mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
into the Quirinal holding hands with Camillo on one side and Prince
Giustiniani on the other, and reconciled them with the pope for the
sake of Christian charity. But Prince Ludovisi’s Spanish dignity had
been severely wounded. He refused to be reconciled and remained on
his estates outside Rome in a huff.
The remainder of 1654 was fraught with strange occurrences. Locusts
ruined much of the harvest. In May the Colosseum began to
rumble and three and a half arches suddenly collapsed. In June fire
raced through the neighborhood near the Barberini Palace, miraculously
stopped in its tracks by an image of the Virgin on a suitcase
maker’s house. In August the heavens themselves seemed to proclaim
the imminent death of the pope. Strange lights were seen in the Roman
night sky, perhaps a rare southerly display of the Northern Lights.
“They say that at night they see fires and splendors in the heavens and a
procession of many lit torches and it seems there is an empty coffin,”
Giacinto Gigli wrote the first week of August. 1
The flames of fear were further fanned by a solar eclipse on August
12 and a lunar one on August 27. Astronomers predicted that the eclipse
of the sun would be the darkest in history, except for the one that occurred
when Christ had died on the cross. Many Romans, fully expecting
to die, went to church and gave confession that day, and stayed there
for the length of the eclipse. If they died on sanctified earth, freshly
confessed, perhaps God would forgive them their sins more readily.
Giacinto Gigli laughed at such superstitions. On August 12 he stayed
home and dined with his family, candles and flints at the ready when
darkness came. But it was “not the complete darkness that had been predicted.
It was not too dark to read or write or do anything else.” He did
not have to light his candles. When the sun emerged fully after three
hours of twilight, thousands poured out of the churches rejoicing.
But there was one person in Rome who did not rejoice. For millennia,
an eclipse was thought to predict the death of a monarch or the end of an
age. “There will be signs in sun, moon, and stars,” Jesus said. 2 And indeed,
the day after the eclipse the pope was wracked with diarrhea that
nothing seemed to stanch. He could not perform any official functions
or even leave the palace due to his constant need for a chamber pot.
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