Was Pope John Paul I Murdered? (Part I)
Here is the first part of the discussion of the Pope’s death I promised. Much of it is only slightly rewritten from the book that I tried to have published back in the 80’s and early 90’s. It will, however, include a discussion of the second (2007) edition of David Yallop’s book In God’s Name. In time, I hope to do more research and put together the definitive treatment of the subject.
Many of the people who were close to Pope John Paul I have always been reluctant to talk about the controversy surrounding his death. This is not because they want to conceal anything, but rather because they are weary of being questioned on the subject. They wonder why there is so much interest in the theory that the Pope was murdered and so little in his life. They feel betrayed by those who have distorted the facts they have provided in order to write scandalous books, and angry because those who read these books seem to be more interested in sensationalism than they are in the truth. When I spoke with the Pope’s brother and sister-in-law and his secretaries, Father Lorenzi and Father Senigaglia, about his death back in 1985, they told me that they were afraid that attempting to refute these lies would only add to the furor, and that no one cared about the truth anyway.
I am sure that Senigaglia and Lorenzi’s feelings are the same today, though the Pope’s brother Edoardo and his wife Antonietta are now dead (Antonietta died in 2006 and Edoardo in March 2008). I am not dwelling on the details of John Paul’s death out of any love for sensationalism, but only out of love for the truth. In this case the truth is not difficult to determine. There is not a shred of evidence to support any of the claims that Pope John Paul I was murdered on the evening of September 28, 1978.
The most famous of these claims is contained in David Yallop’s sensational international best-seller In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (Bantam Books, 1984, 2nd ed 2007), in which the author claims that several people actually living inside Vatican City told him that John Paul I was murdered, and gave him evidence to prove it. Who exactly are these people, and why would they make such an extraordinary accusation? This is the most important question, because the credibility of these sources is vital to the credibility of Yallop’s book. Explaining the nature of these sources is the best refutation of Yallop’s claim that some highly placed cardinals, the Grand Master of an illegal Masonic Lodge and some corrupt Italian financiers plotted together to murder a Pope.
While Yallop’s book is perhaps the most famous, there have a dozen or more other books in different languages exploring the same territory, including both support and refutation. The most famous of the latter is John Cornwell’s equally scandalous best-seller A Thief in the Night (1989). He does poke holes in the murder theory, but then he comes up with an almost equally scandalous theory of my own. I will have more to say about Cornwell’s book later on.
But most of the treatments of the Pope’s death are ultimately based on the same story, or some version of it, that was told to Yallop by his sources, a story that goes back to the morning of the Pope’s death. That’s why I want to begin by tracing the origins of this story as fully as possible, so that the strength or weakness of the evidence it presents will be clear. Its origin lies with some followers of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the traditionalist leader who was in conflict with the Vatican at the time. In order to talk about them, I will first have to sketch in some background.
The Traditionalists and the Freemasons
Catholics in the U. S. are familiar with the refusal of Lefebvre and his followers to accept any aspect of the Second Vatican Council, and their belief that those who accept it are heretics. But in Europe, especially in France, the traditionalists, or “integralists,” as they are often called, also refuse to accept anything that has happened in social or intellectual history since the French Revolution. Many of them still believe in absolutist government in both Church and state and are opposed to modern democracy. Archbishop Lefebvre himself showed sympathy towards the cruel right-wing dictatorship in Argentina and the Franco dictatorship in Spain. One of the beliefs that the traditionalists share with others on the extreme right is their hatred of Masonry because to them it represents everything wrong with the modern world.
