More Tragic than Murder? A Thief in the Night (Part I)
I’m finally getting around to posting my debunking of Cornwell’s book about John Paul I. This little project has grown considerably as I’ve worked on it, so again it will have to be divided into several parts.
Yallop’s book was the first English-language bestseller to sensationalize and distort John Paul I’s life and death. But it was not to be the last. In May 1989, a little over ten years after the Pope’s death, John Cornwell, an English journalist, published A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John Paul I (New York: Viking, 1989). In it, he suggested that rather than being murdered, John Paul I was an incompetent Pope who didn’t want the job, and who helped bring about his own death. His work received a better reception from the critics, who had lambasted Yallop’s work. Even today, some well-informed Catholic writers who reject Yallop’s book cite Cornwell’s as a solid investigation that really clears up the mysteries about the Pope’s death.
Cornwell’s reputation later plummeted, however. In 1999, a decade after A Thief in the Night, he went on to write Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking) only to meet with massive criticism of his book for being one-sided, sensationalistic, unscholarly, even fraudulent. He had not only repeated the frequent accusation that Pius had remained silent about the Holocaust, he openly charged him with anti-Semitism and aiding Hitler’s rise to power.
Along with many other errors, numerous critics pointed to a good solid lie right on the front cover of the book: a photo of the future Pope Eugenio Pacelli as papal nuncio to Germany leaving a government building surrounded by German soldiers. In the original edition published in England, the photo was identified inside the book jacket as one taken of Pacelli in March 1939 while Hitler was ruling Germany, suggesting that Pacelli had a close relationship with the Nazis. In fact, the photo was actually taken in 1927, during the Weimar Republic, years before Hitler came to power. On the cover of the American edition, the photo was even cropped to eliminate details that would aid in dating it. (1).
In the end Cornwell was forced to take back many of his conclusions. In 2004, he said, “I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler’s Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by the Germans.” (2).
Yet while there have been plenty of scholars who were ready and able to defend Pius XII against Cornwell’s attacks, there have been few or none writing in English to do the same for his treatment of John Paul I (3). This is what I want to accomplish here. And with any luck, I will force him to take back his conclusions about John Paul I as well, although he has largely repeated them in one of his latest books The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II (New York: Doubleday 2004).
Cornwell, who worked for the London Observer, had also published two novels. In his book he said that while he was visiting the Vatican in the fall of 1987, to get some information about the Vatican’s views on the apparitions at Medjugorie and other supernatural phenomena, Archbishop John Foley, President of the Vatican Commission for Social Communications, had urged him to his surprise to write a book about the death of John Paul I, a subject he originally not been intending to pursue. Foley, he says, wanted a book that would tell the Vatican’s side of the story and dispel the rumors of murder fueled by Yallop’s book. He promised the British author that he could “open up the Vatican” to him. After some hesitation, Cornwell says, he agreed. Though Cornwell, a former seminarian, had since left the practice of the Catholic faith, he felt that he could be objective on the matter. (4).
The Vatican tells the story differently. Archbishop Foley denied that he promised to open up the Vatican, and a journalist who knew Foley said he believed the prelate, and found the statements attributed to him in Cornwell’s book not very credible (5). Other reports indicate that the Vatican only agreed to cooperate with Cornwell on the book after it had received a letter from England’s Cardinal Basil Hume vouching for his integrity. (6). This suggests that it was Cornwell who approached the Vatican, not the other way around.
Like Yallop, Cornwell enjoyed great success and notoriety with this book. His subsequent sensationalistic works on the papacy, including Hitler’s Pope, which have sold well, demonstrate that he has clearly learned where his bread and butter lie, though his honesty and scholarship have frequently been questioned.
In spite of his reputation, A Thief in the Night has been seen by some as the definitive work on Pope John Paul I’s death. But is it?
