No pope had ever been more approachable; no pope ever had such a warm and captivating smile – a smile that reached out to everyone he met. Pomposity he detested. It was of course inseparable from his position, but he reduced it to a minimum. He was, for example, the first pope to refuse a coronation; there were no more triple crowns, no more gestatorial chairs in which he would be carried shoulder-high through the crowds, no more swaying ostrich feathers, no more of the royal “We”. He longed to take the Church back to its origins, to the humility and simplicity, the honesty and poverty of Jesus Christ himself.
But how was it to be done? First of all, there was the Curia to contend with. He had no enemies in it – indeed, at the time of his election he had no enemies at all. But his refusal to be crowned with all the usual trappings had horrified the traditionalists, and his decision that the extra month’s salary normally paid on the election of a new pope should be cut by half had not increased his popularity. He soon found, too, that the Vatican was a hotbed of petty hatreds, rivalries and jealousies. “I hear nothing but malice, directed against everything and everyone,” he complained. “Also, I have noticed two things that appear to be in very short supply: honesty and a good cup of coffee.”
In such an atmosphere it was inevitable that he would be misinterpreted and misrepresented. L’Osservatore Romano, for example, in a special edition published within hours of his election, reported that he was among the first of the bishops to circulate the encyclical Humanae Vitae, “and to insist that its teaching was beyond question”. This was completely untrue. It was well known that in 1968, as Bishop of Vittorio Veneto, he had submitted a confidential report to his predecessor as Patriarch of Venice, recommending that the recently developed contraceptive pill should be permitted by the Church; and that this report, having been approved by his fellow-bishops, was submitted to Paul VI. As we know, Paul rejected it; but John Paul had not changed his opinion. In 1978 he had been invited to speak at an International Congress in Milan to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, but had refused to go. Within days of his election he agreed to receive the American Congressman James Scheuer, who headed a House Select Committee on Population. “To my mind,” he had remarked to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Villot, “we cannot leave the situation as it currently stands.”
Had he lived his full term, this quiet, gentle, smiling man might well have achieved a revolution in the Church – a revolution even more dramatic and profound than that created by Pope John’s Second Vatican Council. But he did not live. Shortly before 5.30 a.m. on Friday, 29 September 1978 he was found dead in his bed. He had been Pope for just thirty-three days – the shortest reign since that of Leo XI in 1605.
Was John Paul I murdered? Certainly, there were reasons to believe so. For a man of sixty-seven he was in excellent health; there was no post-mortem or autopsy; the Curia obviously panicked, and was caught out in any number of small lies as to the manner of his death and the finding of his body; and if, as was widely believed, he was on the point of exposing a major financial scandal in which the Vatican Bank and its director, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, were deeply implicated, there were at least three international criminals – one of whom, Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano, was later found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London – who would have gone to any lengths to prevent him from doing so. The Vatican, moreover, is an easy place for murder. It is an independent state with no police force of its own; the Italian police can enter only if invited – which they were not.
Advertisement
The arguments for and against the conspiracy theory are long and complicated. To set them out here would mean devoting twenty or thirty pages to a pope who reigned for only a month, and would hopelessly unbalance a book which is already overlong. Anyone who would like to study them – and they are well worth studying – should read two books: In God’s Name by David Yallop (in favour of the theory) and A Thief in the Night by John Cornwell (against it). They can then decide for themselves.
Having for many years been convinced that the Pope was indeed murdered, I have now reread the evidence on both sides and have changed my mind. The murderer – if there was one – must somehow have gained admittance to the papal apartments in the middle of the night. Unless one or both of the papal secretaries (or one or more of the small team of nuns who did the cooking and cleaning) were implicated in the plot – which I find hard to believe – I do not see how he could have managed to do so.