Some say the Pope's Audience Hall was deliberately designed to look like the head of a snake.
Pope Paul VI's Audience Hall was built in 1971, but its bizarre design has just caught the attention of conspiracy theorists in 2017. There has always been a strange curiosity surrounding the hall, but when internet sleuths realized what the Pope's stage looks like from the back of the room, all Hell broke loose. Not only does the Audience Hall contain absolutely no traditional Catholic symbols, the design has people wondering whether the Catholic Church is even run by Catholics anymore.
Before we get to the stunning and bizarre architectural design that everyone is talking about, let's look at the sculpture that rests behind the Pope on the stage where he addresses his audience.
That, according to the artist Pericle Fazzini, is Jesus Christ rising up from a nuclear crater following a holocaust. The sculpture was commissioned in 1965 by Count Galeassi and was meant to depict the threat of nuclear war in the 20th Century. The problem for a lot of conspiracy theorists is that the sculpture, like the entire hall, contains no crucifixes or Catholic symbolism.
Now, if we zoom out to see the stage from the back of the room, this is what we see...
The Pope addresses the audience from a chair that situates him smack-dab in between what clearly appears to be two fangs. The two stained glass windows on each side give the appearance of eyes.
Of course, the hall only takes on the appearance of a massive reptilian, snake-like head from certain angles, but looking directly on from the back of the room, where much of the audience enters, it's difficult to miss the architectural design.
A part of the building stretches outside the Vatican and into Italy. The Hall seats nearly 6,500 people. Conspiracy theorists have made claims that range from the Vatican being overthrown by Satanists, to the Church being the victim of a coup d'etat in the 1960s in which Paul VI was killed and replaced by a doppelganger. Some have even suggested that the Catholic Church is being run by reptilians.
Not much is known about the reasons or intent for the Audience Hall's design, but what we do know is that our eyes aren't deceiving us. Not this time. But, maybe the whole thing is just an accident rather than a deliberate message or symbol embedded into a design.
