Chapter Nineteen

Guarducci Alone: A New Beginning

1978

Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” portrays the elderly adventurer, unloved by his people, summoning his aged crew for the final voyage of their lives:

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, …

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.201

Almost exactly nine years after George Strake’s death, his great friend Pope Paul VI died outside of Rome. Harkening back to his collaboration with Carroll, McGeough, Kaas, Strake, and Guarducci, Paul VI had only one final request. He wished to duplicate Saint Peter’s burial in location and form, being placed directly in the soil without tomb or monument near the location where Peter’s bones had been found. Thus he joined Ludwig Kaas, a short distance from the Graffiti Wall.

Without Paul VI’s protection, Guarducci would now feel the power of Ferrua and the Vatican bureaucracy. Blunt, without tact, a remarkable scientist but a terrible politician, Guarducci was an easy target. For his part Ferrua, after twenty-six years of humiliation, was intent on a harsh and merciless revenge.

Almost immediately, Ferrua fired Guarducci and excluded her from working on or even visiting the Necropolis or the Graffiti Wall.202 After a short time, the bones that had been identified as Peter’s were quietly removed from public view. Guarducci and the bones disappeared from all new Vatican publications. Vatican guides did not mention them or Guarducci.²⁰³ In effect, Ferrua and the Vatican antiquities bureaucracy overruled sub silencio Pope Paul VI’s authentication of Guarducci’s find. It was a bureaucratic sleight of hand worthy of the Medici, cruel and almost certain to eliminate Guarducci from any further Vatican involvement.²⁰⁴ When Guarducci or others wrote of her finds, they were greeted either with silence or ridicule, particularly by Ferrua. Yet this apparent end of aged Guarducci’s brilliant career was in fact only a new beginning. She would strive, seek, find, and never yield.

Truly, this rejection of her twenty-five years of work would have been enough to destroy any normal person. At the age of seventy-six, she was fired and excluded like a criminal from access to the work she had poured her whole life into for more than two decades.²⁰⁵ Her work was denounced as the imaginary ramblings of an ignorant, pious woman. These denunciations came not from outsiders, but from leaders within the Church she so deeply loved. It would be twelve years before she could speak publicly of the deep sadness and hurt inflicted upon her by those within the Vatican bureaucracy. But Guarducci was not broken or finished, even at seventy-six. Ferrua apparently did not understand the immense strength of a determined woman. In fact, Guarducci would prove to be an Italian version of the unsinkable Molly Brown, another Annie Taylor.206 For Guarducci, her end was only a new beginning. Continuing to teach epigraphy and archeology at La Sapienzia University in Rome, Guarducci also repeatedly published or assisted with articles and books defending her finds. Each was met with a savage review attacking her by Ferrua or a surrogate.

Vatican insiders, likely with Ferrua’s approval, even secretly leaked Ferrua’s own report, I-XVII and OSSA-U-GRAF, by giving journalist J. J. Benitez access to the secret archives of the Vatican library.²⁰⁷ While they would not permit Benitez to copy the OSSO, they did allow him to take notes. According to those notes, Ferrua’s report contended, “No serious scientist has paid attention to … the information of the pontiff” and “the apostle [could] have been buried anywhere, and even as Roman law for criminals, thrown in the Tiber or buried in a mass grave.” The report further maintained that Pius XII had been “deaf” to his advisors when he made his 1949 public announcement that they had found Peter’s bones, following the leak by Camille Gianfara. Ferrua’s report asserted there was “no scientific evidence” to prove the bones Guarducci had found were Peter’s. Paul VI was likewise “deaf” to his advisors. All of this had absolutely no effect on Guarducci’s efforts or determination.

