On Pilgrimage

Will the Real Pope John Paul I Please Stand up? (Part II)

Here is the promised part II of the discussion of Lucien Gregoire’s “biography” of Pope John Paul I. At this point, I don’t really feel like writing too much more about Gregoire; this would be to give him much more attention than he deserves. So in this installment, I will talk about the source of some of the claims about John Paul I that have allowed books like his to be written to begin with.

Gregoire’s version of John Paul I’s Teachings as Pope

Gregoire claims that Luciani’s pre-papal works were confiscated by the Vatican after his death. He also claims that the Vatican altered John Paul I’s words as Pope on a massive scale, such as to give a complete different and opposite picture of his beliefs. For instance, here is Gregoire’s account of the programmatic statement of his goals for his papacy, delivered to the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel on August 27, 1978:

We must rise up the courage that is within us and set aside the convictions of our Christian forefathers and together we will muster the strength to lift those restraints that have been unfairly placed upon the everyday lives of so many innocent people by doctrine . . . for God-given human life is infinitely more precious than is man-made doctrine. (1)

Some people, believe it or not, have quoted these to me as Pope John Paul I's actual words. Here, on the other hand, is an excerpt from his actual talk.

Overcoming the internal tensions which may have been created here and there, conquering the temptation to conform themselves to the tastes and customs of the world, as well as the titillation of easy applause, united in the same bond of love that must shape the inner life of the Church, as well as the external forms of its discipline, the faithful must be ready to bear witness to their own faith before the world,. . . the temptation to replace God with the autonomous decision that departs from the moral law is bringing modern men and women to the risk of reducing the earth to a desert, the person to an automaton, and fraternal living together to a planned collectivization, often introducing death where God wants life. (2)

If anyone thinks that Luciani felt that the Church’s doctrines are man-made, they are simply wrong!

The most audacious of all the things that Gregoire has written is his account of John Paul I’s last Wednesday audience on the day before his death, September 27, 1978. He claims that the Pope proclaimed his plans to permit birth control, and said the “Moses had great motive to have lied” when he said he had spoken to God. He also supposedly claimed that when the Church condemned the first test-tube baby, this was a sign that “Mother Church does not know right from wrong.” (3)

Here is a famous excerpt from that talk, which I have already published:

We all remember the great words of the great Pope Paul VI. “The peoples who are hungry are making a dramatic appeal to the peoples who live in opulence. The Church shudders at this cry of anguish and calls on everyone to respond with love to his brother.” (Populorum Progressio, no. 3) And then, here justice is united to love. Because the Pope says, still in Populorum Progressio: “Private property is not a undeniable and absolute right for anyone. No one has the right to be able to make use of his goods exclusively for his own benefit, beyond his need, when others are dying because they have nothing.” (Ibid., no. 22) These are grave words. In the light of these words, we must ask ourselves not only as nations, but as private individuals, especially we who are members of the Church: have we really carried out the plan of Jesus, who has said: “Love your neighbor as yourself”? (4)

here is Gregoire’s version of this passage:

Believe me, one day, we who live in opulence, while so many are dying because they have nothing, will have to answer to Jesus why we have not carried out his order, ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.’
We, the clergy of the Church together with our congregations, who substitute gold and pomp and ceremony in place of Christ’s instruction, who judge our masquerade of singing his praises to be more precious than human life, will have the most to explain.
Remember the great words of Paul VI, ‘It is the inalienable right of man to own property. But it is the right of no man to accumulate wealth beyond he necessary while other men starve to death because they have nothing! (5)

Here is the actual video of the address (the part in question goes from 5:22 to 6:58):

Note that even those parts of Gregoire’s account that are similar to what was actually said have clearly been reworded by the author. For instance, the Pope very clearly says that the right of property is NOT an inalienable right. Even the order of the sentences has been changed (if there were omissions or if the order of the sentences had been done by editing in the Vatican version, there would have been jumps and cuts in the video, so it’s clearly Gregoire who changed it). As for the other parts of Gregoire’s version for which there is no recording, is there any doubt that these are fictional inventions? If we can’t trust Gregoire to give a correct version of the existing tape, can we really trust him to get the transcription of those mysteriously “missing” parts correct?

Gregoire claims that what the Pope really said, at this audience, especially the controversial parts, was published in an AP story that made newspapers worldwide, including the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. (6). How can it be that I myself have researched the reaction to John Paul I’s papacy in newspapers, both American and from around the world for some 25 years without ever seeing any such story? That’s because none exists! Gregoire’s audacity in regard to his faked sources is incredible.

Father Andrew Greeley was there at that audience where the Pope chatted with Daniele, and recorded his impressions of it in his book The Making of the Popes 1978. Naturally he didn’t mention a word about the Pope’s revolutionary ideas about abolishing the Mosaic law! Not to mention permitting birth control, which Greeley undoubtedly would have favor, and most certainly would have mentioned And, as Greeley recalled, he not only heard the talk, he had a chance to look at John Paul’s own typewritten text. He certainly had a chance to know what he really said.

