Was Pope John Paul I Murdered? (Part III)
Yallop’s traditionalist Sources
David Yallop, an investigative journalist, had already written several books about sensational murder cases, including Deliver Us From Evil, about the Yorkshire Ripper. He has said that shortly after this last book was published in 1980, he received a letter from a “layman very close to the Curia, who laid before me his grave suspicions about the sudden death of Pope John Paul I and promised to give me information of extreme importance if I would respect his desire for anonymity.” (1) Yallop, a Catholic who no longer practices his faith, agreed, and after receiving this information from his source, he embarked on his research. It appears, however, that he did not do most of it personally, but through the medium of a journalist, and perhaps other people as well. Among those contacted were a number of people who knew the Pope, including his family, and his secretaries, Mgr. Senigaglia and Father Lorenzi, all of whom Yallop thanks for their help at the beginning of his book. But many of these people have publicly rejected his conclusions.
Lorenzi told me that he was first approached by Yallop in November 1982, and learned then about his murder thesis. At that time the book was to be titled The Pope Must Die. “In June, 1983, I met with him again in London,” Lorenzi said. “I got the impression that his approach had changed quite a lot. Since November, he had become fond of the late Pope. He had fallen in love with him. I came to the conclusion that he had changed his mind [about the murder plot].” It was on this basis that Lorenzi agreed to be interviewed and to help him with the project. But, he continued, “when the book was published, I realized that I was wrong. Yallop had stuck to his original idea that Luciani had been a meek, innocent victim of a world-wide plot. This is his thesis, which I do not share or agree with.” (2). Apparently, none of the other people close to the Pope that he contacted (at least those I spoke to) were told anything about the murder theory when Yallop contacted them.
The Pope’s sister-in-law, Antonietta Luciani, told me that the family was approached by a man who called himself Yallop, but was in his twenties or early thirties, which certainly does not answer the description of Yallop, who was then middle-aged. Apparently it was his investigator, Philip Willan. But her husband did not want to talk to him, so he approached their daughter Pia instead, and got information from her. She said that he family had no idea that Yallop was planning to say that the Pope was murdered. They were shocked by the contents of the finished book, and have rejected Yallop’s theories in several interviews and also in their conversation with me. Antonietta told me emphatically that Yallop’s book was “all lies.” (3)
Msgr. Senigaglia also says that he was approached by a journalist on behalf of Yallop, and was simply been asked to help with a biography of Pope John Paul I. After the book was published, he accused Yallop of “placing in the mouths of the living things that were not said, or that were manipulated,” and misusing and distorting the information he gave him. He too totally rejects the murder theory. (4)
Apart from those who have accused him of distorting or misusing the information they supplied to him, who were Yallop’s main sources? For one thing, he relies heavily on the authors of the ANSA story. Who were they? Did any of them actually work inside the Vatican? Yallop’s own descriptions of his sources are contradictory. In one interview he described those who convinced him to initiate his investigation as “some lay people close to the Vatican, but who do not work in the Vatican.” (5) And yet, in his book, he says that they were a group of people “within the Vatican.” (6)
I obtained some information about one of these people working with Yallop from the late Pope’s family. While I was at the Luciani house in October 1985, and was inside with Antonietta, she suddenly took my arm, pointed to the window. and cried, “Look!”
I looked out. A man had stopped to talk to her husband Edoardo, who was in the yard. Antonietta shuddered, and said, “I am more afraid of that man than I am of the devil!”
She told me that he went by the name of Enrico Maria Montini, and claimed to be a relative of Pope Paul VI, that he had been to their house several times with pamphlets he had written full of wild accusations against the Italian bishops, among them Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the Archbishop of Milan, who had been the target of many traditionalists because of his progressive views, including his work for ecumenism. A few minutes later, Edoardo came back into the house with a handful of pamphlets, which he immediately threw into the family’s wood-burning stove, exclaiming “Per carita!” (For heaven’s sake!), the strongest oath I ever heard him utter.
Antonietta also said that “Montini” had told them that he had helped Yallop with his book. But it appears that the closest he had ever gotten to the Vatican is to have once been expelled from a seminary. Antonietta told me that “Montini” had stolen or forged the official seals from several dioceses in Italy, to make it look as if his accusations against a number of Italian bishops had the approval of someone in the hierarchy.(7) Did he perhaps do something similar with official Vatican seals in order to pass himself off as someone close to the Curia?
