Rome — Evangelists seeking to promote a positive image of Catholicism often find themselves up against negative stereotypes of the institutional Church, perhaps above all the Vatican—if not the Vatican of reality, then certainly the Vatican of popular imagination and potboiler fiction.
This mythic Vatican is typically styled as rich, powerful, corrupt, and vindictive, often making it difficult to present Rome as the nerve center of a loving and life-giving faith.
In the popular catalog of indictments, perhaps no myth about the Vatican has been as pervasive over the centuries as secrecy—the notion that the Vatican is an ultra-secret, closed world, inaccessible to the outsider and supremely arrogant in its refusal of transparency.
To evangelize effectively means, in part, being able to respond to such impressions. So, let’s unpack the myth—and, to a great extent, that’s exactly what it is, a myth—of Vatican secrecy.
First, let’s stipulate that the Vatican does have its secrets, just as governments, corporations, non-profit organizations and every other type of institution does. It’s also true that the Vatican is more insulated from pressures for disclosure than secular democracies; there are no sunshine laws, no Freedom of Information Act requests, and no subpoenas from an independent judiciary that can compel discovery.
All that notwithstanding, there are a couple basic points to bear in mind vis-à-vis claims of Vatican secrecy.
Secrecy expectations in the Vatican are pretty much the same as in any other institution, from a city hall to General Motors.
First, compared to other centers of global power, the Vatican is considerably less secretive simply because it has much less to keep secret. There’s no data from spy satellites, no classified weapons programs, no human intelligence from undercover operatives, and no trade secrets for industrial products because the Vatican doesn’t have any of those things.
As for the information it does possess, the Vatican is less hush-hush than people tend to believe. For example, despite the ominous-sounding name of the “Secret Archives” (which was rebranded in 2019 to the more accurate “Apostolic Archives”), most of its collections are open to any researcher willing to buy a tessera—more or less the equivalent of a library card.
Second, it is true that the Vatican imposes an official obligation of secrecy upon employees, which falls into two broad categories.
The first is the segreto d’ufficio, or “secret of the office,” a better term for which might be “confidentiality.” Basically, it stipulates that employees must not divulge information for which there’s good reason for keeping confidential—for instance, the names of people who’ve given testimony in sex abuse cases.
The second category is the segreto pontificio, or “pontifical secret,” which covers major decisions affecting the life of the Church—such as not disclosing the contents of a papal document before it’s issued or revealing the name of a new bishop until the appointment is announced.
These secrecy requirements may sound sweeping, but basically they boil down to “don’t talk about the company’s business until it’s finished.” In that sense, secrecy expectations in the Vatican are pretty much the same as in any other institution, from a city hall to General Motors.
If that’s all there is, then where does the secrecy myth come from? In part, it’s this: Yes, the Vatican is often hard for outsiders to understand, but that’s less because it’s secretive than because it’s unique. It’s unlike any other institution most people have ever encountered, and if you want to figure it out, you have to crack its codes.
In general, there are three foreign languages you have to know to make sense of the place: Italian, Catholic, and Vaticanese.
Although the Vatican prides itself on being a truly global institution, in reality it remains one of the most stubbornly monolingual environments on earth. Its daily news bulletin, for instance, is almost exclusively in Italian; most news briefings, conferences, and assemblies are in Italian; and private conversations are generally in Italian, even when there isn’t a single actual Italian in the mix.
Moreover, Italian isn’t just the language of the Vatican, it’s also the culture. Beneath the level of superiors, a massive chunk of the Vatican’s workforce is Italian, and Italian cultural perspectives and instincts dominate its internal ethos.
You also have to “speak Catholic,” meaning you have to know at least a little Catholic theology, liturgy, canon law, spirituality, and Church history, otherwise many of the conversations in and around the Vatican will seem terribly opaque.
Just the other day, a Vatican insider told me he believes that under Pope Francis, the Church is setting the clock back from Centesimus Annus to Rerum Novarum. If you don’t know those are the titles of social encyclicals by John Paul II in 1991 and Leo XIII in 1891, respectively, and have some sense of their contents, that comment won’t mean anything—not because it’s secretive, but because it’s unfamiliar.
“Rome is a city in which everything is a mystery, but nothing is a secret.”
Finally, you have to “speak Vatican,” meaning knowing the argot of the place. You have to know the difference between an apostolic exhortation and a motu proprio, for instance, and between a capo ufficio and an addetto di lavoro, and between a dicastery and an academy. The Vatican is a culture unto itself, and all those terms have meanings that reveal themselves only in context.
To be sure, acquiring a basic fluency in those three foreign languages takes time. The good news, however, is that on the other side of having done so, the Vatican doesn’t really seem that secretive anymore, and you can generally find out most of what you want to know.
Two other notes before leaving the myth of Vatican secrecy behind.
First, even when the Vatican does try to keep secrets, it’s often not very good at it. Remember the two separate Vatileaks scandals, when troves of supposedly secret Vatican documents were leaked to journalists and published in Italian newspapers? Such indiscretions are as much the rule as the exception. As the old joke goes, “Rome is a city in which everything is a mystery, but nothing is a secret.”
Second, if the question is whether the Vatican can and should become more transparent, the obvious answer is yes. It’s been forty years since the late John Paul II said in 1984 that the Vatican should be a “house of glass, where all can see what is happening and how it carries out its mission in faithfulness to Christ and the evangelical message,” and I suspect almost everyone would concur that there’s still considerable ground to cover for that vision to become reality.
The point, however, is that it’s a myth to assert that due to its alleged secrecy, the Vatican is impossible to understand. On the contrary, for anyone willing to discover its culture and learn its languages, it’s surprisingly comprehensible.