FOR the Catholics of the world, the news was as sudden and shocking as those bulletins from Dallas on the day John Kennedy died. But this was even more unexpected. There had always been a real possibility that JFK would be a target when he visited that city of hate.
But John Paul I, spiritual leader of 800 million Catholics around the globe?
Hard to believe.
The headline in that last week of September 30 years ago left no room for doubt
POPE JOHN PAUL FOUND DEAD
It meant that the Catholic Church would remember 1978 as a tragic and traumatic year almost unprecedented in its long history, a period forever to be known as the Year of the Three Popes.
It began on Sunday, August 6, when Pope Paul VI died.
He had led his worldwide flock through 15 troubled years and had seen his Church torn apart by doubt, especially when his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae proclaimed that any sort of artificial birth control was “against God’s will”. Many Catholic leaders were aghast; they had hoped for change. One leading Jesuit said the Pope had gone against his own experts on the subject.
Paul had succeeded John XXIII in July, 1963, no easy task because that Pontiff was one of the best-loved of modern times while Paul was often regarded as a remote figure, austere and distanced from his flock. And when he died of a heart attack, it seemed the Church wanted a successor closer to John.
They got one: Albino Luciani, Patriarch of Venice.
His reaction when the fabled white smoke announced that the search was over, that he was Pope, was humble: “I don’t know how I could have accepted. The day after I already regretted it, but by then it was too late.
This ever-smiling son of a bricklayer, who looked, someone said, like everyone’s favourite uncle, swiftly earned the name “the Homely Pope”. He combined the names of his two predecessors to become John Paul I and in spite of his benign, self-effacing approach to the job, he quickly sent tremors through the Vatican old guard.
He began as he meant to go on. With humility. There would be no splendid coronation. He refused to be crowned. There would be no sedia gestatoria, the chair in which Popes were carried above the crowd; no jewel-encrusted triple-deck tiara, instead just a white wool stole around his shoulders; no traditional six-hour ceremony, either, Just a simple mass.
He was, to put it bluntly, a new broom and he felt there was much in the Vatican to be swept away.
Sensationally, some Italian newspapers claimed he contemplated allowing use of the contraceptive pill, their stories based on a document supposed to have been sent by Luciani to Pope Paul. This was instantly denied by the Vatican hierarchy. Artificial contraception was anathema to the traditionalists.
The new Pope was also rumoured to be unhappy with the activities of the Vatican Bank and its alleged connection to P2, a Masonic lodge within the Vatican, and this was enough, later writings claim, to antagonise powerful forces within the Church.
Little wonder, then, that the conspiracy theories surfaced almost immediately when John Paul I was found dead in his bed on September 29 after just 33 days in office. After all, he was only 65 and in good health, so not surprisingly the whispers started.
The Pope had been murdered. Why? To prevent him sacking men like the Chicago-born Archbishop Paul Marcincus, “God’s Enforcer”, suspected of some very dodgy financial deals which might even have embraced the Mafia.
Much later such claims would be made public in books like David Yallop’s In God’s Name, sub-titled An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul. “Fanciful and absurd,” was the Vatican reply, but even prominent Catholics like Father Andrew Greeley had doubts. Given the evidence that Yallop had gathered, said Greeley, “the probability of murder goes up”.
John Cornwell, though a lapsed Catholic after seven years studying for the priesthood, was asked by the Vatican to investigate the rumours. He found that official claims contradicted themselves, especially over who found the body and when.
Nobody could explain why the bedroom lights were left on all night or whether there had been a secret autopsy or – most mystifying of all – whether morticians were summoned to the Vatican before the body was found. One report insisted they were taken to the mortuary a full half hour before the discovery of Pope John Paul’s death.
Rumour, speculation, gossip? Or fact? We will probably never know what really happened on that night 30 years ago.
On October 16, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland became Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian Pope since Adrian VI in 1542.
At 58, he was the youngest Pope of the century.
And things were back to normal at the Vatican.
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(Source: WO)