ROME — For the almost two decades Paul Weston worked in the Vatican library, he was asked to reveal the truth about the Vatican hiding the Ark of the Covenant, a legend that has had long legs despite having no roots.
“People don’t realize we don’t have it, and never did,” he said, with a child-like joy in his eyes. “But we do have a feather of archangel Gabriel that fell from one of his wings on his flight to Bethlehem and someone brought to the Vatican for safekeeping.”
“An answer fitting to the absurdity of the question, I always thought,” Weston told Crux in a perfect British accent, despite a lifetime in Italy.
His career as a Vatican librarian began almost by chance: After finishing his studies in the Vatican School of Librarianship, he was offered a part-time job cataloguing and systemizing a collection of books on Pop Art given to Pope Paul VI, who had a personal friendship with some of the greatest Italian artists of his time.
“Half way through this task, the prefect was made archbishop by Pope John Paul II,” he said. “As an office, we went to greet him, as you do, at the Sistine Chapel. When my turn came, the archbishop said that this was a ‘great day for the both of us’.”
Weston couldn’t hide his surprise, because though, “sure, it’s good the prefect got promoted,” he didn’t see it as a personally relevant news. Noting his uncertainty, the prefect said: “It’s my first day as an archbishop, and your first day as an employee of the Vatican library.”
And just like that, Weston got the job he never knew he wanted. It was Nov. 1 of “I believe 1983.” A holiday in Rome, he had to tell his now former boss that come Nov. 5 he would not be returning to his teaching position.
Today retired, Weston is an honorary member of Athletica Vaticana, an athletics federation set up in 2019 in a dual effort with the Italian Olympic Committee in hopes that the Vatican could achieve recognition by World Athletics one day.
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A bookworm and a man who truly enjoyed his job, he once met actor Richard Gere, who was doing a tour of the library with the prefect. Not recognizing him, Weston assumed he was an academic, so “I went on talking,” and he left. “The two ladies who were there with me, never forgave me for not introducing them to the actor of Pretty Woman!”
Anecdotes aside, Weston had one of the thousands of jobs in the Vatican that are often considered too small to be significant, but that in reality, actually keep the entire place running. In his case in particular, took one of the world’s greatest libraries into the 21st century.
The library’s website notes that during the term of prefect Father Leonard E. Boyle, 1984-1997, manual cataloguing of printed books was definitively replaced with electronic cataloguing; in the following years, the data contained in the old card catalogues was converted to electronic format. Nowadays, the Vatican Library preserves over 180,000 manuscripts (including archival units), 1,600,000 printed books, about 9,000 incunabula, over 300,000 coins and medals, more than 150,000 prints, thousands of drawings and engravings, and over 200,000 photographs.
Brushed aside in this shortened version of the library’s history was the role Weston and his team played in the entire process. The years Pope John Paul II spent preparing for the Great Jubilee of 2000, this librarian was traveling up and down the United States, exchanging ideas and learning from the handful of libraries that, by 1995, had converted their entire catalogue collected in index cards to an electronic format. It took the team some five years to come up with the perfect system, which of course, was constantly changing as computers made major jumps in processing ability.
Digitalizing the catalogue per se took three years, 125 people – 100 of them working all over the globe – and thousands of floppy-disks, the closest thing to a pen drive 25 years ago. Thanks to their painstaking job, the catalogue can now be reviewed online from anywhere in the world, and no special credentials are needed to do so.
Following this enterprise, Weston was part of the early negotiations with IBM and the University of Rio de Janeiro to digitalize the library’s actual content, particularly the manuscripts, so that those too could be reviewed online. However, some 20 years after being given a Vatican job, he went back to his first passion, that of teaching and “passing on the wealth of experience I had accumulated.”
Speaking about his role as a layman in the Vatican, Weston said it was “very demanding, challenging, and rewarding, because you had all the eyes on you, because everyone thinks there’s a certain standard that comes from the fact that ‘it is the Vatican’.”
“At the same time, the idea was that in providing a service to the users, we had to be up to a standard that people though the Vatican library had to be up to,” he said. “And it was very rewarding, because you know that what you’re doing is not only a reason for personal pride, but it’s something that you are doing for the Church, and also for humanity. “
“As the prefect used to say, we are not the owners of these treasures, but the temporary keepers, because they belong to humanity,” Weston insisted.
Much like the character Indiana Jones, who made the Lost Ark a thing, this librarian spent two decades of his life surrounded by treasures, because the amount of knowledge and experience layered in those shelves tells the story of a big part of humanity.
“We are now what those authors have been over millennia,” Weston said. “And that is something that truly brings home your own existence. It brings you back to the roots of your being, as if you spent your days chatting with your cultural ancestors over a cup of tea.”
Follow Inés San Martín on Twitter: @inesanma
