From hidden time machines to sinister plots, the Holy See has been the subject of numerous wild allegations throughout history. Join us as we explore the most shocking conspiracy theories surrounding the Vatican, from alleged papal assassinations to secret archives and mysterious financial dealings that have captivated conspiracy theorists worldwide.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00The Vatican's secret archives have captured people's imagination for centuries.
00:05Welcome to WatchMojo.
00:06And today we're looking at the most shocking, most unbelievable conspiracy theories
00:11that the Holy See has been accused of covering up.
00:14The Vatican collected a tax for years.
00:16Eight to ten percent of Catholics in Germany of their payroll went to the church.
00:21Hitler agreed to collect it at the source.
00:24The Catholic Church created COVID-19.
00:27So I started to wonder, well, what about the name Corona?
00:30Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?
00:33So I actually looked up what's the definition.
00:35And on Dictionary.com it brings up 13 definitions.
00:39Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.
00:46And I didn't know what a miter was.
00:47So I copied it and pasted it and then hit images.
00:51While the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic remains mysterious,
00:55it's probably fair to say that it wasn't as part of a sinister plot
00:59to infect the general populace's blood with Satan's DNA.
01:03That is, unless you believe the 2022 viral, quote-unquote, documentary,
01:08Watch the Water, which mostly consists of an interview
01:11between conservative radio host Stu Peters and chiropractor Brian Artis.
01:16So this actually could read the Pope's venom, pandemic.
01:22It also can read crown.
01:24Corona means crown also in Latin terms.
01:28Corona means crown.
01:30Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.
01:34So put that together for me.
01:36In the video, Artis says that with regards to COVID-19 vaccines,
01:40quote, they're using mRNA, which is mRNA extracted from the King Cobra venom.
01:46Said Dr. David Relman, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University,
01:52Peters and Artis' theories are, quote, miles from reality
01:56and indicate a profound lack of understanding in science and medicine and much twisted logic.
02:01I've said this for about a year now that I actually believe this is more of a religious war
02:06on the entire world.
02:09I've been adamant about that, actually.
02:13The message of Christ forever was he's the master healer.
02:18And faith precedes all miracles, not vaccines.
02:2419th century Catholic immigrants to the United States were pawns of the Pope.
02:28Catholic population was very small up until the mid-19th century.
02:32And then we begin to see these waves of Irish Catholic immigrants, German Catholic immigrants.
02:37And then by the late 19th century, Italian Catholics, Polish Catholics,
02:44the largest number of immigrants coming into the United States right now are coming from Latin America.
02:50Have you ever heard the expression, history never repeats itself, but it rhymes?
02:54That rings true to the Know-Nothing Party's attempts to spread anti-Catholic hatred in the mid-1800s.
03:00Supporters of the party feared the increasing influx of Catholic immigration,
03:04particularly from countries like Germany and Ireland.
03:07Catholicism itself was vilified.
03:09It was seen as papist and corrupt and hierarchical and anti-democratic.
03:14Specifically, they feared that Catholic religious leaders would try to instill anti-American beliefs
03:19and their followers and remake the country in its own image.
03:22In fact, they allege that Catholic bishops were handpicked by the Pope to sow chaos on American soil.
03:28The Know-Nothings eventually folded in 1860 due to internal disagreements and infighting over the issue of slavery.
03:35Well, the Know-Nothings is a kind of a nickname that applied to the American Party.
03:39And they get the name from the secrecy that surrounded the organization.
03:42The rule was, if you were asked about the organization, people said,
03:46what is this group you belong to?
03:47You were ordered to answer, I Know-Nothing.
03:50Pope Benedict XVI resigns to stomp out on illicit secret society.
03:55Good morning, I'm George Stephanopoulos in New York.
03:57We are coming on the air right now because Pope Benedict XVI is resigning on February 28th.
04:01That was announced by the Vatican just moments ago.
04:04He will resign on February 28th.
04:06The Pope's saying it himself at a meeting for the beatification, consistency of the beatification of saints.
04:12To put it lightly, the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI was kind of a big deal.
04:18Reigning from 2005 to 2013, he became the first Pope to do so since Gregory XII's forced resignation in 1415.
04:26Aged 85 at the time of the announcement, Benedict attributed his decision to step down from the papacy to his failing health.
04:33So for beneficantism, it's a unique phenomenon.
04:36It's a recent one, and I don't think it's going to be around that much longer.
