As a former history Ph.D. student who has done research in the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum (ASV), this is kind of an uninformed announcement, or at least it is not the whole truth. The truth is that the Vatican already has all of its pre-modern manuscripts (e.g., roughly pre-1700) digitized. In fact, you're not allowed to read the original copies of the older manuscripts. Instead, when you request a manuscript they hand you a CD that you then take down a flight of stairs to a room with iMac G4's that aren't connected to the Internet where you can view the jpeg's using some early 2000's image viewer. Anyone with a master's degree and with a legitimate claim to being a researcher can visit the archive after a brief interview, and the application process is perfectly straightforward and made public on the ASV's website in multiple language. There is nothing "secret" about it. (It is "secret" in the Latin sense of the word meaning "apart," because it was established as a central archive meant to replace the decentralized archives that were hitherto held in each of the Vatican's individual departments.)
They could have put the digital copies up a long, long time ago if they had felt like it, but libraries are institutions of power and old attitudes die hard. I don't know what the new digitized copies will add, but I'm guessing that they will be in color and that they will also include the more modern manuscripts in the collection. There are more important reforms that they could divert their resources to, however, like better and more uniform indexing and cataloging. Perhaps these will follow, but even once (if) they put the copies on the Internet the state of the Vatican catalogs is such that it will be extremely difficult for any interested members of the public to approach the source material.
ASV is entirely separate from the Vatican Apostolic Library. The former is the archives of the internal actions of the church; the latter is an archive of publications obtained by the Vatican.
Wow, facepalm. I wish I could downvote my own comment now. I swear, I thought that I read "Vatican Secret Archive" in the original article. Yes, the BAV (Vatican Library) is a separate entity, and I've also researched there. AFAIK, none of the BAV is digitized. Unlike the ASV, there isn't even a microfilm copy of the BAV (about 10% of the ASV's collections were photographed in the 50's and are available in St. Louis, MO). This is actually a monumental step =) Also unlike the ASV, the BAV actually has decent catalogs, meaning that people will be able to actually use the digital collection.
After the Da Vinci Code book & film, people think there's some sort of secret early Christian books that are being hidden and if the world knew about them, Christianity/Catholic church would fall.
But there are loads of early Christian books / "gospels" that survive or rediscovered which are quite different from what's in the bible, and no-one really cares.
For example in 1945, a pile of early books were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt[1], including a Gospel of Thomas[2]. There is a Infancy Gospel of Thomas[3] from ~145CE which claims to talk about Jesus as a child, in which child Jesus uses his supernatural powers to kill children who bully him.
Have the revelations of all this "brought down the Catholic Chruch"?
One of my favorites is the Protoevangelium of James, which tries to deal with the inconsistency of Herod killing all the children of a certain age along with the suggestion John the Baptist was in the womb at the same time as Jesus.
The gospel claims that John's mother, Elizabeth, was just sort of "swallowed" by a mountain for a while, in what always struck me as a pretty hamfisted retcon.
But yeah, these have been available for a long time. Wider readership could possibly erode support for the Church, as people realize just how pedestrian and hamfisted some of the early Church writings were, and they might start to read the gospels more critically. Maybe, maybe not. The barrier to wider readership isn't a conspiracy so much as mass laziness though.
No, but (as I gather it) the bible as it is known today (and for the past millennia) is a whole, and anything extra - gospel of Thomas, the apocryphal books, etc - are seen as just that - extra, non-canonical, and not to be treated as fact / truth or handled during sermons.
> "But there are loads of early Christian books / "gospels" that survive or rediscovered which are quite different from what's in the bible, and no-one really cares."
One of the reasons "no one cares" about a lot of the "quite different" books is that they haven't been established as being written in the same time period. The Gospel of Thomas has the strongest claim to being contemporary with the other gospels, but even that claim is fairly weak; the GoT appears to quote heavily from and allude to the other writings, as if it was written at a later date in response. My own read is that it's from around the time of Marcion.
Many of the other "gospels" appear to have been written much later, and they lack even basic historical credibility. The canonical gospels reference names and locations that are appropriate for 1st century Palestine (lots of guys named Simon, references to specific small villages), as if they were written by people who were at least familiar with the area at that time; many of the other gospels name Jesus, Mary, Jerusalem, and that's it, as if they were written by people from elsewhere who had heard the names but had no firsthand knowledge.
One of the other writings linked on that page (I forget whether it's Ignatius or someone else) actually discusses the gospels, describing the authorship of the four that are in the Bible. Many of the writings, including some that are in the Bible, warn against false teachers and distortions of the gospel.
The net result is that few people are either particularly surprised that there were "quite different" gospels, or are particularly inclined to treat them as credible.
Not hiding. But definitely many, many fun things that I could spend all day telling you about =) Some things just silly (one of my colleagues found a sixteenth-century property document involving a certain "Castel Cazzonelculo" outside of Rome--Google Translate is your friend). Some things more...subversive...
They could have put the digital copies up a long, long time ago if they had felt like it, but libraries are institutions of power and old attitudes die hard. I don't know what the new digitized copies will add, but I'm guessing that they will be in color and that they will also include the more modern manuscripts in the collection. There are more important reforms that they could divert their resources to, however, like better and more uniform indexing and cataloging. Perhaps these will follow, but even once (if) they put the copies on the Internet the state of the Vatican catalogs is such that it will be extremely difficult for any interested members of the public to approach the source material.