If the vatican was as evil as Anti Catholics made it to be, then they would have destroyed those documents...
It's like the argument that Bush deliberately "lied" about WMD...if he was as evil as they claimed he was, he would have planted WMD...heck, at the time of the invasion, they were claiming he planned to "plant" WMD...
Catholics have a long varied history...but remember, most of the classical books you read were copied and kept in monasteries. Catholics figure that the truth should be pursued because God is truth, and we have nothing to hide...which is why many anti Christian documents are still in existence in the Vatican libraries.
thinking that a routine execution of a minor troublemaker in a minor province of a large empire would be noted in the archives of Rome is a bit too much.
One emperor actually examined Christianity by importing some distant relations of Jesus, and found them to be mere peasants. If Jesus didn't exist, how could he have done this?
And Many Romans found the laws persecuting Christians absurd... Suetonius (?Sp) remarked on Nero's torturing of Christians ...Pliny the Younger being told that according to law, he has to prosecute loud mouth Christians, but being instructed not to look too vigorously for them, since they rarely caused trouble...
I'm not accusing Catholics of being evil.
But I have always believed that if we really knew the truth about all things, it would be quite a different than what we have been taught and normally believe.