I defer to your friend's expertise on the subject, but really, the Church isn't trying to hide anything. This was not the case when the ASV opened to the public in the late nineteenth century when in fact the Vatican's hope was that researchers would read their documents and write nice things about the church. These days, however, the ASV is one of Europe's main archives, curated by respected professionals. There is no hidden agenda.
A more likely reason why your friend had such a hard time was Napoleon, who made a policy of transferring all the grand archives of the countries he conquered back to Paris. An enormous number of documents were lost during the transfer and the eventual repatriation, somewhere around one third. Records relating to Galileo's trial were lost, for example. Of course, the most likely reason that your friend and I had difficulty is just the incredibly user-unfriendly systems of cataloging that the ASV uses.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for the Vatican, I should also point out that the fact that these archives are open at all is remarkable. These aren't a national archive, for instance, where the state maintains records as a service for its citizens and to keep the nation's heritage alive. The ASV is quite simply the dumping ground for the Vatican's bureaucracy over the past 1700 or so years. They don't owe this to anyone.
It would be like if Microsoft pooled all documents generated by HR, marketing, product development, engineering, legal, and its other divisions, physically dumped them in various containers over the centuries, and one day in the year 3749 A.D. announced that the public could rifle through the papers if they wanted to. The immediate impetus would be to demonstrate that Office 3750 was not in fact part of an anti-competitive plot to secure a monopoly on productivity software sold in Alpha Centauri and Venus. But by 3800 A.D., that original purpose would have been long forgotten and researchers, regardless of which office suite they use, would be able to mine the archives for anything that anyone working for Microsoft ever said, did, or observed during the work day, so long as those thoughts were captured on some format that eventually made its way to paper.
...to make the analogy more complete, let's also assume that most of the other major institutions and their archives have been wiped out by this time. What ends up happening, then, is that researchers in 3749 A.D. dig through MS' archives for glimmers of things like what people ate during the day in 2014 or what sort of music they listened to.
A more likely reason why your friend had such a hard time was Napoleon, who made a policy of transferring all the grand archives of the countries he conquered back to Paris. An enormous number of documents were lost during the transfer and the eventual repatriation, somewhere around one third. Records relating to Galileo's trial were lost, for example. Of course, the most likely reason that your friend and I had difficulty is just the incredibly user-unfriendly systems of cataloging that the ASV uses.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for the Vatican, I should also point out that the fact that these archives are open at all is remarkable. These aren't a national archive, for instance, where the state maintains records as a service for its citizens and to keep the nation's heritage alive. The ASV is quite simply the dumping ground for the Vatican's bureaucracy over the past 1700 or so years. They don't owe this to anyone.
It would be like if Microsoft pooled all documents generated by HR, marketing, product development, engineering, legal, and its other divisions, physically dumped them in various containers over the centuries, and one day in the year 3749 A.D. announced that the public could rifle through the papers if they wanted to. The immediate impetus would be to demonstrate that Office 3750 was not in fact part of an anti-competitive plot to secure a monopoly on productivity software sold in Alpha Centauri and Venus. But by 3800 A.D., that original purpose would have been long forgotten and researchers, regardless of which office suite they use, would be able to mine the archives for anything that anyone working for Microsoft ever said, did, or observed during the work day, so long as those thoughts were captured on some format that eventually made its way to paper.
...to make the analogy more complete, let's also assume that most of the other major institutions and their archives have been wiped out by this time. What ends up happening, then, is that researchers in 3749 A.D. dig through MS' archives for glimmers of things like what people ate during the day in 2014 or what sort of music they listened to.