conservative Catholic. There's some mealimouthedness about Galileo and Bruno as well.

Outnumbering such passages, however, are dozens of wonderful little historical sketches and vignettes: the monks of Western Ireland who cast themselves off into the Atlantic in coracles with a few days' supply of food and water only, and the possibility that the almost unique wheel on an Incan child's toy was the work of one of these; the Emperor Heliogabalus racing an elephant-drawn quadriga on Vatican Hill; the scarlet-edged bindings of Napoleon's L'Infer in the Bibliothèque Nationale; enquiries back home to the let-us-do-your-thinking-for-you office from missionaries to China as to the suitability of a native convert's praying to a crucifix secretly concealed in a shrine; the transfer of the Archives to Paris after Napoleon's Italian victories, and the eventual selling of large quantities of these for cardboard and wrapping paper to Parisian merchants; a fascinating mini-history of Savanarola's Florentine reign (the intolerance and absolute Protestant self-conviction of this are very instructive). Okay, there are also some rather twee sixty-ish speculations about missionaries on Tau Ceti - written a little more aridly or acridly, or a decade or so before (it was first published in 1969), it would have been better - but whatever
you might think about the Catholic Church, the extraordinary richness of its history cannot be denied, and this book brings it across very well.

Summary: