00.00 | Title Inserts | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
00.50 | narrator | A daily ritual. Every morning at seven the night watch of the Swiss Guards open the magnificent bronze doors that form the main entrance to the Vatican. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
01.05 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | The Vatican is the only state in the world to which access is routinely closed at night. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
01.16 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Most people never get a chance to see life in the Vatican from the inside. For centuries, the papal residence has been a world shrouded in mystery. |
01.43 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | 19 April 2005 <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
02.04 | Cardinal | “I announce to you tidings of great joy: we have a Pope!” <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
02.40 | narrator | April 2005 ushered in a new chapter in ecclesiastical history. Joseph Ratzinger was elected to fill the highest office in the Roman Catholic Church. Not since Hadrian the Sixth almost 500 years ago had this post been held by a German. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
03.01 | narrator | He chose his new name in memory of Saint Benedict of Nursia and of Benedict the Fifteenth, who has gone down in history as a pope of peace. Joseph Ratzinger had become Benedict the Sixteenth. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
03.16 | Ratzinger | “To succeed the great Pope John Paul the Second, the cardinals have chosen me, a simple and humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord.” <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
03.46 | narrator | On the day after his election, Benedict the Sixteenth was taken to his new workplace in the apostolic palace. Tradition requires all the offices and private chambers of a deceased pope to be sealed until the election of a successor. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
04.19 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | The rooms of course were very familiar to Pope Benedict. As one of the closest confidants of John Paul the Second, he would come and go here all the time. And yet: even after decades in leading positions within the Church, there was much that was new and unfamiliar. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
04.42 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Even signing with the papal name had to be practised. But from now on, the person and the office were inseparably united. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
05.00 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Before his election as Pope, Joseph Ratzinger was the most influential of the cardinals in the Roman Catholic church. For 23 years, he had been Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith, and thus had a major voice in determining church doctrine. No one knew the Vatican so well as he did. Shortly before his election as Pope, he allowed outsiders an insight into everyday life behind the walls of the ecclesiastical state. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
05.27 | Ratzinger | On the whole I would say that the Vatican and the administration that goes on here is not so very different from or more mysterious than a major corporate or political administration. It is true that when making our decisions we have to keep the whole of history in mind, so to speak, and that for us the past is not simply past. We have to remember that. But it’s not as if we were continually rummaging through secret archives. Legal continuity is there in present-day law books and in the statements on doctrine. To that extent I would say that I can’t see any dark secrets to which only a few have access behind the scenes. 06.17 <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
06.21 | narrator | Tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world visit the centre of the Roman Catholic church every day. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
06.30 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Few realize that once in St Peter’s Square they have left the Italian state behind and are now on Vatican territory. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
06.45 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | The earthly state consists of just a small piece of land, and has just a few hundred citizens. The heavenly state that is governed from here, though, encompasses about a billion Roman Catholics worldwide. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
07.01 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | If the Vatican were a corporation, it would be the oldest business on earth, and with more than a million employees, bigger than any other multinational. Not to speak of a company headquarters of incomparable splendour. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
07.21 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Just a few steps away from St Peter’s Square is the seat of the Congregation of the Faith, better known by its old name, the Holy Roman Inquisition. It’s the most important institution of the Holy See. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
07.39 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | For more than two decades it was led by the man who is now Pope. In this capacity, he monitored the faith of the Roman church. It is an office than can only be exercised by a theologian of the highest standing. Even as a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger was known as a “Mozart among the theologians”. But in spite of the many years in Rome, he never broke the ties with his Bavarian homeland. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
08.10 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Joseph Ratzinger was born in the small town of Marktl am Inn in Bavaria in 1927. He was the youngest of three children of a policeman. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
08.24 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Like his elder brother Georg, he studied theology and in 1951 was ordained priest. Scholarship has remained his passion to this day. At the age of 30 he was already Professor of Fundamental Theology and Dogmatics in Tübingen. He has also held teaching posts in Freising, Bonn, Münster and Regensburg. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
08.48 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | During the Second Vatican Council, he wrote a pro-reform speech for the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings, which aroused considerable attention. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
09.00 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | After just four years as archbishop of Munich and Freising, he was summoned to Rome, the centre of power, in 1981. John Paul the Second appointed him Prefect of the Congregation of the Faith. His attitudes were often controversial, especially in the matters of clerical celibacy, contraception and the ordination of women. The leadership of the church faces a constant challenge, namely to maintain the Christian tradition while at the same time reacting to the values of a modern society. It’s a balancing act that can quickly lead to unpopularity. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
09.45 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | As head of the Congregation of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger was also the keeper of one of the treasures of church history: the archives of the Inquisition. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
09.56 | Ratzinger | I often used to come down here, but these days there’s too much going on. I would very much like to take a longer look at all this, but I can’t. 10.08 <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
10.12 | narrator | Leafing through the first printed index of prohibited books awakens memories of the dark chapters in the history of the Church. The list of banned authors features many prominent names, for example Martin Luther. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
10.30 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Hundreds of thousands of Inquisition trial records are stored here. They document the controversial procedures of an institution which saw its function as upholding Christian doctrine. They are silent witnesses of dramatic errors, contradictory censorship rules and the persecution of those with different opinions. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
10.52 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | The most notorious injustice: Galileo was forced to recant his conviction that the earth revolved around the sun. In 1992, 350 years after his death, the Pope apologized. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
11.09 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Until a few years ago, even leading Church dignitaries were refused access to these documents. It was only Cardinal Ratzinger who opened them up to scholars, leading to numerous new insights. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
11.25 | Ratzinger | Today we can say that the justice that was administered here was no worse, indeed it was better, than the worldly justice of the time. Errors such as the case of Galileo are clear enough. But what we have found out above all is that the Vatican was not responsible for the great witch-hunts. On the contrary, it reined them in and tried to introduce proper legal structures here too. In practice, this meant it prevented alleged witches being put to death. It’s a many-sided phenomenon which can’t be dealt with in one sentence. It’s an attempt to defend the continuity of values and at the same time to do people justice, and that’s a difficult task, the complicated problem that we were concerned with here. 12.14 <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
12.21 | Narrator | Upholding the “continuity of values” is one of the most important tasks of today’s Pope. It is said that the Roman church thinks in terms of centuries. But even that may be an understatement. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
12.36 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | In Roman times, the site of today’s Vatican was occupied by an arena for chariot races. Under Emperor Nero, it became a place of execution for countless Christians. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
12.53 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | What was then the adjacent cemetery is now an ancient necropolis just a few metres below St Peter’s Basilica. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
13.05 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | There is much to suggest that St Peter, prince of the Apostles, the Rock on which Jesus wanted to build his Church, was buried here after suffering his martyr’s death. But historians cannot be absolutely certain. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
13.22 | Ratzinger | St Peter cannot now say: “I’m buried in there,” can he? Looked at purely historically, there’s scope for discussion. On the other hand, in my opinion the convergence of probabilities, with the whole context of the cemetery that was removed to build the basilica, and all the details that we have been able to see, is so great that I would say that it’s a normal historical certainty – or at least a high historical probability – that justifies our saying that Peter is buried there. 13.58 <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
14.02 | narrator | Above the excavations is the Confessio, and above that, the Pontifical Altar. So Peter’s grave really does form the foundation of St Peter’s. In the words of the bible, the rock on which the Church is built. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
14.26 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | St Peter’s basilica is a total work of art. The most important artists and architects of the day worked on it for 120 years. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
14.46 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | It was Pope Julius the Second who in 1506 gave the order to demolish the first basilica, which had become dilapidated. Donato Bramante was commissioned to build the new church, but by the time of his death only the four central pillars had been erected. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
15.06 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | Nor did Michelangelo live to see the completion of the enormous 136-metre high dome that he had planned. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
15.24 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | With the nave built by Carlo Maderno, the basilica acquired its definitive form. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |
15.37 | <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> | After the consecration in 1626, four more decades passed before the layout of St Peter’s Square was complete. Bernini saw his colonnades as arms spread out to embrace all the faithful. <!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--> |