The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There is a lot of documented evidence that makes it clear that nobody 'outside' knew what was hidden inside the Villa Torlonia.

Well, that kind of claim is impossible to prove, isn't it?  You mean that "no one outside was supposed to know", perhaps?   

To copy the handwriting of the Carteggio letter written by Marci's scribe

That may be Rich's claim.  It is not something that I consider plausible enough to worry about.  

The threat of continued confiscation was very real. After that, the Vatican were themselves worried that the state might find out that they bought these books which the state considered their property.

I can believe that. (Although, didn't that danger cease to exist at some point? perhaps with Mussolini's treaty of Laterano, in the 1920s?)

However, Wilfrid knew, by 1911 of earlier, that those "confiscatable" books existed, right? And that the books he bought in 1911 came from that collection?  Wasn't that the accepted excuse for his lies about the "Castle in Austria": that he had promised the Jesuits that he would keep the existence of that collection secret?

Even if he had no physical access to them himself, and did not even know where they were being kept, he could get information on the contents of those books -- including how Barschius and Marci had described the "mysterious book" -- through Strickland and other Jesuit contacts. No? 

I can think of the following scenario: some time before 1911, while perusing that collection, Strickland finds Marci's cover letter -- either attached to the VMS, or to some other book, or in the Carteggio, or behind a desk, whatever.  He reads Raphael's claim that some book that Marci sent to Kircher was a Bacon original.  Eventually he tells his friend Wilfrid about it.  Wilfrid thinks he struck gold, becomes determined to find and acquire that book.  He eventually convinces the Jesuits to sell him a bunch of books from that collection, including the letter and/or the VMS.

Is this scenario impossible? 

(There are many possibilities for what happened after that.  In one, for instance, Wilfrid buys the book but not the cover letter, but convinces some very very good friend to discreetly "borrow" it, so that he can stick it to the VMS.  I think this is rather unlikely, but it does not seem to be impossible.  Is it?)

In 1896, ... the Jesuits moved large collections of books out of the German College in Rome to a hiding place in Holland, pretending (again) it was part of the private library of the Father General.

That is new for me.  When were those books returned to Rome?  Could the VMS and/or Marci's cover letter have been part of that transfer?  Is there a catalog of those books?

How could he choose the books that he would buy?

As I wrote before, when investigating the possibility of malfeasance by Wilfrid, we must disregard completely everything that he said or wrote, and every piece of material evidence that he could have forged, adulterated, planted, mislabeled, etc.   And, to be safe, do the the same for anyone who may have been his accomplice.  Such as Strickland...

All the best, --stolfi