Man Who Tried To Enter Forcefully the Vatican With His Car Wanted To Tell His Visions of the Devil to the Pope

Simone Baldovino, a 40-year-old man with a criminal history related to drugs, spent the night in the Vatican’s “jail.” However, after midday on Friday, May 19, it was made known that he had been taken to a hospital near the Holy See. “This afternoon, at the end of his interrogation by the Magistrate, in the presence of his trusted lawyer and once his state had been verified, the driver of the car who entered the Vatican last night illegally was taken to the Psychiatric Department of the Holy Spirit Hospital in Sassia to receive imperative medical treatment,” stated the Holy See Press Office. 

From the moment of his detention on Thursday night, it was obvious that he was “in a serious state of psychophysical impairment.”

The question many are asking is why and for what reason Simone Baldovino wanted to enter Vatican City. He was not carrying arms or, for that matter, a bomb. According to several of the media, he wanted to tell Pope Francis the visions he had had of the devil. 

In fact, Baldovino’s psychophysical state led him not only to pass through two security controls (that of the Swiss Guards and the Vatican Gendarmerie), but also to dodge a shot and leave open mouthed the military men posted outside Saint Anne’s Gate, on the border between the Vatican and Italy, and to arrive at the very place where Heads of State and Government arrive that the Pontiff receives: Saint Damasus; courtyard, a few steps from the Secretariat of State. 

ZENIT consulted a demonologist who participated recently in a Course for Exorcists, offered by the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, who explained that, “regardless of this case and taking the reflection to a more general ambit, although it’s prudent to refer a person with such impairment to a psychiatrist, it cannot be discarded that someone with a history of drug addiction is susceptible to possession or visions.”