The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia (25 page)

John Paul then fixed his attention on the trembling man before
him. Cardinal Villot, he said, must resign his position as the Vatican's
secretary of state by the following morning and return to a retreat in
his native France. After all, Villot was seventy-two and in frail health.
Contemplation in a monastic setting would grant him a measure of
peace and the opportunity to pray for a happy death. His replacement
would be John Paul's close friend, Cardinal Giovanni Benelli.15 When
Villot objected to this "drastic measure," the Holy Father reminded
him that Pope Pius X removed Cardinal Rampolla, the secretary of
state under Leo XIII, from office upon learning that Rampolla was a
freemason. He was merely following the example of his esteemed and
holy predecessor.

Before dismissing Villot, the pope assured the secretary of state
that fellow members of the "Vatican Masonic Lodge" would be
removed from the Holy See and placed in parish positions where
their activities could be scrutinized by bishops and prelates who were
"truly Catholic."

The meeting ended at 7:30 P.M. The Holy Father recited the final
part of his daily breviary and joined his two assistants-Fr. John
Magee and Fr. Diego Lorenzi-for the evening. Sister Vincenza, his
trusted cook and housekeeper, served clear soup, veal, fresh beans,
and salad.

After dinner the pope watched the evening news, retired to his
study to review his notes, and at 9:30 P.M., took leave of his two
young assistants and his old housekeeper: "Buona notte. A domain.
Se Dio Vuole" ("Good night. Until tomorrow. If God wishes"). He
appeared to be in high spirits.

The next morning-at 4:30 A.M.-Sister Vincenza, following her
morning routine, knocked at the door of the pope's bedchambers and left a pot of coffee on a table in the hallway. When she returned
a half hour later, she found the tray untouched. Assuming John Paul
was still asleep, she knocked at the door and said: "Holy Father! It is
late!" She received no answer. With growing concern, she opened the
door to the bedchambers and called out: "Buono serra, Papa!" The
room was still. She approached his bed and asked: "Are you all right,
Papa? Are you felling well?"

The pope was sitting up in bed with his glasses half off his nose.
His fingers were clutched around a file, and paper was strewn among
the bed covers. As soon as she approached him, Sister Vincenza
reeled back in horror. The pope's lips were pulled back in a macabre
grimace; his gums were exposed; his eyes appeared to have popped
from their sockets.16

The nun shrieked with alarm and pulled a bell to summon Father
Magee. "It was a miracle that I survived," Sister Vincenza later told
British investigative reporter David Yallop. "I have a bad heart." 17

As soon as Magee entered the room and saw the pope's condition, he telephoned Cardinal Villot, who occupied an apartment
within the Lateran Palace. Villot, according to Vatican sources,
uttered the following cry of surprise in French: "Mon Dieu, c'est vrais
tons ca?" (My God, is all that true?) Then he asked Magee an extraordinary question: "Does anybody else know the Holy Father is dead?"
Magee replied on the phone that no one knew except the Vatican
nun. Villot then told Magee that no one-not even Sister Vincenzamust be allowed to enter the pope's bedroom and that he, as the duly
appointed Vatican Camerlengo (that is, "presiding Cardinal") would
handle matters as soon as he arrived.18

Villot appeared in a matter of minutes. To Magee's amazement,
the cardinal was shaved, well groomed, and in full ecclesiastical attire.
It seemed as though Villot was prepared to make a public appearance.
The time was 5:00 A.M.

Before proceeding with the rite of extreme unction, Villot began
placing items from the pope's bedroom in a satchel-the vial of low
blood pressure medicine that John Paul kept on a bedside table, the
papers that were scattered on the bedcovers, the file folder that
remained clutched in the dead pope's hand. The cardinal opened the desk to remove the appointment book, the list of papal transfers, and
the pope's last will. Finally, he removed John Paul's glasses and his
slippers. None of these things were ever seen again.19

Villot telephoned Dr. Buzzonetti, the Vatican physician, and then
began to administer the sacrament of extreme unction-the anointment of the head of the deceased with holy oil. As soon as he completed this rite, Villot told Magee that Sister Vincenza must be sent
away at once to her Motherhouse in Venice so that she would remain
out of communication with the press.