The organization that the traditionalists find so evil actually began in the Middle Ages as a perfectly respectable Catholic stonemasons’ guild. In later centuries, the Masons began to develop strange religious rituals at variance with Catholic teaching. As a result, beginning in 1738, the Church forbade Catholics to become Masons. Some branches of Masonry, particularly those in Italy and France, were sympathetic to Enlightenment thought, Deism, and anticlerical and revolutionary movements. In 19th-century Italy, many Risorgimento leaders belonged to Masonic Lodges of the “Grand Orient” Rite, which were famous for their attacks on the papacy. Because of this, Masonry became a hated word to many Catholics. For the Catholic ultraconservatives in France who refused the accept the French Revolution in the 18th century, and their descendants, who reacted the same way to the beginnings of modern democracy in the 19th and 20th, Masonry remains the root of all evil.
In line with these beliefs, the followers of Lefebvre attribute not only the Council but all of modern thought to the workings of a sinister Masonic plot. Lefebvre himself has described it as “a secret pact, which existed even before the Council, between high dignitaries in the Church and in Masonic Lodges.” (1)
Even before the Council was over, a number of conservative Catholics began claiming that there was clear evidence of connivance between some members of the Vatican Curia and the Freemasons. The charge was repeated again in the 1970’s, based on a distorted version of events that were then taking place in the Church. What actually happened was this: It was generally recognized that Masonry in England and the United States has not been revolutionary, and hostility towards the Church among Masons in these countries has always been much rarer. For a long time many Masons, particularly in England, have said that the Church was misrepresenting them when it called them anti-Catholic. Some Church officials, including the well-known Italian Jesuit, Giovanni Caprile, also urged a re-examination of the Church’s attitude toward Masonry. Cardinal Villot was also said to be in favor of this idea.
The re-examination of the question resulted in a confidential letter written in July 1974 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the episcopal conferences of England and several other countries, explaining that the provision in canon law which stated that Catholics who join Masonic Lodges are to excommunicated should be interpreted to mean only those Lodges that were anti-Catholic or plotted against civil governments. This was in line with the modern policy of the Church to reduce as far as possible the number of automatic excommunications in canon law, and was also a gesture of good will towards Masons. Soon, however, the English hierarchy, as well as Father Caprile and other writers, suggested that the ending of the automatic excommunication could be taken to mean that Catholics could, under certain circumstances, be Masons and still good Catholics. This idea was never officially adopted by the Church, and in fact was eventually rejected by Pope John Paul II. (2) The Church still insists that because of Masonry’s beliefs and rites, it is incompatible with Catholicism. But for the traditionalists, the very fact that some prelates were even considering a re-examination of the Church’s attitude towards Masonry meant that those in power in the Church had totally abandoned the Catholic faith and sold out to the ideas of the modern world. All of this is the sole basis for the accusation that some Vatican prelates themselves were Masons. It obviously has no basis in fact.
The accusation erupted again with surprising force in 1976, when Pope Paul began warning Lefebvre that he was heading for schism and asked him to stop ordaining priests. It was at this time that articles began appearing in several right-wing periodicals, including the Italian journal Il Borghese, and the French newspaper L’Aurore, accusing a number of Curial cardinals and even Pope Paul himself, of secretly belonging to Masonic lodges. The authors of these accusations naturally thought that this persecution of themselves, the only remaining faithful Catholics, could only be due to Masons infiltrating the Vatican. The accusations were largely directed against the members of the Curia who were loyal to the Council and Paul VI’s policies, especially those who carried out the Pope’s directives against Lefebvre and his movement.