What the Pope’s family told me can perhaps be at least partly confirmed. According to Stuart Applebaum of Bantam Books, which published In God’s Name, one of those who worked with Yallop on the book was a “former seminarian and student of John Paul I’s papacy.”(8) At any rate, it does not seem that this man would be the type of person who would have real inside information about the Vatican. The description of his activities, on the other hand, sounds very much like those of some of the more fanatical traditionalists.
In the first edition of his book, Yallop steadfastly refused to name any of the sources who gave him direct information about the murder, on the grounds that their lives might be in danger. In his second edition, however, published in 2007, he drops some hints, which I will talk about later.
Yallop’s Investigation
It’s clear, then, that Yallop’s original sources had a definite agenda. Yallop at first seems to have decided to follow up on this story out of curiosity. If what Lorenzi says is true, however, Yallop must have quickly realized that the sources he was dealing worth weren’t credible, especially since what he was learning about the real Albino Luciani as a progressive Vatican II bishop made it clear he wasn’t about to make any of the changes the traditionalists wanted in the Vatican. Yallop decided to write a biography of the Pope instead.
But something must have happened during the course of Yallop’s research that apparently pointed him back in his original direction. In fact, there may have been more than one. One thing that did happen in those years was the finding and publishing of the P2 membership list in 1981. P2 was the infamous illegal Masonic lodge in Italy also known as Propaganda Due, whose members have been responsible for a number of criminal activities. Its “Grand Master” was Licio Gelli. Other members included the Italian banker and tax lawyer Michele Sindona, and Roberto Calvi, the head of the Banco Ambrosiano in Milan. Both men were involved in a number of business deals with Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank.
Another thing was the questions that were raised in 1982 about the IOR’s role in the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano, and the publication, in the same year, of a book (The Vatican Connection by Richard Hammer), which told how in 1973 the U.S. Department of Justice had interrogated several Vatican officials, including Marcinkus, as a part of their investigation into the manufacture and ultimate destination of almost a billion dollars in forged U.S. securities.
Yet another thing was something that Yallop had learned about Luciani during his time in Venice: in 1972 he himself had come up against the IOR and the Banco Ambrosiano in regard to the Banca Cattolica del Veneto. The majority share of this bank in northern Italy were held by the Vatican Bank, and the minority shares by many of the dioceses of the Veneto, including Venice. The bank provided the dioceses with the low-cost loans necessary for their building of churches, schools, hospitals and other institutions. In 1972, the Vatican Bank sold its shares to the Banco Ambrosiano without informing the bishops. Luciani had gone to the Vatican to protest the sale, and to have told a colleague (who, of course, remains anonymous): “Calvi’s money is tainted. The man is tainted. I would not leave the accounts in his bank if the loans he provided were totally free of interest.” (9). He was also said to have tried to get the directors of the Banca Cattolica, now in Calvi’s hands, to change its name, because to call a bank owned by Calvi Catholic was “an outrage and a libel on all Catholics” (10). In fact, he recounts a story told by his sources, in which Luciani had come to the Vatican to see Marcinkus with his complaints, and had been rudely thrown out of his office. (11).
Here in the midst of this financial corruption, Yallop thought, is where the motive for Pope John Paul I’s murder must be found. The new Pope had attempted to oust Marcinkus, and Calvi and Sindona saw to it that he paid with his life. And Luciani would be the perfect hero for opposing the financially corrupt Vatican. Nevertheless, as a result of his enthusiasm for researching this story, the doings of Sindona, Calvi, the P2 and the Vatican Bank almost replaced John Paul I as the subject of his book. Here was a potent cocktail combining corruption, greed, murder, and that most controversial and juicy of targets, the Vatican: in short, all the necessary ingredients for a mega-best-selling book.