Dr. Buzzonetti arrived at 5:45 A.M., examined the body, and
announced to Villot and Magee that the pope had suffered "a coronary occlusion," that he had died "between 10:30 and 11:00 the previous evening," and that he had "suffered nothing. 1120 But the pope's
bulging eyes and horrific grimace seemed to tell a different story.

Villot immediately produced a small silver hammer from his
purple robe. He tapped the pope's forehead and asked: "Albino
Luciani, are you dead?" He performed this ritual three times and
then affirmed to Father Magee that the Holy Father had passed on
to a greater glory.

The day would witness even stranger events. Shortly after the
physician left, two morticians-Ernesto and Arnaldo Signoracciappeared out of nowhere. It was 6:00 A.M. Villot must have summoned the morticians as soon as he received the call from Father
Magee-before 5:00 A.M., before he called the physician, before he
had even viewed the body.21

Even though the bodies of the popes are traditionally not
embalmed, the two morticians, under instructions from Villot, began
to inject embalming fluid into John Paul's body. This unorthodox
measure of embalming without draining the body of blood would
serve to prevent any possibility of a complete autopsy and any accurate determination of the cause of death.22 The morticians also
manipulated the distorted jaw of the pope, corrected his horrible grimace, and closed his eyes.

While the pope's body was being arranged, Villot instructed the
stupefied Magee to relate to the world a fabricated story about the
morning's events. Magee was to say that he, not Sister Vincenza, had found the pope's body. The young priest was to make mention of neither the papers strewn across the bed nor the items that Villot had
placed within the satchel. What's more, in order to give an ecclesiastically correct spin to the pope's passing, Magee was to say that John
Paul had died with a copy of The Imitation of Christ, the great devotional work by St. Thomas a Kempis, clutched in his hand .2-1

At 6:30 Villot conveyed news of the pope's death to Cardinal
Confalonieri, the eighty-six-year-old dean of the Sacred College;
Monsignor Casaroli, head of the Vatican's Diplomatic Corps; and
Sergeant Hans Roggan of the Swiss Guards.

At 6:45 Sergeant Roggan came upon Bishop Paul Marcinkus outside the Vatican Bank. This was most unusual. Marcinkus, who lived
twenty minutes from the Vatican in the Villa Stritch in Rome, was a
late riser and never appeared at his office before 9:00 A.M. The sergeant blurted out the news: "The Holy Father is dead. They found
him in bed." Marcinkus stared at Roggan, displayed no emotion, and
made no comment.24 Later, when questioned about his behavior,
Marcinkus said that he thought Roggan had "gone mad."25

Finally, at 7:27 A.M., nearly three hours after Sister Vincenza discovered the pope's body, Vatican Radio made the following
announcement: "This morning, September 29, 1978, about fivethirty, the private secretary of the pope, contrary to custom not having
found the Holy Father in the chapel of his private apartment, looked
for him in his room and found him dead in bed with a light on, like
one who was intent on reading. The physician, Dr. Renato Buzzonetti, who hastened to the pope's room, verified the death, which
took place presumably toward eleven o'clock yesterday evening, as
`sudden death' that could be related to acute myocardial infarction."

Despite Villot's care in manufacturing the fiction, the story quickly
began to fall apart upon inspection. The first problem came with The
Imitation of Christ. John Paul's copy could not be found within his
living quarters. It had remained among his belongings in Venice,
where he had served as patriarch. On October 2 the Vatican was forced
to admit that John Paul was not reading The Imitation of Christ at the
time of his demise. The Holy Father was rather holding in his hands
"certain sheets of paper containing his personal writings such as hom ilies, speeches, reflections, and various notes." On October 5, after
continual badgering from the press, the Vatican came clean and
admitted that the papers the Holy Father was holding concerned "certain nominations in the Roman Curia and in the Italian episcopate."