Cornwell’s Theory
Cornwell rejects the murder theory but believes that John Paul I was faced with a job beyond his capabilities as Pope. He really had the mentality of a simple country priest. As a bishop and cardinal, he “had been sheltered from political conflict and had no time for theological dispute.” (7). Cornwell says that John Paul found himself lost when trying to cope with important Church problems. He told others in the papal apartment that he shouldn’t be Pope and that he was begging God to allow him to die. At the same time, Cornwell says, he was mortally ill, and no one in the Vatican showed a proper interest in his medical care.
Cornwell believes that John Paul was suffering from phlebitis in his legs, a dangerous condition that can lead to an embolism or blood clot in the lungs, but neglected to take necessary medication. Though he experienced severe pain in his chest on September 28, 1978, he forbade his secretaries to summon a doctor. As a result, he suffered from a massive embolism while alone in his room that night, and died within moments. In the end, the Pope, no longer wanting to live, had hastened his own end. Cornwell asks:
“What is the dividing line between ‘giving up,’ suicide by deliberate neglect, and ‘resignation’ or ‘abandonment in a religious sense? There is no evidence that Pope John Paul abandoned himself to despair, but he was ready to die, and there was not only a sense of ripeness, but a strong desire. It took only his refusal to see a doctor and the heedlessness of others to assure him the end he so devoutly wished for.” (8)
Is there any truth in all this?
Whatever criticisms I have about the book in other regards, I will say that one thing Cornwell actually did do well was to prove the sheer ridiculousness of the murder plot theory put forward by Yallop. The few clear facts he documents demolishes that theory, and Yallop’s claims of a deliberate cover-up by the Vatican. He even defends Marcinkus. Particularly helpful in this regard is his inclusion in an appendix of the 1987 article in the Wall Street Journal detailing the charges against Marcinkus and the point-by point refutation by the lawyers for the Vatican Bank.
Of course, once the murder theory was done away with, Cornwell still had to justify his work for the modern book market by coming up with something sensational. He ended up putting forward a real character assassination of the late John Paul I, who was in no way the insecure, whiny character, hopeless in despair and the near suicide that Cornwell makes him out to be.
Cornwell’s book is filled with distortions. As an investigative reporter, he perhaps can’t be faulted for not being a rigorous historian. But even as a journalist, he is unforgivably sloppy, and also suspiciously casual about the truth. As a preliminary to further discussion, I will list these major failings:
1) A lack of in-depth research. Cornwell’s actual summing up of the pre-papal career of Albino Luciani, which takes up at most 2 or 3 pages, is very superficial and at times completely inaccurate. What Cornwell needed to do, and clearly didn’t have the capacity to do, is to really investigate the Pope’s earlier life, study his writings and talk to people who knew him and who could discuss his theological and pastoral approach as a bishop and a cardinal in depth. If he had done so, he would have reached a very different conclusion about the Albino Luciani’s qualifications to be Pope.
In addition, if Cornwell really wanted to know what John Paul I did and thought as Pope, why not turn to the actual texts of his few talks and writings during his short papacy, which have been available from the beginning in English? For a former seminarian, Cornwell seems strangely uninterested in what the Pope thought theologically. Maybe he no longer has a taste for such things, but he should have done his research.
2) Depending on the wrong sources. Cornwell’s non-research is filled out with interviews with a bunch of gossipy Vatican monisignori, who clearly never met John Paul I during his papacy or at any other time. Cornwell accepted at face value their notions that he was “out of his depth” as Pope. Cornwell eagerly reproduce the words of one of these worthy informants that the Vatican “floats on a sea of brilliant bitchery,” (9) evidently relishing the poor image that this give of the Vatican. But he does himself little credit by apparently accepting without question everything told him by such “bitchy” sources. The few times Cornwell did interview someone with actual insight into Luciani’s personality and his strengths through lifelong acquaintance with him, such as his niece Lina Petri, he ignores those insights in putting together his picture of the Pope.
In addition, those who actually did speak to John Paul I frequently as Pope – Cardinal Villot, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Caprio, and Cardinal Casaroli — left accounts of their own, which were available while Cornwell was doing his research, but which he ignored. They provide a completely different picture.