However, there was a catch. If the Pope was murdered in his bed, in one of the most closely guarded places in the world, someone in the Vatican would have to have been intimately involved in the plot. And as it happened, two top prelates in the Vatican, Cardinal Villot and Bishop Paul Marcinkus, were on the traditionalists’ list of Masons. Yallop must have believed that his was the connection he needed. Hence his book’s conclusion that not only Marcinkus but Villot was involved in the Pope’s murder, but that Villot covered up all the evidence on the morning of the Pope’s death. But what does the evidence for this boil down to?
Yallop’s Evidence
Yallop says that John Paul been alerted to the presence of Masons in the Curia in the article “The Great Vatican Lodge” in the right-wing weekly L’Osservatore Politico, a copy of which had been mailed anonymously to the Vatican. Among those it named as Masons were Cardinals Villot, Baggio, Casaroli and Poletti, as well as Bishop Marcinkus, the director of the Vatican’s Institute for Religious Works (IOR), also known as the Vatican Bank. Yallop says that the Pope was shocked by these revelations and began making plans to remove these men from their offices, thus giving them a motive for murder. (12).
Yallop believes that the P2 was at the head of the Masonic conspiracy in the Vatican, and that it was Licio Gelli who actually arranged the murder, which was carried out by Villot, Marcinkus, or some other Vatican insider. Yallop believes that Gelli arranged the murder of the Pope in order to prevent him from dismissing Marcinkus and disclosing the illegal operations in which his friends Sindona and Calvi had embroiled the IOR.
It is true that many of the extreme right-wing haters of Masonry point to Vatican involvement with P2 members Sindona and Calvi as further evidence for the Masonic conspiracy. For instance, in Malachi Martin’s novel Vatican (1986), there is a detailed account of a conspiracy involving what Martin calls “P1″ or Masonry in general, the “P2,” Gelli’s lodge, and the KGB. Martin believes that it was these organizations, along with Protestants, liberation theologians, and various other evildoers, who were behind the pontificate of Paul VI, and arranged the murder of John Paul I. The novel was advertised as fiction, but it represents Martin’s true views of the history of the Church. (13)
But it is debatable whether P2 was the left-wing organization the right seems to think. Its Grand Master, Licio Gelli, fought for the Fascists in World War II, and later, when the tide turned against the Fascists, he began spying for the Communist partisans. Like Gelli, many of the organization’s members were opportunists who cultivated whoever was in power. But the actual beliefs of many of them, including Gelli, were strongly anti-Communist, and it is believed that Gelli hoped to prevent a Communist take-over in Italy by building up the power of the right and, through scare tactics and manipulation of public opinion, to pave the way for a right-wing coup. If this is the case, the P2 would hardly be involved in a leftist conspiracy. But, more important, the P2 was evidently not the main suspect for Yallop’s traditionalist sources. They were not so much concerned about the Vatican Bank as they were about the supposed treachery of liberal Cardinals like Villot and Casaroli. And the evidence that Yallop supplies for the Vatican-P2 conspiracy is anything but convincing.
Yallop leads his readers to believe that there were Vatican members of the P2, but the evidence that he offers proves nothing of the kind. No Vatican prelates appeared on the P2 membership list published in 1981. The names of the Vatican “Masons” on the list in L’Osservatore Politico were supposed to have been enrolled in several lodges (Villot, for example, was supposed to belong to a lodge in Zurich), but Yallop does not provide the name of even one who was supposed to have belonged to the P2. In fact, the Osservatore Politico list was composed almost entirely of bishops, cardinals, and other high-ranking prelates, while the P2 list was composed of influential lay people and high government officials.
Yallop claims that the Pope asked Cardinal Felici if some of the cardinals on the list were actually Masons, and that Felici had replied in the affirmative. This conversation, one of many which Yallop includes in his book, but admits came to him second hand, was most likely related to him by his traditionalist sources. According to the story, Felici explained that the list was very similar to one passed around the Vatican in 1976, and that it was intended to influence the new Pope’s decisions about Vatican appointments. “These lists appear to have emerged from the Lefebvre faction,” Felici is supposed to have said. “Not created by our rebel French brother, but certainly used by him.” (14) There was therefore every reason for John Paul I to give no credit to this list, for he was already family with Lefebvre’s accusations against the bishops.
