2023-08-26 03:42:21
Pope John Paul I (1912 – 1978) greets the crowds gathered in St. Peter’s Square following his first blessing, on August 27, 1978 (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
On August 26, 1978, twenty days following the death of Paul VI at the age of 81, the smoke released following the Vatican conclave confused the 300,000 faithful gathered in Saint Peter’s Square. The gaseous wisps that frayed in the Roman sky, rising from the Sistine Chapel, was grey, bordering on black. Some thought a bad omen. It had to be white, because a new Pope, the 263rd, had just been elected: Albino Luciani, Cardinal Patriarch of Venice. A while later, the confirmation came. On the balcony of Saint Peter’s Basilica, the cardinal protodeacon announced the Habemus Papam and Luciani appeared, John Paul I, the first pontiff in twenty centuries to adopt a compound name, in honor of his predecessors (John XXIII and Paul VI). . No one imagined, in the midst of the parishioner’s clamor, that he was going to die just 33 days later, at the age of 65, or that this year would be the year of the three Popes (John Paul II was elected on October 16) or that suspicions regarding a alleged religious assassination would spread like smoke from smoke.
The body of Juan Pablo I was found in his bed during the early morning of September 29. The official sources of the Holy See reported that he had died in his sleep of a heart attack, and that he had been found by his private secretary, John Magge, which was false, because a nun had discovered the lifeless body. It was announced that no autopsy would be performed: a hiatus through which numerous conspiracy theories, with and without foundation, would enter. On September 30, some 100,000 people, who lined up for hours, said goodbye to John Paul I in the Clementine Room of the Apostolic Palace. Later, the remains were transferred to the Sistine Chapel in an impressive funeral procession; The body, embalmed, was exposed before the altar of the Resurrection of the basilica until October 4, when the funeral was celebrated and the coffin was deposited in the Vatican grottoes.
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bino Luciani (1912-1978) was ordained a priest in 1935, created a cardinal in 1973, and elected pope in August 1978 following the death of Paul VI, but passed away 33 days later (Photo by David Lees/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
The hypotheses of the assassination were diverse, but they converged on the supposed motive: John Paul I had the firm intention of auditing the accounts of the Institute for the Works of Religion, better known as the Vatican Bank, following a series of reports that related him to coups. State, tax evasion and business with the mafia and the P2 Masonic lodge, founded by Licio Gelli.
During the early morning of September 29, the nun Vincenza Taffarel left, like the thirty-two previous mornings, a cup of coffee in the sacristy for the new Pope to drink when he got up. After a few minutes, at 5:20 am, she noticed that the cup had not been touched. She then she entered the papal bedroom. The bedroom light was on, probably from the night before. But, at this point, Sister Vincenza herself bifurcated her story in two directions. She first stated that she had found the Pope, clothed, on the bathroom floor, where she had vomited. Later, that the body of the pontiff was on the bed, slightly inclined, with his glasses on, surrounded by disordered papers. Beyond the inexplicable double testimony, the Vatican authorities considered it inappropriate for it to be known that a woman had entered the papal bedroom. With the supposed intention of avoiding rumors, she ordered herself to omit that fact or, rather, to falsify it.
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The official version was that Luciani had felt bad on the night of the 28th and that one of his advisors, Diego Lorenzi, advised him to consult the doctors. But the Pope, according to this account, did not want to disturb or alarm anyone. “Before going to bed, he sent for the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Colombo. They discussed the succession in Venice, a post he had left vacant. They had a long conversation, disagreed regarding the candidate. Later, the Pope retired to his room, and little else can be known. He suffered such a severe heart attack that he didn’t even have time to ring the bell next to his bed,” said Giovanni Maria Vian, Church historian, former director of “L’Osservatore romano” and author of the book “John Paul I, the Pope without a crown. Life and death of John Paul I”.
The two previous pontificates, that of John XXIII and that of Paul VI, had been of changes and renewals in the Church, especially since the Second Vatican Council. In 1978, the death of Paul VI tensed the struggle between conservative and progressive sectors. Those were troubled times in Italy. On March 16, Aldo Moro, former prime minister and leader of the Christian Democracy, had been kidnapped in a coup commando of the Red Brigades in which five of Moro’s guards were massacred. Negotiations between the new government, led by Giulio Andreotti, and the terrorists, who offered to release Moro in exchange for the release of imprisoned comrades, did not prosper. The tension continued until the brigadistas murdered Moro. His body appeared in the trunk of a Renault 4 on May 9. The upheaval included shady political dealings and illegal actions by urban guerrillas, the mafia, and intelligence services.
The death of John Paul I – the son of a socialist bricklayer – occurred in a world divided by the Cold War, plagued by acts of espionage and conspiracies. “The fact that John Paul I died a month following being elected is very impressive. From a supernatural perspective it leads to reflection. If you are a believer, you think regarding how God might have allowed the vicar of Christ to die. But from another point of view it is impossible not to think that this death was caused by dark forces. And so everything leads to inevitable speculation. It is a very turbulent period in the history of the Church and of the world”, wrote the Spanish author Juan Manuel de Prada.
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he Italian statesman and prime minister Aldo Moro (1916 – 1978), following his kidnapping by left-wing terrorists from the Red Brigades, who later assassinated him (Photo by Central Press/Getty Images)
Rightly or not, every detail regarding the behavior of John Paul I opened up in a delta of suspicion. His secretary Magee (who in 2009 had to resign from the bishopric of the diocese of Cloyne, Ireland, accused of covering up pedophile priests) declared that, already in the exercise of his pontificate, the Pope did not give too much precision regarding future actions of the. “Luciani kept repeating that this or that would be done by the next Pope.” He argued that, for example, when he was asked regarding his meeting with the bishops of Ibero-America in Puebla, Mexico, scheduled for March 1979. There he had to pronounce on Liberation Theology, which proposed the option for the poor, like many political movements. of the time. Another oddity: according to Magee, Juan Pablo told him a few days before his death: “I will leave and the one who was sitting in the Sistine Chapel in front of me will take my place.” The phrase was understood as a reference to Karol Wojtyla, future John Paul II, Polish Pope, who was facing Luciani during the August 1978 conclave.
Other strange events, born at the crossroads of the bipolar world and religion, made the brief papacy of John Paul I rarefied. On September 5, 1978, he received Boris Rotov, Nicodemus, representative of the Russian Orthodox Church in Leningrad, at the Vatican, which some sources later linked to the KGB. As soon as they left to speak in private, Nicodemo, 49, collapsed in front of John Paul I and died, supposedly of a heart attack, as would happen shortly following with the Pope. With the end of Nicodemus, Metropolitan Archbishop of Leningrad, the negotiations between the Vatican and representatives of the Soviet Union also came to an end. According to some versions, Nicodemus had participated in secret negotiations, in the 1960s, with the intention of having some kind of interference in the Second Vatican Council in exchange for the Catholic Church not condemning atheistic communism during those assemblies.
From a proletarian family, promising heaven for the poor, John Paul I was a staunch defender of Opus Dei. Highly educated, a persistent reader, a notable talker, an affable man -several of the pseudonyms he was given were linked to his smile-, he represented a kind of hinge between those who did not want an extremely conservative Pope nor one with sympathies for the left. His audacity, in fact, was not going to be ideological but more reckless: wanting to clarify the Vatican accounts. That intention dragged a story. While he was Patriarch of Venice, in 1972, the Vatican Bank had sold to Banco Ambrosiano, owned by Roberto Calvi, the Banca Católica del Veneto, which used to grant low-interest loans. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican administration, authorized the operation. Against all logic or – depending on how you look at it – with all logic, Luciani was not consulted. The ninguneo was not a good omen and there was a deep sea.
In 1978, the Bank of Italy produced a report warning regarding suspicious movements of Banco Ambrosiano funds and promoted an investigation into Calvi’s financial empire (whose body was found hanging from a London bridge in 1982, following the scandalous collapse of the the entity that managed). However, the inquiries around the so-called “bank of the priests” got bogged down. First, Emilio Alessandrini, a Milan judge investigating this case, focused on illegal financial maneuvers involving businessmen, religious, politicians, gangsters and members of P2, was assassinated. John Paul I died shortly following. And at the age of four the Banco Ambrosiano collapsed, dragging down other entities linked to the Vatican. The judicial accusation included the diversion of secret funds to the Polish union Solidaridad and to the Nicaraguan Contras, among others. The hypothesis that John Paul I had been poisoned gained strength. In time, the Vatican scandal would find its way into films like Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather III.”
Pope John Paul I is draped in a woolen cloak by Cardinal Felici, dean, during a service in St. Peter’s Square, Rome, on September 29, 1978 (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
In 1985, the writer and researcher David Yallop, nicknamed “the seeker of justice”, affirmed that John Paul I had been assassinated for his intention to clarify Vatican finances. In the book “In the name of God”, he maintained that the Pope had been poisoned with digitalis -used for cardiological treatments, but toxic and potentially lethal- which was supplied to him by order of Licio Gelli. He also accused various ecclesiastics of being his accomplices: Marcinkus, at the time in charge of the Vatican Bank (and who, following dodging many complaints throughout his life, died in Arizona in 2006, at the age of 84); Cardinal John Cody, Archbishop of Chicago, and Cardinal Jean Villot, Vatican Secretary of State.
In 1988, in response, the Holy See summoned the journalist John Cornwell and gave him access to sources close to John Paul I. The result was “Like a thief in the night”, a book in which the British man assured that he had dealt with of a natural death, supplemented with some negligence. “There is no doubt that his death was from natural causes,” he opined. The same think those who postulate him for his beatification. His conclusion was that Luciani had health problems -especially circulatory- and that the stress of his high office had combined with some medical negligence in a combo that turned out to be fatal. Different sectors questioned Cornwell, considered that his version was the one that the Vatican wanted to transmit and denied that John Paul I had serious health problems.
Some 100,000 people said goodbye to John Paul I in the Clementine Room of the Apostolic Palace. Later, the remains were transferred to the Sistine Chapel in an impressive funeral procession; The body, embalmed, was exposed before the altar of the Resurrection of the basilica until October 4, when the funeral was held (Getty)
With the passage of time, investigations, essays and fictions followed one another around the doubts generated by the death of the Pope. In “The day of the reckoning”, the Spanish priest Jesús López Sáez insisted, following years of investigation, with the theory that the pontiff was poisoned with a strong dose of a vasodilator. Researcher Eric Frattini, author of the book “The Holy Alliance”, raised questions: “If John Magee said that the Pope had felt chest pains, why didn’t he notify Dr. Da Ros? Why was it not said that John Paul I had been prescribed injections for his low blood pressure problem? Who ordered the removal of the pope’s surveillance and why?
But the book that had the most media coverage -which does not mean that it was the most rigorous, rather the opposite- was “When the Bullet Hits the Bone”, by Anthony S. Luciano Raimondi, gangster and nephew of the legendary mobster Lucky Luciano, who claimed to be one of the murderers. In the book, he claimed that he had been part of a group of assassins for Marcinkus, of whom he revealed that he was a cousin, and that he received training in the habits of John Paul I, whom they planned to poison through a infusion. “He was standing in the corridor, outside the Pope’s quarters, when tea was served. He had done a lot of bad things in my time, but I didn’t want to be there in the room when he was poisoned. I knew killing him would buy me a one way ticket to hell,” he wrote.
According to Raimondi, the motive was to stop an investigation for fraudulent maneuvers in which important American companies were involved. “If the Pope had kept his mouth shut he might have had a long reign,” he wrote, with little tact and little credibility. Later, in an interview with “The New York Times,” he declared: “I helped kill the pope.” And he added that John Paul II kept his silence and that is why his papacy lasted almost 27 years and that his death was due to natural causes, at an advanced age. John Paul I was beatified on September 4, 2022, with a celebration in Saint Peter’s Square. He was credited with curing an eleven-year-old girl, in Buenos Aires, on July 23, 2011.
Keep reading:
John Paul I, the 33-day Pope, was beatified by Francis in the VaticanThe Argentine miracle of Pope John Paul I: the girl who was going to die and healedJuan Paul I: hunger in childhood, the unexpected choice and doubts regarding his death
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