Vatican City may have fewer than 1,000 citizens and spans only 110 acres, but it also has a multimillion-dollar budget and an unbelievably complex history. Understanding how it all works requires parsing through centuries of religious texts. Is the Vatican confusing and mysterious? Is the pope Catholic? A look behind the scenes:
1. Regular exorcise!Baudelaire once said that "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist." But in modern-day Vatican City, the devil is considered alive and well. The late Pope John Paul II personally performed three exorcisms during his reign, and Pope Benedict XVI expanded the ranks of Catholic-sponsored exorcists throughout the world. In fact, Father Gabriele Amorth, the Church's chief exorcist, claims to expel more than 300 demons a year from the confines of his Vatican office, and there are some 350 exorcists operating on behalf of the Catholic Church in Italy alone. Amorth also teaches bishops how to tell the difference between satanic possession and psychiatric illness, noting that those who suffer from the former seem to be particularly repulsed by the sight of holy water and the cross.
2. Where thieves go to preyWith 1.5 crimes per citizen, Vatican City has the highest crime rate in the world.
It's not that the cardinals are donning masks and repeatedly robbing the bank, it's just that the massive crowds of tourists make Vatican City a pickpocket's paradise. The situation is complicated by the fact that the Vatican has no working prison and only one judge. So most criminals are simply marched across the border into Italy, as part of a pact between the two countries. (The Vatican's legal code is based on Italy's, with some modifications regarding abortion and divorce.) Crimes that the Vatican sees fit to try itself — mainly shoplifting in its duty-free stores — are usually punished by temporarily revoking the troublemaker's access to those areas. But not every crime involves theft. In 2007, the Vatican issued its first drug conviction after an employee was found with a few ounces of cocaine in his desk.
3. The worst confessionsSome sins are simply too much for a local bishop to forgive. While priests can absolve a sin as serious as murder (according to the Church), there are five specific sins that require absolution from the Apostolic Penitentiary. This secretive tribunal has met off and on for the past 830 years, but in January 2009, for the first time ever, its members held a press conference to discuss their work.
Three of the five sins they contemplate can only be committed by the clergy. If you're a priest who breaks the seal of confession, a priest who offers confession to his own sexual partners, or a man who has directly participated in an abortion and wants to become a priest, then your case must go before the tribunal to receive absolution. The other two sins can be committed by anyone. The first, desecrating the Eucharist, is particularly bad because Catholics believe that the bread and wine transubstantiate into the body and blood of Christ. Messing with them is like messing with Jesus. And then, there's the sin of attempting to assassinate the pope. That one's pretty self-explanatory.
The meetings of the Apostolic Penitentiary are kept confidential because they're a different form of confession. The sinner is referred to by a pseudonym, and only the Major Penitentiary, Cardinal Manuel Monteiro de Castro, decides how the sin shall be dealt with. Presumably, a bunch of Hail Marys doesn't cut it.
4. You can read the Pope's mailThe Vatican's secret archives haven't been truly secret since Pope Leo XIII first allowed scholars to visit in 1881. Today, it's even more accessible. Outsiders are free to examine the correspondences of every pope for the past 1,000 years, although there is one catch: Guests have to know exactly what they're looking for. With 52 miles of shelves in the archives, the librarians prohibit browsing.
The most famous existing letter is probably Henry VIII's request that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon be annulled, which Pope Clement VII denied. Henry divorced Catherine anyway and married Anne Boleyn (and four other women), leading to Rome's break with the Church of England. The archives also contain an abundance of red ribbons, which were used to bind 85 petitions from English clergyman and aristocrats.
5. The Pope liked to text messageDuring his tenure, Pope Benedict XVI routinely sent text messages of his homilies to mobile subscribers around the world, and in 2009, the Vatican opened up an official YouTube channel to show various papal addresses and ceremonies. The Vatican even released an iPhone application that contains multilingual versions of the Breviary prayer book and the prayers of daily mass. Most recently, Benedict had
joined Twitter in December, two months before his resignation. The Vatican's enthusiasm for technology isn't limited to cell phones and the internet. It has also added solar panels to the roof of the Pope Paul VI auditorium as part of its commitment to fight climate change.
6. The Vatican has the finest Swiss bodyguards Nowadays, the Swiss have a reputation for pacifism, but back in the 1500s, they were considered an unstoppable military force. Swiss armies were renowned for the their mastery of a weapon called the halberd, a deadly combination of a spear and an axe, and their ground troops were famous for routinely demolishing legions of enemies on horseback. After Pope Julius II witnessed their ferocity in battle 500 years ago, he recruited a few soldiers to become his personal bodyguards. Ever since, Swiss Guards have pledged fidelity to the pope, sometimes dying for the cause. During the sacking of Rome in 1527, for instance, three quarters of them were killed while providing cover for Pope Clement VII to escape.
Today, the hundred or so members of the Swiss Guard spend most of their time bedecked in Renaissance garb, twirling their halberds in ceremonies or manning checkpoints around the Vatican. When the Guards are actually protecting the pope, they wear plain clothes and carry distinctly modern weapons.
7. The Mafia dipped into the collection plateIn The Godfather: Part III, a shady deal between the Mafia and the Vatican leads to the murder of the pope. Was this based on a true story? Possibly. On the morning of September 29, 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead, sitting up in his bed, after only 33 days in office. Although Vatican officials claimed the 65-year-old pope died of a heart attack, there was never an autopsy, and at the time, the Vatican definitely had ties to organized crime. Sure enough, in 1982, Vatican Bank president Father Paul Marcinkus resigned from his post after a series of scandals exposed the bank's ties to the Mafia. Eventually, the bank had to repay more than $200 million to its creditors. But Marcinkus was never indicted of a crime, and though he was suspected of being involved in several mysterious deaths, including Pope John Paul I's,
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin, opening the sores; hope has died in Mr Orwell's wintry mind, and only pain is known. I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down. The faults of Orwell as a writer - monotony, nagging, the lonely schoolboy shambling down the one dispiriting track - are transformed now he rises to a large subject. He is the most devastating pamphleteer alive because he is the plainest and most individual - there is none of Koestler's lurid journalism - and because, with steady misanthropy, he knows exactly where on the new Jesuitism to apply the Protestant whip... ...Mr Orwell's book is a satirical pamphlet. I notice that some critics have said that his prophecy is not probable. Neither was Swift's Modest Proposal nor Wells's Island of Dr Moreau. Probability is not a necessary condition of satire which, when it pretends to draw the future, is, in fact, scourging the present. The purges in Russia and, later, in the Russian satellites, the dreary seediness of London in the worst days of the war, the pockets of 19th-century life in decaying England, the sordidness of bad flats, bad food, the native and whining streak of domestic sluttishness which have sickened English satirists since Smollett - all these have given Mr Orwell his material. The duty of the satirist is to go one worse than reality; and it might be objected that Mr Orwell is too literal, that he is too oppressed by what he sees, to exceed it. In one or two incidents where he does exceed, notably in the torture scenes, he is merely melodramatic: he introduces those rather grotesque machines which used to appear in terror stories for boys. In one place - I mean the moment when Winston's Inquisitor drives him to call out for the death of his girl, by threatening to set a cageful of famished rats on him - we reach a peak of imaginative excess in terror, but it is superfluous because mental terrorism is his real subject
This week I visited BB pal Kirsten Anderson's wonderful 