That John Paul was studying the accusations made by the Lefebvre faction is plausible. In fact, Edoardo, the Pope’s brother, who visited him in the Vatican and stayed overnight on September 20-21, recalled the Pope saying that a dossier had been prepared for him on the Lefebvre affair (15), much of which he was already familiar with from Venice. The accusation that Curial Cardinals were Freemasons might have made him laugh, or it might have made him groan, but he never would have believed it.
Cardinal Felici himself, according to Yallop, believed the list of Vatican Masons. to be at least partly fabricated. There is, of course, every reason to believe that it was completely fabricated. Because of the total lack of evidence for his theory, Yallop himself is forced to admit that “Vatican Freemasons were, by and large, not P2 members.” (16) In reality, he has failed to demonstrate that there were Freemasons of any kind in the Vatican, let alone P2 members.
Yallop makes much of the fact that L’Osservatore Politico was published by a P2 member named Mino Pecorelli. He believes that Pecorelli, who was disillusioned with the P2, wanted to publish the list of Masons in order to embarrass Gelli by revealing his association with Marcinkus and other Vatican prelates. But this is very unlikely, since the list was not intended to be one of P2 members, nor did the article apparently suggest any connection with Gelli. Pecorelli was only using the same list of Masons that other extreme conservatives, including the traditionalists, had used.
It is more likely that Pecorelli’s real reason for publishing the list was that he genuinely believed, as many other rightists did, in the existence of a leftist-Masonic conspiracy in Italian society and in the Church. It may also be that, in accord with what many people believe to have been P2’s usual practice, he was publishing the list as “evidence” of such a conspiracy in order to provoke fear and hatred of the left. In fact, the publication of Pecorelli’s list was a stupendous irony: here was a member of a Masonic lodge accusing others of being Masons! But, although it was, at least on the surface, a Masonic organization, the P2 had very little to do with the supposed left-wing aims of Masonry.
Yallop says that not only Sindona and Calvi, but also Gelli and Umberto Ortolani, another P2 member, had a powerful influence within the Vatican. Yallop’s evidence for Ortolani’s ties to the Vatican is very weak.
The traditionalist origins of Yallop’s evidence against Ortolani is evident from his account. He says that Ortolani helped the liberal Cardinal Lercaro to arrange the election of Pope Paul VI. The extreme right has long been claiming that liberals and Masons arranged the election of Pope Paul, whom they claim was a Mason, so that they could take control of the Church. However the conservative businessman Ortolani does not seem to have been a sympathizer with the liberal social ideas of Cardinal Montini. Why he should have wanted to help elect him Pope is difficult to understand. But the fact that Ortolani was known or rumored to be a Mason was evidently the only proof that the traditionalists needed that he was part of a conspiracy to elect a liberal Pope. (17) The traditionalists were right in their belief that the Vatican Bank’s association with Calvi and Sindona was bringing nothing but harm to the Church. They are certainly not the only ones to say so. But there is no evidence at all that the Vatican was part of a gigantic P2 conspiracy.
The presence a confederate inside the Vatican is absolutely necessary to the murder plot, as Yallop himself admits. Calvi, Gelli, and Ortolani were in South America at the time of the Pope’s death, and Sindona was in New York. If any of these men had really wanted to murder John Paul I, they could not have done so without the direct assistance of someone inside the Vatican. Who might this person or persons have been? Yallop insists that Gelli and some P2 members were personal friends with many bishops and cardinals working in the Vatican. One of those on the P2 list, for example, was Francesco Baggio, Cardinal Baggio’s brother. (18) But it is impossible to prove anything from this, especially since the P2 list was apparently doctored by Gelli to include the names of people who had never heard of the organization, but whom Gelli found it advantageous to have listed as members.
Yallop’s Case Against Marcinkus Falls Apart
The only person in the Vatican who did have a clear connection with some P2 members was Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. What is Yallop’s case against Marcinkus? He says that Marcinkus was involved in criminal acts, including a scheme to obtain almost a billion dollars in counterfeit securities for the Vatican Bank. He says that as Patriarch of Venice, Luciani had already become determined to stop the schemes in which Marcinkus and the Vatican bank had become embroiled as a result of their association with Roberto Calvi and the Banco Ambrosiano, particularly the takeover of the Banca Cattolica del Veneto, which had upset many priests in his diocese. Upon becoming Pope, Luciani decided to oust Marcinkus, expose his crimes, and end the IOR’s association with Calvi. Reason enough, Yallop says, for Marcinkus to have been involved in John Paul’s murder.
