Between October 2025 and April 2026, vatican.va replaced without any notice one of the most frequently cited phrases against John Paul II on interreligious matters. The audio and the context support the correction—the Pope said «this land», «esta tierra»—but the scandal is twofold: a Vatican apparatus that disseminated and endorsed for a quarter of a century an erroneous transcription with grave implications, and that same apparatus now correcting it without a press note, without a footnote, coinciding in time with the exchange of communications between Rome and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X on, precisely, these issues.
On 21 March 2000, during his Jubilee pilgrimage to the Holy Land, John Paul II visited Wadi Al-Kharrar, on the Jordanian bank of the river, the place that tradition and archaeology identify as the site of the Lord’s Baptism. After the scheduled prayer and the final blessing, the Pope improvised some farewell words. The transcription that the Holy See published at the time—and that remained unchanged on vatican.va for more than twenty-five years—recorded them as follows:
«May Saint John Baptist protect Islam and all the people of Jordan, and all who partecipated in this celebration, a memorable celebration. I’m very grateful to all of you.»
«May Saint John the Baptist protect Islam and all the people of Jordan». As late as 15 October 2025, as the Wayback Machine capture confirms, the official page still read «protect Islam». In the capture of 15 April 2026, the same document says something else: «May Saint John Baptist protect this land and all the people of Jordan». At some point during that semester, someone at the Holy See altered the text. No editorial note. No communiqué. No erratum. Twenty-six years later.
The matter had been circulating in recent weeks on forums and social media. InfoVaticana has carried out a detailed investigation of the Wayback Machine capture history to narrow down the date of the change, has located the complete video of the ceremony—the live broadcast by EWTN—to compare it with the original audio, and has contacted directly the parties involved in the doctrinal dialogue on these controversies.
The Pope said «this land»
Let us state it clearly: the correction is, in all likelihood, accurate. Anyone who listens to the original recording—the live coverage that EWTN broadcast on that 21 March 2000, which we reproduce below—will note that John Paul II’s diction, with his marked accent (the official transcription itself always preserved the oral error «partecipated»), is compatible with «this land», and the context confirms it: the Pope had just blessed Jordan and its people, he was speaking of a land sanctified by the Baptist, and an invocation that the Precursor protect «this land» is the natural thing in the mouth of a pontiff. That Saint John the Baptist should «protect Islam»—a religion that denies the divinity of the One whom he pointed out as the Lamb of God—was, by contrast, a major theological anomaly.
But the fact that the phrase was a transcription error does not exonerate the Holy See: it aggravates it. Because the error was not the work of a distracted typist one afternoon in March. It was fabricated, translated, printed and upheld by the entire official Vatican apparatus:
The Bollettino of the Press Office of 22 March 2000—still accessible today on press.vatican.va—not only reproduced the phrase in English, but also provided its official Italian translation: «San Giovanni Battista protegga l’Islam, tutto il popolo della Giordania…». The Holy See’s translators, the day after the events and with the audio available, understood and consecrated «Islam».
L’Osservatore Romano, in its weekly English edition of 29 March 2000, published the full text with the phrase, preceded by the note «After the blessing the Pope said».
And the same Vatican newspaper reprinted it that same year in the commemorative volume of the trip, Alle Radici della Fede e della Chiesa (2000, p. 37).
For twenty-five years, that apocryphal phrase caused incalculable damage. It was cited in books, articles and debates as an emblem—alongside the 1999 kiss of the Koran or the meetings in Assisi—of the interreligious ambiguities of that pontificate. It fuelled equally the indifferentism of those who celebrated it as a prophetic gesture and the scandal of those who wielded it against the memory, and even against the canonisation, of the Polish Pope. It was used as ammunition in the sedevacantist controversy and in the traditionalist critique of interreligious dialogue. And throughout all that time, no body of the Holy See—neither the Press Office, nor the Secretariat of State, nor the Libreria Editrice Vaticana—bothered to check the audio and defend the truth of what the Pope had said.
The silent correction, and the timing chosen
The second scandal is the manner. An official archive is not a personal blog: when a historical document is corrected—especially one cited for a quarter of a century in theological controversy—the correction is noted, dated and explained. What the Vatican has done is the opposite: it has silently rewritten the text, trusting that no one would notice? It took the Wayback Machine to document the change.
And the timing is striking. The modification took place between October 2025 and April 2026, that is, in parallel with the exchange of communications between the Holy See and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X, whose doctrinal dispute with Rome concerns, precisely, these matters: interreligious dialogue, religious freedom, the gestures of Assisi and of John Paul II’s pontificate towards Islam. The phrase from Wadi Al-Kharrar had figured for decades in the traditionalist argument.
InfoVaticana has contacted both the Fraternity and the Holy See, and has been able to confirm that this specific issue has not been the direct subject of the communications between the parties. The temporal coincidence, however, deserves to be noted, because it is illustrative: while Rome was in dialogue with those who for decades have pointed out the interreligious gestures of that pontificate, someone discreetly removed from the official archive one of the most uncomfortable pieces of that dossier, on the eve of the crisis that would erupt with the Écône consecrations and the Note of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Whatever the explanation, the lesson left by this episode is not reassuring in either of its two halves: an apparatus capable of attributing to a Pope, for twenty-five years and in three different official media, words he did not pronounce; and that same apparatus correcting history without leaving a trace when it suits. The inevitable question is how many other documents on vatican.va have been retouched without anyone knowing. This time, at least, the captures remain.