04:39But it's this idea that Pope Benedict is still the Pope.
04:44Either he's entirely still the Pope and Pope Francis is not.
04:47He's an anti-Pope.
04:48Or there's other versions that might say Pope Benedict is sharing part of the papacy with Pope Francis.
04:54There's various versions to it.
04:56However, that didn't stop fringe conspiracy theorists, dubbed Beneficantists, from claiming that he had, like Gregory before him, been forced out by the damaging Vatican Leaks scandal.
05:07Not only that, but speculation persisted that he'd been ousted by a gay mafia operating within the Holy See that sought to corrupt the Church.
05:15Benedict denied those allegations repeatedly until his December 2022 death.
05:20Aged 95.
05:21The Vatican has announced the death of Pope Benedict XVI at the age of 95.
05:27His health had been worsening in recent weeks.
05:30Benedict served as head of the Roman Catholic Church for eight years until 2013, when he became the first Pope in 600 years to announce his retirement.
05:39Jesuits intentionally sunk the Titanic.
05:43Is there anyone there?
05:45Yes, what do you see?
05:46Iceberg, right ahead!
05:48Yeah, this one might require a bit of context.
05:50For those uninitiated, a Jesuit is a member of the Society of Jesus, a religious order of clerics regular within the Catholic Church, engaged in evangelization efforts worldwide, among other responsibilities.
06:02However, the Jesuits have had a hard time playing nice with the rest of the Church and with secular governments and institutions around the world.
06:09That's led to the dissemination of bizarre, unfounded conspiracy theories about them.
06:13One such theory posits that a 1910 meeting of Jesuit-controlled financiers intended to wipe out their competitors by getting J.P. Morgan to build the Titanic and promptly sink it with major opponents to their agenda on it.
06:26What was that, Mr. Murdoch?
06:28An iceberg, sir.
06:31I put a harder starboard and ran the engines full of stern, but it was too close.
06:35I tried to port round it, but she hid, and I…
06:37Close the watertight doors.
06:39The doors are closed, sir.
06:40Pope John Paul I was murdered.
06:43I replied,
06:45It will be too strange that I can guide myself.
06:52Whoever does not see it.
06:54The blind man took my hand and sighed.
07:02Walk.
07:03It was faith.
07:05Following the 15-year reign of Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I was elected to fill his place on August 26, 1978.
07:14Thirty-three days later, on September 28, the new pope died, likely having suffered a heart attack in the night.
07:21He was succeeded by John Paul II, who held the papacy until 2005.
07:25As slowly the news begins to dawn, and as they see the new Polish pope appear on the central balcony, waiting for him now, the doors open, and he takes the name, as we have heard, of John Paul.
07:42Of course, as with any sudden passing of a notable public figure, wild theories sprouted up almost instantly as to the true fate of the late pontiff.
07:51These primarily stemmed from disagreements about record-keeping in the immediate aftermath of the pope's death.
07:57One major theory is that corruption in the Vatican bank had led scheming archbishops to kill him for financial gain,
08:04with Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, supposedly responsible for administering a fatal dose of poison.
08:24The Priory of Sion was suppressed by the Catholic Church.
08:27The Priory of Sion is a myth, one of the world's oldest and most secret societies, with leaders like Sir Isaac Noon, Da Vinci himself.
08:38The fleur-de-lis is their crest, their guardians of the secret they supposedly refer to as the dark, kind of man.
08:45Don't be fooled by the name, the Priory of Sion was a real organization, not a lost Star Wars subtitle.
08:51However, that's about where the real aspect ends.
08:53French technical artist Pierre Plantard established the Priory as a way to create his own chivalric order, but things went terribly awry.
09:01Plantard claimed that the Priory of Sion intended to benevolently conquer Europe by placing a royal bloodline on thrones across the continent.
09:09The lie spun out of control, and the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail declared that the Priory of Sion was founded by the descendants of Jesus Christ himself.
09:19Eventually, Dan Brown smash-hit The Da Vinci Code, suggested that the Priory of Sion intended to restore the virtues of early Christianity, but had been pushed down by Vatican orthodoxies.
09:31The Priory of Sion protects the source of God's power on earth.
09:37The Vatican is hiding Fatima's third secret.
09:40Her message to the children was much like the message they heard from the angel.