Questions about the actions of the Vatican Bank are certainly legitimate, but Yallop blows this question out of proportion. Much of the book is a campaign against Marcinkus, and much of it is on the level of the parallels Yallop draws between Marcinkus and Al Capone, who simply happened to have grown up in the same town, Cicero, Illinois. This makes entertaining reading, but proves nothing.
The Vatican has always maintained that the Pope and Marcinkus were the victims of their misplaced trust in Calvi and Sindona. The Vatican certainly made a colossal blunder in appointing Marcinkus as head of the Vatican Bank. The amiable, golf-playing American priest had had no financial experience at all before his appointment. Most people believe that Marcinkus, because of his inexperience, was duped by Sindona into helping him in his criminal activities.
Yallop, however, accuses Marcinkus of being fully aware of the criminal nature of the dealings he was involved in with Sindona, and of enthusiastically participating in them. Michele Sindona, Marcinkus’ supposed partner in crime, told a different story. In speaking to a reporter from Newsweek in his prison cell in Otisville, New York in 1982, Sindona practically admitted having deceived the head of the Vatican Bank. “Marcinkus was honest. He does not have the financial background to be a wheeler-dealer,” Sindona said. He gave a judgment very similar to others who knew Marcinkus. “He is perfect socially, but a zero banker. He does not know banking.” (19) This statement was no doubt true. Certainly it would have done Sindona no good personally. It was the only crumb of comfort Sindona ever threw Marcinkus after having caused him so much grief.
Yallop, however, persists in his belief of Marcinkus’ corruption, pointing to the securities fraud case. The unconvincing scenario he puts forth, however, is typical of his approach. A New York police detective named Joe Coffey stumbled onto this operation in 1972, while monitoring the activities of a new York mobster named Vincent Rizzo. Rizzo and several Mafia associates had become involved with a scheme set up by an Austrian con man named Leopold Ledl and his associates, who included a corrupt Italian businessman named Mario Foligni. In 1971 Ledl and Foligni had contacted the Mafia with a request for some $14 million dollars worth of forged securities in large American companies, as a test deposit for a total of $950 million which Ledl said had been ordered by Cardinal Eugene Tisserant for the Vatican Bank. As proof of the order, Ledl displayed a letter on Vatican stationery. According to Foligni, Marcinkus and Michele Sindona wanted to use the securities to finance some of their speculative business enterprises. The FBI and the Justice Department were alerted, and several of the American participants were arrested. In 1973, William Aronwald, a member of the New York Strike Force on organized crime, visited the Vatican along with William Lynch of the Justice Department and two FBI agents, in order to question Marcinkus and find out if he or anyone else in the Vatican knew about the scheme. (Cardinal Tisserant was now dead).
There they found out that the chief piece of evidence in the case was itself an obvious, in fact, rather amateurish, bit of forgery. Vatican officials pointed out that the letter which Ledl claimed was the Vatican’s order for the securities was written in 1971 on a Vatican letterhead which had become outdated in 1968. The signature was illegible. Suspiciously, the Mafia figures who had brought the forged securities to Rome said that they had never met with any Vatican prelate. Ledl had always left the others behind when he claimed to be having his meetings with Tisserant, Marcinkus, and an unnamed archbishop. After a test deposit of some of the securities in a Swiss bank resulted in a disclosure of the forgery, most of the rest seem to have disappeared, except for those that went into the pockets of the forgers themselves.
Marcinkus told the U. S. investigators that at about the same time that the bonds had been brought to Rome, Foligni had attempted to involve him and the Vatican Bank in two business deals which he had rejected. He also said that Foligni had been “bad-mouthing me all over town and making wild accusations against my character.”
The evidence is very confused, but it seems that Ledl and Foligni were the real brains behind this scheme. What reason might they have had for forging the letter implicating the Vatican? There is an interesting fact about Foligni that might provide an answer. Not long after the affair with the forged bonds — for which he was never prosecuted — he founded an ultraconservative Catholic political group called the New People’s Party. In its platform, he proclaimed himself to be “the man with clean hands.” Perhaps Foligni was one of those conservatives who believed that Marcinkus, who was involved with Sindona, a known Mason was part of a Vatican-Masonic conspiracy. If this was the case, perhaps he meant to implicate Marcinkus in trade with counterfeit bonds as a means of getting him dismissed from his job.
Richard Hammer, the author of The Vatican Connection, said that there was strong evidence that the Vatican participated in the crime, and eventually received at least part of the money. But Hammer depended on information supplied by Coffey, who had not participated in the investigation at the Vatican. (20) After the book’s publication, Aronwald insisted that there was no credible evidence to link the Vatican to the crime. (21) The book also failed to mention that the letter, the only physical piece of evidence linking the Vatican to the crime, was a forgery. Yallop admits this, and he also rejects Hammer’s claim that the investigation proceeded no farther because of a cover-up. But he provides no convincing explanation for why the investigation halted if there was evidence that Marcinkus was guilty. In fact, the Vatican had been co-operative, and the investigation came to a halt because of the lack of evidence. Yet, even admitting all this, Yallop still feels justified in describing Marcinkus as “the man who had masterminded one of the world’s greatest swindles.” (22).
Yallop clearly exaggerates wildly when it comes to Marcinkus. Others who knew the truth from Luciani’s time in Venice insisted that he was also exaggerating wildly about the Banca Cattolica del Veneto affair. Msgr. Senigaglia told me “Luciani never spoke to Marcinkus” while Patriarch of Venice, as Yallop claims. Nor did Marcinkus throw Luciani out of his office. Senigaglia would have known this very well, since he was not only Luciani’s secretary, but his driver, and accompanied him on his trips to Rome. (23)
Father Lorenzi has exploded another of Yallop’s exaggerated claims (for which Yallop had in fact, given no source). Lorenzi explained that it was true that Luciani had wanted the Veneto bank to drop the title “Catholic,” but that was not, as Yallop says, because of Calvi’s association with the bank, but because of his concern that people would perceive the Church as too involved in financial affairs. Back in the nineteenth century, when many such “Catholic” banks were founded and offered savings plans to the poor, the name served as a guarantee of honesty. But the name “Catholic” on a bank now gave a different impression to many people, one that suggested the financial wheeling and dealing, while Luciani felt that the church should be known for poverty. Luciani felt that “the word `Catholic’ and the word `Bank’ shouldn’t go together,” Lorenzi told me.
Lorenzi was also unhappy because Yallop paid no attention to John Paul’s real spiritual aims when describing his proposed “revolution” in the Church, a revolution that seems to describe more Yallop’s hopes for the Church than those of the Pope. Lorenzi said that John Paul definitely did not feel that the Vatican Bank scandal was the most urgent problem he had to solve as Pope. He felt that it was more important to teach the world Christian truths. “If a Pope starts out worrying about money,” Lorenzi said, “he is a failure and should resign.” (24)
John Paul I certainly might have dismissed Marcinkus, if he knew that the bishop was involved in illegal affairs, but there is no evidence that he knew any such thing. Yallop provides only unsubstantiated statements to support his claim that Luciani had already carried out a major investigation into Calvi and Sindona’s crimes before becoming Pope, and that Marcinkus’ dismissal was imminent. If the Patriarch of Venice knew as much as much on coming to the Vatican as Yallop claimed he did, why did he reappoint Marcinkus as he did right after becoming Pope? Luciani had always practiced prudence, and would have needed much more time than Yallop suggests to determine the truth and arrive at a decision.