3) Inaccuracy and fictionalizing. The few times I have been able to check a source that Cornwell used, suspicious things crop up. Sister Irma Dametto complained that Cornwell completely invented the circumstances of her interview with him (which did not take place at tea alone with him, but in a Vatican office in the presence of Marjorie Weeke, secretary of the Vatican’s Office for Social Communications). Weeke and the Pope’s niece, Lina Petri, have complained that Cornwell attributed to them things they never said. (10)
Some of the inaccuracy is due to Cornwell’s lack of knowledge of Italian, or his deliberate distortion in translation. For instance, in his interview with Lina Petri, he quotes her as saying that when she saw her uncle’s body in his room in the Vatican on the morning of September 29, he was dressed in a white cassock with torn sleeves. Cornwell naturally speculates feverishly about the reason for these torn sleeves. He makes it part of an imagined scenario in which the secretaries actually found the Pope shortly after his death (around midnight), and took off his cassock, tearing it in the process, in order to put on his pajamas, and arrange him in a sitting position in bed, to make it look as if he had died there (11). But Lina later pointed out that she had really only said that the sleeves were wrinkled (stropicciate), not torn (strappate). All the speculation was based on a faulty translation (12).
Certainly, there must be dozens of other such inaccuracies, in addition to the smaller mistakes, such as Cornwell’s consistent misspelling of the name of Luciani’s first diocese as bishop, Vittorio Veneto (which he calls Vittoria Veneto).
Cornwell often distorts the character of words of his interviewers in other ways. I myself interviewed Don Diego Lorenzi, the Pope’s secretary in Venice and the Vatican, some years ago, and corresponded with him for several years. I found him far from the buffoon that Cornwell makes him out to be. Cornwell has Lorenzi speaking near-perfect English in a distinct British idiom (even using words like “bloody’), where the real Lorenzi speaks and writes English well, but in a distinctly Italian way, making mistakes in grammar and usage typical of an Italian. Perhaps these changes are a kind of hangover from Cornwell’s career as a novelist.
Many details in Cornwell’s interviews with Lorenzi and his fellow papal secretary, Father (now Bishop) John Magee, are different from those they have given elsewhere, or are highly colored and exaggeratee versions of things they are on record elsewhere as saying. And in many cases, they are exaggerated in just such a way as to shore up Cornwell’s own sensational theory.
All of this raises a gigantic red flag about Cornwell’s accuracy. I will discuss these as well as other more serious inaccuracies in the next installment.
(1) See Prof. Ron Rylchak, “The Morphing of a Book Cover,” on his website Hitler, Pope Pius XII, The Jews, the Catholics, the Truth.
(2) “The papacy.” The Economist, December 9, 2004, pp. 82-83; also in the U.S. ed., which is dated December 11.
(3) When the book first came out, I wrote an article refuting the author’s claims: Lori Pieper, “Controversial Theory about Pope’s Death Proposed.” Our Sunday Visitor, August 20, 1989, pp. 3-4. Jesus Lopez Saez’s book, Se pedira cuenta, originally written in Spanish, and his subsequent book, El dia de cuenta, do the same.
(4) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, pp. 1-3.
(5) Desmond O’Grady, “A Thief in the Night: More Vatican Bashing?” Our Sunday Visitor, August 20, 1989, pp. 3-4.
(6) “Death in Rome: Was John Paul I murdered?” Time, June 19, 1989, p. 53; no author given.
(7) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 261.
(8) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 265.
(9) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 62.
(10) Sister Irma Dametto, letter to editor of Humilitas (August 1991), p. 11; Tornielli and Zangrande, Papa Luciani: il sorriso di santo, p. 152.
(11) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, pp. 257-58
(12) Tornielli and Zangrande, Papa Luciani: il sorriso di santo, p. 152, note; conversation of the authors with Dr. Lina Petri.