Gregoire says “The Church’s releases of the event are brief and edit out most of the Daniele dialogue.” (7) This is not only untrue, but completely absurd. The complete written text of all of John Paul’s Wednesday general audience talks was printed in L’Osservatore Romano. It is true that the Vatican didn’t release the whole recording of some them on its various commercial tapes/CDs, because of time limits. (But one seems to have been released on CD now that includes them all; Il Piccolo Catechismo di Giovanni Paolo I, by St. Paul Media and 30 Giorni). That is the sole basis, perhaps, for Gregoire’s wild imaginings. But it’s certainly no excuse for them.

I’m quite certain that Gregoire never listened to a single one of these tapes himself, largely because I’m certain he doesn’t understand Italian. He actually appears to have gotten all of his ideas about the Vatican suppressing the Pope’s words from other authors – principally Yallop – who claimed that the Vatican massively censored John Paul I’s talks while Pope. He also used the published texts of the Pope’s audience talks in English and butchered them in his pursuit of his agenda.

Just last night, I began a discussion over on my YouTube channel with someone who claimed that John Paul I was a truly “open-minded” Pope who was going to make “tremendous changes” in the Church. In answer to my appeal to the facts of his beliefs as asserted in his writings, he /she replied that it didn’t matter what I said, or how many doctrinal statements I listed by Luciani, he and millions of others just knew, based on their “feelings” when they looked at him, that he was the Pope who was going to change it all. Depend on this sort of feeling long enough, and you will get delusions like Gregoire’s.

Other claims of Vatican Censorship of the Pope

So much for Gregoire. Let’s look at the wider issues.

Yallop started all this nonsense about massive Vatican censorship of John Paul I in 1984 by claiming that the Vatican hid or altered his record both before and after he became Pope. Yallop claims that on his election, the Curia snatched up all available copies of Luciani’s pre-papal writings, including his doctoral dissertation and locked them in the Vatican’s secret archives (8) Odd how I was still able to find copies of all those writings scattered over three dioceses without any trouble when I went to Italy seven years later! The first edition of his doctoral dissertation was still in the archives in Belluno, and the Luciani family also had a copy. The revised edition from 1958 was printed in the Opera Omnia in 1989. Everything Yallop said was completely untrue, and has caused enormous damage when it has been repeated and even exaggerated over the years. Gregoire obviously made massive use of Yallop’s work.

Other writers – who also seem to be basing the idea on Yallop, have made similar claims. In Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, Paul Hutchison claims that “immediately after [John Paul I's election], a team of trusted priests from the Secretariat of State began cleansing the archives of documents pertaining to the new pope that did not agree with their imagine of the magisterium.” Specifically, the notes for Luciani’s 1965 retreat to priests in Vittorio Veneto were taken because they contained a passage expressing his hopes for a relaxation of the ban on birth control. (9)

There are a number of things wrong with this statement. First, Luciani’s notes for this conference, which was still unpublished at the time of his election, were, like the notes for the rest of his writings, in his personal files, not the diocesan archives. They would have been in the diocesan archives in Venice or Vittorio Veneto only if he left his papers to one of those dioceses in his will; in which case they would have gone there only after his death. Luciani kept his personal collection of notes in various notebooks and agendas.

Second, these personal files were indeed taken from Venice to Rome very shortly after John Paul I’s election, but it was at the Pope’s own request. He entrusted the work to one of his own secretaries, Don Caro Bolzan, who arrived at the Vatican with them on September 2. (10) John Paul I very much wanted to use this notes for his talks as Pope. After he died, these files were returned to his family, as Edoardo Luciani and his wife testified to me personally.

Third, if Vatican officials tried to suppress evidence of this text, they once again did a very poor job. The talk was published from the original typescript transcription of the talk, which had been recorded on audio tape. A copy of this transcript was also in Luciani’s personal files, with corrections in his own hand. The work appeared as Il Buon Samaritano by the Edizioni Messaggero in Padua two years after Luciani’s death in 1980, (11) and republished in the Opera Omnia in 1988-89. Both of these versions the precise passage on birth control cited by Hutchison.

This stuff only makes headway because people seem to just naturally assume that the Vatican censors papal writings. This is especially true for John Paul I, because so many people have this odd habit of reading their own pet ideas into him.

This seems all the more plausible to some because of the repeated claims, even in supposedly reputable authors, that the Vatican “censored” Pope John Paul I’s talks as Pope, and changed his words before they appeared in L’Osservatore Romano. But is it really possible for the Vatican newspaper alter a Pope’s writings without anyone knowing it?

Stay tuned for the third installment.

NOTES

(1) Lucien Gregoire, Murder in the Vatican p. 128.

(2) The original Latin text is from the Acta Apostolica Sedis, LX (1978):691 99; the translation is mine.

(3) Gregoire, Murder in the Vatican, p. 13.

(4) L’Osservatore Romano, September 28, 1978. Once again, the translation of the original Italian text is mine.

(5) Gregoire, Murder in the Vatican, p. 9.

(6) Gregoire,Murder in the Vatican, p. 23.

(7) Gregoire, Murder in the Vatican, p. 16.

(8) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 147.

(9) Robert Hutchison, Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei (New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), p. 247.

(10) Msgr. Carlo Bolzan, I miei vescovi, cardinali, sommi pontefici (Privately published by the author, 1981).

(11) For the history of this text, see Il Buon Samaritano (Padova: Edizioni Messaggero, 1980, introduction.

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009, by Lori and is filed under "Catholic Social Teaching, Church issues, Pope John Paul I ". You can leave a response here, or send a Trackback from your own site.