"The Vatican Secret Archives: the archives of the Pope, custodian of the historical memory of Peoples" the Report by Alejandro Mario Dieguez

On April 8, the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue and the Master's programme "Philosophy and History of Religion" organized a meeting with a research fellow of the Vatican Secret Archive

In his report, Alejandro Mario Diegues focused on some of the most important documents of the Vatican archive, paying special attention to those of them that are directly related to Russia.
The Vatican Secret Archives were founded in 1612 by Pope Paul V and were opened to researchers by Pope Leo XIII in 1881. Nowadays, the Vatican Archives are consulted by more than a thousand scholars every year, coming from 60 nations and with no-one being excluded on grounds of their religion.The name they bear (“secret”) and their almost 70 kilometers of documentation frequently attract considerable popular curiosity, specially on the part of those who expect to find in the Archives the explanation for every kind of “paranormal enigma”. In actual fact, the “treasures” of the Vatican Archives are very different: they are those which are the reflection of more than 800 years of the continuous history of humankind.

The event was managed by Leonid Luks - the academic supervisor of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue.