Authors: David Yallop
Some observers talked perceptively of a great promise unfulfilled, others of a pontificate that had promised to be fun. With regard to an explanation for the sudden death, the Roman Curia dis-information service achieved a remarkable coup. Writer after writer talked about a long record of illness. That someone as experienced as Patrick O’Donovan of the
Observer
could be deceived into writing the following indicates just how successful the lies were: ‘It is only now generally known that Cardinal Luciani had a long record of all but mortal illness.’
Exactly what these mortal illnesses were was not stated. Fighting a deadline it is clear that O’Donovan and the other writers had no time for personal research but relied on Vatican contacts. Some talked of Luciani’s heavy smoking, of the fact that he had only one lung, of his several bouts of tuberculosis. Since his death others have been told by Vatican sources of his four heart attacks, of the fact that he suffered from phlebitis, a painful circulatory disease. Others mention the fact that he suffered from emphysema, a chronic illness of the lungs usually caused by cigarette smoking. There is not a word of truth in any of it.
The overkill of Vatican lies is self-defeating. Would 111 cardinals gather in Rome in August 1978 and elect a man suffering from all of the above? And then permit him to die alone? Along with the lies about Luciani’s medical history the Vatican disinformation service was busy in other areas. The Curia were pushing the non-attributable, off the record view that Luciani was no good as a Pope anyway. Why mourn what was worthless? I discussed this smear campaign with Cardinal Benelli who remarked:
It seemed to me that their [the Roman Curia] aim was twofold. To minimize Luciani’s abilities would reduce the sense of loss and consequently reduce the demands for an autopsy. Secondly the Curia were preparing for the next Conclave. They wanted a Curial Pope.
When Luciani had lunched with his niece Pia one of the subjects discussed had been Press distortion. Now in death Luciani became a victim of just this. The negative comments were mainly inspired by insignificant priests or monsignors who were normally busy writing
irrelevant Vatican memos. They found it highly flattering to be asked for their opinion of the late Pope. The fact that none of them was near the corridors of power or had ever been within the Papal Apartment was masked by the all-embracing description, ‘a highly placed Vatican source said today’. What they said was part of the great injustice done to the memory of the dead Pope. It enabled writers, who before the August Conclave had been dismissive of Luciani, to put behind them the uncomfortable fact that Luciani’s election had been a major demonstration of how ill-informed they were. Their thinking appears to have been: well, yes, we discounted him, but you see he should have been discounted. Thus:
The audiences attracted the immediate sympathy of the public but had disappointed and sometimes worried church officials. The Pope expressed a philosophy of existence that on occasion resembled the
Readers Digest:
common sense, a little simple at that, which broke the grand theological flights of oratory of Paul VI. Clearly he did not have the culture and the intellectual training of his predecessor.
Vatican correspondent Robert Sole
for
Le Monde
We followed first with eagerness, then with a growing sense of the ridiculous, his generous efforts to discover who he was. He smiled, his father was a socialist, he rejected the tiara for a simple stole, he spoke informally at audiences.
Commonweal
Newsweek
considered that Luciani’s rejection of the philosophy ‘Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem’ was a betrayal of the Latin American cardinals who had played such a valuable part in his election. The periodical considered that in making this observation Luciani had rejected the theology of liberation. Because of Curia censorship they missed the fact that he had added an important qualification: ‘There is some coincidence but we cannot make a perfect equation’, and in doing so missed the point.
Peter Nichols, the very experienced
Times
correspondent, but writing on this occasion in the
Spectator,
compared Luciani with a popular Italian comedian of yesteryear who had but to stand there in sight of the populace to be given an ovation. He failed to explain why Paul VI had not received ovations on each appearance.
Others criticized the fact that he had re-confirmed all the Curia heads in office. They neglected to point out that this had also been done by the last three Popes before Luciani and that he retained the power and authority to move any of them at any time.
Much of the world’s news media had, in the days following the Pope’s death, carried stories about the Vatican ritual that surrounds this moment. The newspapers were full of accounts of how Cardinal Villot had approached the inert body and proclaimed three times, ‘Albino, are you dead?’, each question being followed by the symbolic striking on the Pope’s forehead with a small silver hammer. The Press also gave dramatic descriptions of how Villot had then taken the Fisherman’s Papal ring from Luciani’s hand and subsequently smashed it to pieces.
With the death of Albino Luciani there was, in fact, no head tapping, no calling of names. These ceremonies had been abolished in Paul’s lifetime. With regard to the Papal ring, Luciani’s reign was so brief that the Vatican had not even created the ring. The only ring on Luciani’s hand throughout his entire Papacy was the one given to all bishops who had attended the Second Vatican Council.
Why this highly inaccurate reportage is worth considering, when one is aware not only of how much Luciani did achieve in such a brief span, but also the very high regard in which such men as Casaroli, Benelli, Lorscheider, Garrone, Felici and many others held Luciani, is the fact that this was an orchestrated campaign. Not one single critical obituary or article carried any of the facts recorded in the previous chapter. One of the many expressions they are fond of quoting within Vatican City states, ‘Nothing is leaked from the Vatican without a very specific purpose’.
On October 1st, the pressure for an autopsy on Luciani increased. Italy’s most respected newspaper
Corriere della Sera
carried a front page article with the title, ‘Why say no to an autopsy?’ It was by Carlo Bo, a highly talented writer with considerable knowledge of the Vatican. That the article appeared at all is significant. In Italy, thanks to the Lateran Treaty and subsequent agreements between the Italian State and the Vatican, the Press is seriously muzzled when writing on the Catholic Church. The libel laws are very stringent. Critical comment, let alone an outright attack, can rapidly result in the newspaper concerned being brought to court.
Carlo Bo cleverly avoided any such risk. In a style rather reminiscent of Mark Antony’s speech to the Roman populace, Bo talked of the suspicions and allegations that had surfaced after the sudden death.
He told his readers that he felt confident that the palaces and cellars of the Vatican had been free from such criminal actions for centuries. Because of this very reason he said he simply could not understand why the Vatican had decided not to perform any scientific checks, ‘in humble words why there was no autopsy’. He continued:
. . . The Church has nothing to fear, therefore nothing to lose. On the contrary it would have much to gain.
. . . . Now to know what the Pope died of is a legitimate historical fact, it is part of our visible history and does not in any way affect the spiritual mystery of his death. The body that we leave behind when we die can be understood with our poor instruments, it is a leftover: the soul is already, or rather it always has been, dependent on other laws which are not human and so remain inscrutable. Let us not make out of a mystery a secret to guard for earthly reasons and let us recognize the smallness of our secrets. Let us not declare sacred what is not.
While the fifteen doctors who belonged to the Vatican’s health services refused to comment on the desirability of performing autopsies on dead Popes, Edoardo Luciani, newly returned from Australia, failed to help the Vatican’s position when he was asked about his brother’s health:
The day after the enthronement ceremony, I asked his personal doctor how he had found him, bearing in mind all the pressures he was now subjected to. The doctor reassured me, telling me that my brother was in excellent health and that his heart was in good condition.
Asked if his brother had ever had any heart trouble, Edoardo replied, ‘As far as I know absolutely none’. It did not fit very well with the Vatican-orchestrated fantasy.
By Monday October 2nd the controversy surrounding the Pope’s death had become world-wide. In France at Avignon, Cardinal Silvio Oddi found himself the object of many questions. As an Italian cardinal surely he could tell his French questioners the true facts? Oddi advised them that the College of Cardinals ‘will not examine the possibility of an enquiry at all and will not accept any supervision from anyone and it will not even discuss the subject’. Oddi concluded: ‘We know in fact, in all certainty, that the death of John Paul the First was
due to the fact that his heart stopped beating from perfectly natural causes.’ Clearly Cardinal Oddi had achieved a major medical breakthrough for the entire world – the ability to diagnose without an autopsy what is only diagnosable with an autopsy.
Meanwhile the protests of Father Lorenzi and other members of the Papal Apartments about one particular lie had finally borne fruit. The Vatican announced:
After the necessary enquiries, we are now in a position to state that the Pope, when he was found dead on the morning of September 29th, was holding in his hands certain sheets of paper containing his personal writings such as homilies, speeches, reflections and various notes.
When the Vatican had previously announced that Luciani had been holding
The Imitation of Christ,
Father Andrew Greeley records in his book,
The Making of The Popes,
‘some reporters openly laughed’.
These papers, detailing the crucial changes that Albino Luciani was about to make, have undergone some extraordinary metamorphoses over the years: a report on the Church in Argentina; notes for his next Angelus speech; sermons made in Belluno/Vittorio Veneto/Venice; a parish magazine; the speech he was about to deliver to the Jesuits (in fact this was found on his study desk); a report written by Pope Paul. When a Head of State dies in apparently normal circumstances his last actions are of more than academic interest. When a Head of State dies in the circumstances surrounding Albino Luciani’s death, the need to know becomes a vital matter of public interest. The fact that Luciani was holding his personal notes on the various crucial changes he was proposing to make has been confirmed to me from five different sources. Two are direct Vatican sources; the other three are external non-Vatican residents. With the Vatican officially retracting
The Imitation of Christ
version the Curial machine was beginning to show signs of strain.
The strain grew even greater when the world’s Press began to comment on a number of disturbing aspects. For a Pope to have no one monitoring his welfare from mid-evening until the following day struck many observers as wrong. The fact that Dr Renato Buzzonetti worked mainly at a Rome hospital and consequently was not able to guarantee absolute availability seemed outrageous. If the observers had known the full scenario of Vatican inefficiency the outrage would have been even greater. The full facts illustrate not only the potential for a premature natural death but the scenario for murder.
In Spain, as in other countries, the controversy broke into public debate. Professor Rafael Gambra of the University of Madrid was one of a number who complained of the Vatican ‘doing things in the Italian manner or in the Florentine manner as in the Renaissance’. Urging that an autopsy should be performed, Gambra voiced fears that a Pope who was manifestly going to bring a much needed discipline back into the Church might have been murdered.
In Mexico City the Bishop of Cuernavaca, Sergio Arceo, publicly demanded an autopsy declaring, ‘To Cardinal Miranda and me it seems that it would be useful’. The Bishop ordered a detailed statement to be read out in all churches in his diocese. The Vatican machine moved fast. The detailed statement, like much else in this affair vanished from the face of the earth and by the time the Vatican had finished with Cardinal Miranda he was able to declare upon his subsequent arrival in Rome that he had no doubts whatsoever with regard to the death of the Pope.
On October 3rd, as people continued to file past the Pope’s body at the rate of 12,000 per hour, the controversy roared on. The Will of Albino Luciani had vanished but by its extraordinary behaviour the Vatican was ensuring a bitter legacy. A Pope with an ability to speak openly, directly and simply was surrounded in death by deviousness and deceit. It was clear that the loss felt by ordinary people was immense. From the Vatican there was scant acknowledgment of that widespread feeling – rather a bitter rearguard action to protect not the memory of Albino Luciani but those to whom the evidence of complicity in his murder clearly pointed.
Non-Curial priests were now debating in newspapers the merits and demerits of an autopsy. Pundits and Vatican observers were castigating the Vatican for its obduracy. What had become abundantly clear, as Vittorio Zucconi observed in
Corriere della Sera,
was that, ‘Behind the doubt about the Pope’s death lies a vast dissatisfaction with “official versions”’.