It's Sunday

To mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of this remarkable institution, the Vatican and the City of Rome have assembled an extraordinary exhibit of materials from the Secret Archives, Lux in Arcana (“Light in Mysterious Places”), which can be enjoyed at the Capitoline Museum in the Piazza del Campidoglio until September 9, and sampled online at www.luxinarcana.org. If good fortune brings you to La Città before September 9, reserve at least three hours to savor an assemblage of primary historical materials of a magnitude never before exhibited in one place, and unlikely to be shown again in the foreseeable future.

Some of the documents — written on such various materials as parchment, vellum, paper, and birchbark (the medium for an 1887 letter from the Ojibwe Indians to the pope, “the Great Master of Prayer, he who acts in Jesus’s stead”) — bring to mind epic moments and historical turning points across ten centuries: the handwritten records of Galileo’s trial before the Inquisition; Pope Alexander VI’s bull Inter Cetera (which might be translated, “Among Other Things”), dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal; the 1530 petition from dozens of members of England’s House of Lords, asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that the Tudor king might marry Anne Boleyn; Gregory XIII’s calendar of 1582 with the “missing ten days” in October, an excision that rectified the inaccuracies of the earlier Julian calendar; a letter from Mary Queen of Scots to Sixtus V just before her execution; Polish king John III Sobieski’s 1683 letter to Innocent XI, reporting his victory over the Turks at the Battle of Vienna; letters from Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln to Pius IX during the U.S. Civil War.
  National Review

The Vatican has enough money to create an unparalleled museum where people from all over the world throughout the ages could witness these and other remarkable artifacts held in its vaults. And they could make another fortune in ticket sales. So why keep them “secret”? As if I didn’t know the answer to that. Charlie Pierce rather precisely and concisely states the situation:

Make no mistake. I would sell your grandmother to the Somali pirates for a half-hour in there, and I know actual historians whose price would be higher than that.
  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.