Among the accused were Cardinal Villot, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, who had sent to Archbishop Lefebvre the ultimatums of the Pope telling him to stop his unauthorized ordinations of priests at his seminary in Econe, Switzerland, and Cardinal Sebastiano Baggio, who as head of the Congregation of Bishops, had suspended Lefebvre from his faculties as a priest and a bishop in 1976 when he refused to comply with Pope Paul’s orders. Also among the accused was Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, then the Secretary of the Council for Public Affairs of the Church, and later Cardinal Secretary of State. The traditionalists believed that Casaroli was in league with the Communists because he was implementing the Ostpolitik, that is, the Vatican’s policy of negotiating with East European Communist governments to obtain religious freedom for Catholics in those countries. (3)
Many traditionalists wanted to believe that it was not really Pope Paul who was responsible for the condemnation of Lefebvre, but the supposed Masons in the Curia. It was a very important point, because papal authority is, after all, infallible. Very elaborate theories were developed to prove that the “real” Pope had not condemned Lefebvre. In 1977, a man named Theodor Kolberg published a pamphlet The Deception of the Century, in which he claimed that in 1975 Cardinals Villot, Casaroli and Benelli had imprisoned Pope Paul in the Vatican and put in his place an exact double who was responsible for the actions taken against Lefebvre. Kolberg and others reasoned that the Pope’s infallible authority was not behind these actions, since it was not the real Pope who was taking them. The author relied in part on the revelations of Veronica Lueken, a supposed visionary of Bayside, New York, who claimed that the substitution of an impostor for Pope Paul had been revealed to her by the Virgin Mary. (Lefebvre himself is said to have rejected this absurd story). After Pope Paul’s death, Kolberg claimed that his body had not been embalmed and he been buried in the bare ground instead of a stone sarcophagus so that his body would decay more quickly and no one would discover that it was really the double in the grave!
Of course, all traditionalists do not believe in this type of story. But there are a few of them — and they are certainly to be pitied — who are so emotionally and mentally affected by their distress over changes in Church and society that they cannot accept that they fail to distinguish fantasy from reality. This is exactly what happened to them in the case of John Paul I.
Origins of a Conspiracy Theory
When John Paul I was elected, many Catholics on the extreme right expressed great hope in him. The Italian right wing paper mentioned above, Il Borghese, hoped that Cardinal Luciani’s election would “bring Catholics to a new commitment in the battle [against Communism] as militant disciples of the Church of Rome . . . not as followers of Popes enslaved to an Ostpolitik pleasing to Pravda.” (5) Even though Archbishop Lefebvre was suspicious because John Paul I had taken the names of the Popes of the Council, many traditionalists in Rome were pleased at his election. Later Franco Antico, the secretary of the Rome-based traditionalist organization Civilta` Cristiana, would say that he believed that John Paul I would have reversed many of the changes in the Church under Paul VI, and that he was “deeply displeased” that Lefebvre had not sought an audience with him before his death. (6) It was with similar hopes that the believers in the Masonic conspiracy had stepped up their campaign by sending lists of curial “Freemasons” to the Vatican, hoping that this would persuade John Paul I to discharge the culprits.
However, if these traditionalists believed that Pope John Paul I shared their views, then they could have known very little about him. He was a great supporter of the Council and Paul VI’s reforms. It is true that he was denounced by the leftist Catholic dissent in Italy as a reactionary because he had taken a strong stand again Christian activists who adopted Marxist ideology, and because he had tirelessly fought against the legalization of divorce and abortion. It was also said that several conservative cardinals in the Curia had supported his election, including cardinal Felici and Vagnozzi. This, plus a great deal of wishful thinking, may have led some traditionalists to believe that John Paul I would champion their cause. He was actually anything but sympathetic to their views. In fact, he had already written a number of articles while he was Patriarch of Venice refuting the beliefs of Lefebvre and his followers, and decrying their disobedience. (I will go into this more later). Nevertheless, the ultra-traditionalists’ belief that Luciani was favorable to them was so strong that when he died, some of the more extreme began to claim that he was murdered by leftists in the Vatican.