Guarducci remained the moving force behind books defending her find, including The Bones of Saint Peter by John Evangelist Walsh, published in 1982.²⁰⁸ However, Ferrua’s power inside the Vatican more than trumped her campaign. The bones remained obscured in storage while Guarducci remained a Vatican nonperson, wholly excluded from the Necropolis. Ferrua periodically led or inspired attacks in which adherents or secularists claimed the bones were a Church-orchestrated fraud, laughable to all experts. The articles relied either on ridicule (for example, focusing on the animal bones found with the Graffiti Wall bones) or on mistaken facts (such as confusing the discredited Ferrua bones with those discovered by Guarducci from the Graffiti Wall).209

Meanwhile, a significant new piece of evidence emerged from an unlikely discipline: architecture. The Romans are often called history’s greatest engineers. When Constantine’s engineers built the original St. Peter’s and the original marble box enclosing the Trophy of Gaius, the Graffiti Wall no longer served any architectural or engineering purpose. It could easily have been removed. Yet they chose to leave the Graffiti Wall intact, enclosing it within Constantine’s monument. This oddity created an inexplicable and maddening imperfection in an otherwise typically Roman, symmetrical structure. Leaving the Graffiti Wall in place for no apparent engineering reason required that Constantine’s architects move their marble box “off center” by eighteen inches (the width of the Graffiti Wall). For hundreds of years, this inexplicable imperfection had been noted with no ready explanation. Really, the only possible explanation is that the fourth-century engineers knew that something very important was contained within the Graffiti Wall.²¹⁰

1990 — Guarducci Builds Her Reputation

The Age of the Great Ideological Tyrannies in Europe melted in Italy into the Age of Fellini, of Gucci, Valentino, Fendi, and Prada. In a stark symbol of the new age of materialism, the fashion house Fendi would acquire Mussolini’s masterpiece of Fascist architecture in Rome, turning it into their headquarters. Handbags and shoes would replace the fasces and portraits of Il Duce. As the churches emptied and a deep, skeptical, secular materialism spread throughout Europe, Guarducci herself became living history — an ancient relic from a different age. Excluded from her work in the Vatican, she moved to other places and sites not controlled by Ferrua or his minions, where her genius was apparent. She authenticated ancient objects and discredited others as forgeries. Among other things, she was deeply involved in discrediting as a fake the so-called Praeneste Fibula — a golden brooch said to bear the earliest Latin inscription.211 This remains a heavily debated issue.²¹²

The Case of the Black Madonnas

She additionally and simultaneously solved two great mysteries relating to the earliest known image of Jesus’ mother, Mary. The first, pre-dating A.D. 438, was known to history as the Madonna Hodegetria.²¹³ The legendary icon remained in Constantinople for more than a thousand years. Since at least the fifth century, this icon of the Madonna and Child was venerated in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the principal church of the Eastern Empire. The vast cathedral, rebuilt twice because of earthquakes, was finally completed in 537 and served for nearly one thousand years as the centerpiece of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Greek Orthodox Church. In 1453, the Turks conquered Constantinople, and the entire city endured three days of looting and pillage, including Hagia Sophia. Along with numerous other artifacts dating back to the dawn of Christianity, the Madonna Hodegetria disappeared (likely pillaged or destroyed). The icon survived only in ancient manuscripts relating its description and special importance to the Greek people. For five hundred years, it was believed forever lost with no surviving copy.

A second seemingly unrelated mystery involved the so-called Black Madonna — now known as the national symbol of Poland. This icon (also known as Our Lady of Czestochowa), housed in the Jasna Gora shrine in Czestochowa, Poland, depicts Mary holding an infant Jesus, both with dark skin. The icon, probably the most venerated object in Poland, had been the inspiration for many Polish victories, including over the Tartars in the 1300s and the Swedes in 1655. It inspired the brave defense of Warsaw in 1920 against the Soviet Communists. Pope Saint John Paul II, the first Polish pope, first pledged his life to the priesthood in the presence of the Black Madonna, which remained a special object of devotion for him throughout his life. As pope, the shrine of the Black Madonna was his principal stop in Poland. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI214 and Pope Francis²¹⁵ have also made this shrine their key stopping place when visiting the country. But where did the famous icon come from, and when? How was it created and by whom? Wild stories circulated about its origin, but the truth seemed to be lost to history — until Margherita Guarducci got involved.