Yallop’s attempt to place Marcinkus at the scene of the crime fails dismally. The only evidence he presents is the prelate’s supposedly suspicious behavior on the morning the Pope’s body was discovered. Here is how Yallop describes Marcinkus’ arrival at the Vatican that morning, and his meeting with Sergeant Hans Roggen, the head watchman of the Swiss Guards:
In the courtyard near the Vatican Bank, Sergeant Roggan (sic) met Bishop Paul Marcinkus. It was 6:45 a.m. What the president of the Vatican Bank, who lives in the Villa Stritch on Via della Nocetta in Rome and is not known as an early riser, was doing in the Vatican at that time of the morning remains a mystery. The Villa Stritch is a twenty-minute drive from the Vatican. Roggan blurted out the news: “The pope is dead.” . . . Marcinkus continued to stare at Roggan, without displaying any reaction. Eventually Roggan moved on, leaving Paul Marcinkus staring after him.(25)
According to Yallop, Marcinkus’ presence early in the morning at the Vatican at a time supposedly unusual for him, and his reportedly strange behavior, implicates him in the “murder.” Yallop gives no source for the above conversation, although elsewhere in his book he claims to have interviewed Roggen about what happened during his assigned watch at the Vatican that night. But Roggen rejects Yallop’s version completely. In an interview after Yallop’s books came out, he gave his own account of his meeting with Marcinkus:
Roggen: In the St. Damasus Courtyard, [shortly after 6:00], I met Archbishop Marcinkus. He came to the Vatican Bank every morning at this time. I told him the news of the Pope’s death. Then he said, these are his exact words, “You shouldn’t have such bad dreams,” and shook his head. He didn’t believe me.
Interviewer: Only this morning? Yallop maintains that Marcinkus was a later riser.
Roggen: On the contrary!. . .He would drive to the Vatican from the Villa Stritch. . .every morning at 6:00. (26)
But Marcinkus is not the only prelate in the Vatican that Yallop accuses of complicity in the murder. Many of Yallop’s accusations are launched against the only suspect known to have access to the Pope’s bedroom when his body was discovered, Cardinal Jean Villot. And what did Villot do to arouse suspicion? What really happened inside the Vatican that morning?
NOTES
(1) “Le incredibili rivelazioni di uno scrittore inglese sulla morte di Giovanni Paolo I,” Gente, June 29, 1984, p. 5.
(2) Personal interview with Diego Lorenzi, October 24, 1985.
(3) Personal interview with Antonietta Luciani, October 1, 1985, see also Edoardo Luciani, “Mio fratello non e` stato ucciso: lo ha,” [interview] Gente, June 21, 1985.
(4) Mario Senigaglia, “Nel Nome di Dio: Un romanzo che falsa la storia,” Gente Veneta, June 23, 1984, p. 8.
(5) La Repubblica, June 17, 1984.
(6) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 241.
(7) Antonietta Luciani to author, October 4, 1985.
(8) The Catholic Messenger, (Davenport Iowa), August 23, 1985, p. 7.
(9) Yallop. In God’s Name, 2007, ed p. 31.
(10) Yallop, In God’s Name, 2007 ed., p. 31.
(11) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 170.
(12) Yallop, In God’s Name, pp. 176-78, 209-214, 241-42.
(13) Malachi Martin, Vatican (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), passim.
(14) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 177;
(15) Edoardo Luciani, interview in Georges Huber, Jean Paul Ier, ou la vocation de Jean-Baptiste (Paris: Editions, S.O.S., 1979), p. 133.
(16) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 271;
(17) Ortolani’s contacts: Rupert Cornwell, “God’s Banker.” (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1983), p. 46; Ortolani helps elect Pope Paul, Yallop, In God’s Name, pp. 118-19.
(18) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 319.
(19) Harry Anderson, et al., “Inside the Vatican Bank,” Newsweek, 13 September 1982, p. 62.
(20) Richard Hammer, The Vatican Connection (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), pp. 61-98, 201-262, on the investigators’ visit to the Vatican, 286-296, and passim.
(21) Robert J. Cole, “U.S. Inquiry in 1973 at Vatican Bank is Disclosed,” New York Times, August 7, 1982, p. 34, col. 1.
(22) Yallop’s account, In God’s Name, pp. 40-49.
(23) Personal interview with Mario Senigaglia, November 2, 1985;
(24) Personal interview with Diego Lorenzi, October 24, 1985.
(25) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 221.
(26) Victor J. Willi, Im Namen des Teufels? Kritische Bemerkungen zu David A. Yallops Bestseller “Im Namen Gottes?” 2nd ed. (Stein Am Rhein: Christiana-Verlag, 1988), pp. 149-51. Roggen later gave more or less the same account to John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, pp. 202-207 – except that here he placed Marcinkus’ arrival even later, around 6:45. Neither account is of any help to Yallop’s case.