It began almost as soon as the Pope’s body was discovered. The Abbé Ducaud-Bourget, an associate of Archbishop Lefebvre, said in Paris on the morning of September 29: “Perhaps agents of Satan in the flesh is what was the cause of the two heart attacks in such a short time in the Vatican” [i.e. those of Paul VI and John Paul I]. He later elaborated: “It is hard to believe that the death was natural, considering all the creatures of the devil that inhabit the Vatican.” (7). For Ducaud-Bourget and some of the more extreme traditionalists, “creatures of the devil” could be none other than Cardinal Villot and the other prelates in the Curia who they suspected of destroying the Church simply because they were faithfully carrying out the reforms of Vatican II. Now they suspected these prelates of murdering Pope John Paul I. Then Rafael Gambra, a professor at the University of Madrid, wrote a letter to the conservative Spanish newspaper El Imparcial saying that John Paul had been planning to bring “discipline” back to the Church, and may have been murdered by those who wanted to prevent him from carrying out his plans. He called for an autopsy. (8) Fuerza Nueva, a Spanish religious group with ties to the Franco regime, made similar accusations. But a traditionalist organization in Rome, Civilta` Cristiana, was the most persistent one.
When the spokesman for this group, Franco Antico, met with the press on October 3, 1978, he said that his organization was considering charges that “a person or persons unknown” had murdered Pope John Paul, and that he was going to ask the Vatican to start an inquiry. “We have information we will put at the disposal of the authorities, if they decide to make an inquest,” Antico said. He would not discuss this information, but he did say that the circumstances of the Pope’s death gave rise to doubts. Why was there no doctor on duty in the Vatican that night? he asked. Why had the light continued to burn all night in the Pope’s room, with no one apparently noticing it? And why had the Vatican failed to issue a death certificate? (9)
Antico seemed to be hinting that the Pope’s murder was an “inside job.” If that is the case, it is not hard to guess who the suspects were: the evil Masonic Cardinals in the Vatican. Some French-speaking Catholic journalists covering the story quickly concluded that Civilta Cristiana’s insinuations were directed mainly at Villot, whom they described as “the be^te noire of Msgr. Lefebvre’s Roman friends.” (10) The traditionalists seem to have particularly hated the French cardinal because he was among the more liberal minded prelates in the Curia, and because he had defended his fellow French bishops in their struggle to restrain Lefebvre and his followers. The rumor that Villot was supposed to have urged allowing Catholics to become Freemasons only added fuel to their suspicions. It certainly would have fueled those of Antico, the author of a pamphlet attacking Masonry. (11)
On October 6, Antico presided over a press conference in which he further described the charges that his organization was making. He continued to insist that the Vatican’s version of events surrounding the Pope’s death was “full of holes.” He added, “We have concrete evidence to back up our demands for an investigation, but we can’t release it at this time.” (12)
What was this concrete evidence? It was revelation that was to be at the origin of much of the controversy. Understanding it will require a discussion of what happened on the morning of John Paul I’s death.
(To be continued)
NOTES
(1) Yves Congar, OP, Challenge to the Church: The Case of Archbishop Lefebvre (Huntingdon, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1976), p. 92
(2) Stephen Knight, The Brotherhood: The Secret World of The Freemasons (New York: Stein and Day, 1984), pp. 252-53.
(3) Congar, Challenge to the Church, p. 92.
(4) Theodor Kolberg, Der Betrug Des Jahrhunderts (Munich: Privately published, 1977); see Jean Jacques Thierry, La Vraie Mort de Jean-Paul Ier (Paris: J.C. Godefroy, 1984), pp. 17-24.
(5) Monthly Review (July-August 1982), p. 34.
(6) Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1978, p. 2.
(7) Correio do Povo, 30 September 1978. p. 2, Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 239.
(8) Washington Post, 2 October 1978, p. 10.
(9) Ibid.
(10) “The bête noire of Msgr. Lefebvre’s Roman friends,” Jean Bourdarias, Bernard Chevalier and Joseph Vandrisse, Les fumées du Vatican: De Paul VI à Jean Paul II (Paris: Fayard, 1979), p. 151; see also Robert Serrou, “Jean Paul II: Tous les chemins de L`Eglise passent par l’homme,” Paris Match, 23 March 1979, p. 72.
(11) Franco Antico and Franco Andreini, La Massoneria (Palermo: Thule n.d.).
(12) Chicago Tribune, 7 October 1978, p. 2.