The second problem came with the work of the morticians.
Italian law dictated that no embalming should be undertaken until
twenty-four hours after death without dispensation from a magistrate. Moreover, the immediate injection of embalming fluid into the
body of the pope without drainage of blood smacked of foul play.
Pressure began to mount for an examination of the corpse.

On October 1 Corriere Bella Sera, Milan's daily newspaper, published a front-page article entitled, "Why Say No to an Autopsy?"
The article called for complete disclosure of all facts relating to the
pope's death and concluded by saying:

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.26

These demands were intensified when John Paul's personal
physicians said that the pope was in very good health. "He had
absolutely no cardiopathic characteristics," Dr. Carlo Frizzerio said.
`Besides, his low blood pressure, should, at least, in theory, have
made him safe from acute cardiovascular attacks. The only time I
needed to give him treatment was for the influenza attack."27 This
diagnosis was verified by Dr. Giuseppe Da Ros, who examined the
pope on Saturday, September 23, and told the press: "Non sta bene
ma benone"-"He is not well, but very well."28 John Paul's good
heath was attributed to his lifestyle. He exercised regularly, never
smoked, drank alcohol only rarely, and kept a healthy diet.

Numerous heart specialists throughout the world, including Dr.
Christiaan Barnard of South Africa and Dr. Seamus Banim of
London, took to task Dr. Buzzonetti's diagnosis of myocardial infarction without conducting an autopsy as "incredible" and "preposterous."29 Such observations caused Villot to invent another story.
He told several of his fellow cardinals, who pressed for an autopsy,
that the cause of John Paul's death was really not a heart attack. The
Holy Father, he said, had unwittingly taken a fatal overdose of
Effortil, his blood pressure medicine. If an autopsy was undertaken,
Villot insisted, it would give rise to the belief that pope had committed suicide.30

When this explanation failed to quiet the clamor for an autopsy,
Villot said that canon law expressly prohibited the body of a pope to
be subjected to an autopsy. This statement gave rise to a third
problem. Canon law neither banned nor condoned autopsies. It failed
to address the subject. What's more, investigators discovered that an
autopsy had been performed on the body of Pius VIII in 1830.3"

Soon the press discovered that Sister Vincenza, not Father
Magee, first discovered the body of the pope and that the nun had
been confined to a cloister to ensure her silence. Rumors became
rampant that the John Paul had died of poisoning. Some speculated
that a lethal dosage of digitalis had been added to the Elfortil, the
liquid medicine for low blood pressure that the pope kept at his bedside. Such a mixture would induce vomiting-vomiting that would
account for Villot's removal of the Pope's glasses and slippers.

The Vatican set the next conclave for the earliest possible dateOctober 14, and released a final press release to silence all criticism and
to put an end to all speculation: "At the end of the Novemdiales [the
period of mourning], the director of the press office of the Holy See
expresses words of firm disapproval for those who in recent days have
indulged in the spreading of strange rumors, unchecked, often false,
and sometimes reaching the level of grave insinuations, all the more
grave for the repercussions they may have had in those countries where
people are not accustomed to excessively casual forms of expression."

And so the matter of the "murder" of Pope John Paul I came to
a close. No death certificate was ever made public and no post mortem was ever performed. The nineteen rooms of the papal apartments were stripped of any sign that John Paul had ever lived and
reigned as the supreme pontiff over Holy Mother Church. The college of cardinals had made a mistake in electing him-a mistake that
would not be made again. At the next conclave, all-out efforts were
taken for the election of a pope who would permit the Vatican to
return to business as usual.

The time was right for Karol Wojtyla of Poland, who became
John Paul II.