The Vatican is digitizing thousands of rare and important manuscripts

Talk about long overdue. The Vatican, which maintains one of the oldest, most comprehensive, and most well preserved collections of ancient texts in the world, is finally turning to technology. And far from simply being the appeasement of a liberal Pope, this initiative could actually bring with it the most traditional teachings of the Catholic Church — and a whole lot of secular history, too. I don’t care what you think of religion (really, I don’t), if you don’t think this story is interesting then you are simply boring. The Vatican is about to start digitizing tens of thousands of the rarest and most impactful books in human history. The thing about any organization as old and large as the Catholic Church is that, over time, it has an incredible reach and access. Yes, the Vatican archives contain rare manuscripts by important Christian figures, but they also have rare Chinese scrolls collected by early papal explorers, working documents confiscated from early scientists (but, endearingly, still preserved for the ages), and even ancient, illustrated versions of non-Christian holy texts.