In a sanctuary called Montevergine, located about four hundred feet above the countryside of Campania, Guarducci (now in her mid-eighties) located an ancient icon called the Madonna of Montevergine. It was also a black icon — a virtually perfect copy of Poland’s Black Madonna. Trudging through churches, islands, and ancient hillside monasteries, and conducting extensive research, she proved that the Montevergine icon came to Rome in the seventh century as a gift from the Greek emperor. It was a reverse mirror image copy of the ancient Greek Madonna in the Hagia Sophia at Constantinople. Guarducci was able to prove that the Polish Black Madonna was the very same image as the seventh-century Montevergine icon, and that both were therefore derived from the early Greek Madonna in Constantinople.216 She thus rediscovered for history both the earliest known image of Mary and the origin of Poland’s national symbol.²¹⁷ For this and other feats of genius and incredible work, she was hailed as the Grand Dame of Italian Archeology — a living legend and deeply beloved by many of her students. Slowly opinion and science moved her way, despite Ferrua’s iron grip on the Necropolis and the Vatican’s concern with more pressing matters.

A Tale of Two Statues

For hundreds of years, antiquarians had believed that a statue of Saint Hippolytus at the entrance to the Vatican Library was the oldest Christian statue. Guarducci proved the statue dated only from the Renaissance, circa 1500.²¹⁸ Instead, she found substantial evidence that the large, magnificent bronze statue of Peter in the central nave of the Vatican was the oldest known Christian statue — cast and built for a mausoleum of the Roman emperors of the West in the fifth century, before the collapse of the Empire. Even in her late eighties, Guarducci has continued to solve some of the great mysteries of Christian archeology with rare intensity and energy.

Milan

Although her genius and her intense passion for the truth led her into totally unrelated ancient mysteries and places far away, Guarducci always returned to advocate for the truth of her discoveries below the Vatican. Nothing could distract Guarducci’s persistent confidence that Paul VI had been correct that she had located Peter’s relics. The great battle between Guarducci and Ferrua reached a crescendo in Milan in 1990, twenty years after Paul VI’s pronouncement of the authenticity of her great find, and twelve years after her banishment.

The University of Milan invited the eighty-eight-year-old Guarducci to appear in what would be the final live symposium of her life. She was interviewed by Italy’s most famous expert on antiquities, Federico Zeri, also a major television figure, a Sotheby expert on antiquities, and another great detective in outing fakes. A nearly blind Guarducci was led onto the stage by her sister. Before a packed audience and television cameras, Guarducci gave an impassioned defense of her life’s work. She said she had lived her life following the truth wherever it led, whether or not it corresponded with her faith. She praised the courage of Popes Pius XII and Paul VI in pursuing the truth, while denouncing the insiders at the Vatican who now sought to suppress it.

Zeri then spoke. He quietly said he was not a Christian believer, but for fifty years of his long life he had followed Guarducci’s work, before and after her involvement with the Vatican. Zeri described her as a “diamond bit” seeking the truth. He knew her work to be sound and scientific.219 Unlike her opponents, she did not pursue clientele or ideology, but only the truth. He expressed his opinion based on the scientific evidence that she had indeed found Peter. The audience erupted in cheers.

Margherita Guarducci continued to teach well into her nineties, though she was blind and had to be led into the classroom by her sister. She would recite by heart the ancient Greek inscriptions and texts she had found as long ago as her excavations in the 1920s in Crete. She would also recite by heart many of the Christian inscriptions she found during the Peter excavations. Guarducci would often move her hands in the form of the inscriptions as if remembering when she first encountered them forty to sixty years before. Although blind, she saw them again in her mind’s eye as she had long ago found them. In 1995, at the age of ninety-three, she published her final great defense of her discoveries under the Vatican. Although she was now aged and gray, the last pictures of her show the same detached half-smile of amusement, the same strand of pearls around her neck. When her eyesight vanished entirely after her many years in the gray darkness of Crete and the Vatican, she stayed home with her sister at her apartment in Rome. She did not live to see the new millennium. On September 2, 1999, she died and was buried in a cemetery in Rome, a short distance from Dr. Correnti, the anthropologist who had debunked the Ferrua bones and authenticated the Graffiti Wall bones.

The Vatican took no official notice of any kind of her death.