09:44In 1917, Portuguese shepherds Lucia Santos, along with her cousins Jacinta and Franca Marto, claims to have been visited by an apparition of the Virgin Mary at least six times that year, a figure that has come to be known as Our Lady of Fatima.
10:13The figure supposedly revealed three secrets to the children.
10:18Speculation ran wild about the content of the three secrets, which were gradually divulged over the next 83 years.
10:25What are the secrets of Fatima?
10:27The first was a vision of hell, which inspired the children to greater penance for the conversion of sinners.
10:34The second secret was about evangelization.
10:36Although Pope John Paul II released the text of the secret in 2000, conspiracy theorists claim that there is still more that the Vatican hasn't released for fear of stoking mass panic.
10:47Said Pope Benedict XVI, the purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future.
10:53Its meaning is exactly the opposite.
10:56It is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction.
10:59The third secret was kept under wraps until the turn of the millennium.
11:03It included an apocalyptic vision of history as it was about to unfold.
11:09Pope Benedict XVI said it was primarily about the suffering of the church.
11:14Its message then is perennial as much as it was particular.
11:18The Vatican is in possession of a top secret time machine.
11:22Don't you wish you could look back into the past?
11:24That's exactly what Father Pellegrino Irnetti, a Benedictine monk, said he was able to do with his invention, the chronovisor.
11:32According to French theologian Father François Brun, Irnetti claims to have invented a sort of time-travel television, alongside renowned scientists like Enrico Fermi and Werner von Braun.
11:43According to The Guardian, quote,
11:45The time team watched speeches by Mussolini and Napoleon and scenes from ancient Rome, including a performance of Thaestes, a lost play by Quintus Ennius, one of Rome's most important authors, end quote.
11:57Although Irnetti claimed to have watched the final days of Christ and kept a photo as a souvenir, it was later revealed to have been drawn from a postcard.
12:05The Vatican Bank is compromised.
12:08The Institute for the Works of Religion is the main financial center for the Holy See, or at least the most popular.
12:14It employs 114 people and oversees 18,900 accounts, worth over $8.6 billion.
12:21Founded in 1942, the Institute for the Works of Religion, colloquially known as the Vatican Bank, is the official vessel for providing specialized financial services to the Catholic Church worldwide, according to its mission statement.
12:34The secretive nature of the bank's day-to-day functions has enabled grave misdeeds to occur in the shadows, particularly regarding its actions as the main shareholder of the failed Banco Ambrosiano in Italy.
12:46Tensions reached their heights upon the mysterious hanging of God's banker, Roberto Calvi, in 1982.
12:52The bank was accused of money laundering for the Sicilian mob, which was the final straw that led Pope John Paul II to announce major reforms in the Institute.
13:01Calvi was deemed murdered, and theorists tend to link his death to corrupt individuals within the Vatican Bank.
13:07In the Vatican, the Cardinal Angelo Becciu re-inviated to judge the Cardinal Angelo Becciu among the 10 people, pre-lati, financials and vaticanian workers, in the field of the investigation on the purchase of a luxury property in London.
13:21Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos.
13:27You have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.
13:31If you're on your phone, make sure you go into settings and switch on your notifications.
13:35What secrets lie within the Vatican Apostolic Archive?
13:41These are the reading rooms of the Vatican Archives.
13:44Every year, some 1,500 scientists from all over the world come here to do research.
13:50But this is as far as anyone gets.
13:53For the first time, it was possible to shoot the following footage of what lies beyond the reading rooms.
14:00This quote-unquote chamber of secrets is the motherlode for Vatican conspiracy theories, so much so that Pope Francis renamed it from the original Vatican Secret Archive in 2019.
14:11While the name made it a hotbed of speculation, it's worth noting that this might result from a mistranslation from the original Latin, in which secret is more akin to private.
14:21These are the lofts above the west wing of the cortile del Belvedere.
14:26This endless long hall came about under Pope Pius XI and houses, among others, documents of the dataria apostolica and the audiences of the prefecture's archives of the papal room.
14:39However, there is a treasure trove of classified materials at the archive, located in the Vatican City.
14:44As such, speculation has persisted over the years that the archive contains the actual chronovisor, proof of Jesus' enduring bloodline, and even the world's largest collection of adult films and other materials.
14:56Which Vatican conspiracy theories shock you the most?
15:22Be sure to let us know in the comments below.
15:24Did you enjoy this video? Check out these other clips from WatchMojo, and be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos.