Will the real Pope John Paul Please Stand up (Part III)
Here, on the 31st anniversary of John Paul I’s death, is my last post in this series. Don forget to check out my Investigation of the Death of Pope John Paul I as well. My apologies for the lack of greater documentation here; I desperately wanted to get this up today and had very little time.
So it’s clear that the Vatican didn’t snatch up all copies of Luciani’s writings and lock them up in the Vatican archives. But didn’t it massively censor his writings as Pope?
As I’ve said, the idea that the Vatican can and does censor and hush up everything and anything is a widespread assumption. It’s catnip to conspiracy theorists, especially those who hate the Church. These people wildly exaggerate the power of the Vatican. Still, the Vatican Press Office and other papal spokespeople do have some power over the way the Pope’s thoughts are presented to the world. But this is also overblown.
Take a recent one: the controversy over the Vatican press spokesman trying to soften Pope Benedict’s speech about condoms on the plane to Africa. But this was only a matter of a few words, and there was certainly no radical change in meaning. And these things were all noticed and commented about instantly, and incessantly in the press! Certainly if anything on the scale that Yallop, Gregoire and others suggest had taken place with John Paul I, it would have become known right away. But no one at the time reported the Vatican massively altering or withholding John Paul I’s remarks; the few things that did take place were of another order entirely, as I’ll explain later. But first let’s examine the falsehoods that have been put forward.
A cover-up on birth control?
One of the main contentions is that the Vatican not only locked up Luciani’s previous writings, but carried out a disinformation campaign downplaying his earlier stance on birth control after he became Pope. David Yallop started this, but other writers have taken it up.
The background for this is this: In the spring of 1968, after the papal birth control commission had completed its work, Pope Paul was somewhat dissatisfied with the results. He asked Cardinal Urbani, the then Patriarch of Venice, and the Bishops of the Veneto (Luciani among them) to provide him with their opinion on the subject. After they discussed the matter at a meeting, Luciani drafted the document on behalf of the other bishops, and it was sent to the Pope. It did not reflect just his own ideas, but those of the other bishops as well. The document’s exact contents are not known because it has never been published, but it was never intended to be published. It was for the Pope’s eyes only. (Some informed opinion about its contents is available, but I prefer to reserve discussion of that to my forthcoming biography of John Paul I). Later on, that summer, when Cardinal Urbani visited the Pope, Paul had expressed admiration for the document, and Urbani told him Luciani had written it (1)
When Luciani was elected Pope himself, Henri de Riedmatten, who had been secretary to the papal commission on birth control, refuted widespread press reports that Luciani had served on Pope Paul’s birth control commission. This is true — he never served on the commission. Riedmatten also denied the reports that Luciani had written a letter to Paul VI on the subject, saying that he would have known if the Pope had received such a letter. David Yallop wrote about this:
This sort of denial is characteristic of the duplicity that abounds in the Curia. The Luciani document went to Rome via Cardinal Urbani and therefore bore the cardinal’s signature. To deny that there existed a document actually signed by Luciani is technically correct. To deny that Luciani on behalf of his fellow bishops in the Veneto region had forwarded such a document to the Pope, was an iniquitous lie. (2).
This statement is typical of Yallop’s hyperbole, as well as his misunderstanding of the Church; here he misunderstands the way documents of episcopal conferences are written. They don’t usually indicate who actually drafts them. If the document bore only the cardinal’s signature, (or even the signature of Luciani along with those of Cardinal Urbani all the other bishops), then how could de Riedmatten have known that Luciani had done the writing? In fact, it seems that Pope Paul himself did not even know this until Cardinal Urbani told him. Does Yallop really expect Church officials to be clairvoyant? Riedmatten’s purpose in speaking was to clear up false rumors in the press (a full-time job for someone who wants to take it on) and he did clear up some falsehoods. In the case of the document of the Veneto commission, he seems merely not to have had the proper information his disposal, and was probably confused because the press had spoken of a letter rather than an official document of an episcopal conference — but that is not “duplicity.”
Censoring the Wednesday audiences?
Yallop made a big deal out of how L’Osservatore Romano supposedly censored the texts of John Paul I’s Wednesday audiences. It is true that some of the things John Paul said at his audiences were not in the official texts of his talks, but that is because the Pope added these remarks to the prepared texts as he spoke, or changed the prepared text, not because someone later removed them.
What happened here was that for more or less the first time, I think, the Vatican was faced with a Pope who did a lot of improvisation in his talks. In fact, as a bishop in Vittorio Veneto and Venice, he rarely used written texts, except perhaps for his most important homilies on major occasions. He usually had an outline of what he wanted to say, and went from there. He could give long talks from memory–he had a very impressive, almost photographic memory. In fact, Luciani once wrote an article in Venice in which he admitted: “Most of the time I prepare [my homilies], but I don’t manage to write them down, for lack of time.” (3)
In my study and translation of his writings, I have noted that he often expanded and added material to his sermons and conferences after he gave them. That’s because in Vittorio Veneto and Venice he often had a few weeks’ time before he had to give his works to the diocesan bulletin, which appeared monthly or every two months (Compare this to the Vatican where the Pope’s talks had to appear in L’Osservatore Romano the same day). In Vittorio Veneto and Venice he gave many talks with children that were basically question and answer sessions, and were largely improvised.
Not surprisingly, he kept up the same thing as Pope. That is, he readily delivered his talks in the formal style without change, he even used the Papal “we.” But his audience talks and the Sunday Angelus addressed were different.
In fact Cardinal (then Archbishop) Caprio, who was the sostituto at the Vatican Secretariat of State, recalled how for John Paul I’s first Angelus talk on the day after his election, he asked the Pope for the text to deliver to Osservatore Romano and Vatican Radio, and John Paul casually replied, “I never read my talks, I’m not myself when I do. So that I won’t be tempted to, I only make a few notes.” He nevertheless complied with Caprio’s wishes by writing down what he had said from memory, and when Caprio compared it with the recording made by Vatican Radio, he found they were exactly the same. (4) However, as time went on, as Caprio recalled, John Paul began supplying the written text in advance so it could be published in time in L’Osservatore Romano; he had to get over the habit he had as a bishop.
In fact, you will notice if you watch the video of his Wednesday audiences, you will notice that even when he had a written text, he didn’t speak from the text, but from memory. His secretary, Fr. Lorenzi also sat next to him with the text; Fr. Greeley said he saw the original typescript with the Pope’s last-minute insertions written in the margins. (5)
There was one occasion when there was a major discrepancy in the Pope’s words as his spoke them and in L’Osservatore Romano. This was on August 30, 1978, when John Paul I gave a more personal talk to the cardinals. There was a prepared text, the final version of which was done by someone in the Secretariat of State (the usual practice for Popes), but the Pope wasn’t too happy with the style. The talk was delivered to L’Osservatore Romano at 11:00, just at the Pope began speaking, and the staff immediately began typesetting it for the 3 p.m. edition. Vatican Radio had a hookup ready for the audio feed, in connection with the private Italian station GR2. But then John Paul discarded the prepared text and started speaking extemporaneously. He made all the same points as in the prepared text, just in his own style, as the prepared text was even then being distributed to the journalists in the Vatican press room.
But the Vatican feed did not go through, and only Gr2 was able to record the speech. Journalists listening to GR2’s 12:30 p.m. news broadcast of the recorded talk, began calling up the station demanding, “Just what did you transmit? We don’t have this text!” Vatican radio had to resort to broadcasting the speech from GR2’s recording on the later news at 2:30, even though the completely different text had already been published in L’Osservatore Romano. (6)
This was due more to accident and error than anything. Oddly enough, the Vatican (prepared) version of the talk is still the “official one” and was never replaced by the other in printed compilations of John Paul I’s works, but disdain for the Pope’s simple style was certainly not the reason, since the Vatican paper printed all his other talks in the same style without changes. In fact for the first of the Wednesday audience talks on September 6, for which the Pope once again did not have a written text in advance, L’Osservatore Romano noted, “The Holy Father, John Paul I, improvised a discourse, which we are reproducing as we have taken it from his spoken voice” (dalla sua viva voce). This version, when compared with the recording, is quite exact. (7)
Yallop claimed he Pope’s remarks on drug abuse at his third Wednesday audience were “censored” by the Vatican newspaper. True these remarks weren’t in the official text of his talk as printed in the paper, because once again they were an addition, but all Yallop had to do was to look at the text of the story reporting the audience on the same page; he would have found that not only were the Pope’s remarks on drug abuse reported in full there, but special attention was drawn to them by the headline! (8)
It is true that once in a while there was a discrepancy, as I’ve said, but this was not due to someone changing what the Pope said, but to the Pope himself changing the text. If the papal “we” did not appear in the Pope’s remarks but did later appear in the official version published in L’Osservatore Romano, as did happen, this was not because someone at the Vatican paper changed it to read the way he wanted. The journalists simply printed the official text they were given; it was the Pope himself who made the alterations. I don’t see a single case in John Paul I’s papacy in which anyone in the Vatican deliberately changed anything he said after he said it. Most of all, the substance of his words was never altered.
The Vatican and Pope John Paul I
Most of all, the general impression that the Vatican as a whole disdained John Paul I’s simple style is false. Cardinal Caprio, for instance, told an interviewer who asked what he remembered most fondly about John Paul I, answered: “His audiences. John Paul I was a real catechist, a real pastor. His meetings with the people were a source of joy.” (9) There were differences of opinion, and the sniping monsignori cited by Cornwell certainly existed, but I can’t imagine any Pope for whom there would be no criticism. But I have read almost the whole of the Osservatore Romano coverage of John Paul I’s papacy (I bet Yallop didn’t do that; he never cites dates or page numbers or headlines or anything else that would indicate that he did). The paper was full of praise from beginning to end for the Pope’s simple style. As journalists, the staff of the paper were obviously delighted to have a Pope who for once, provided good copy! As I’ve already previously recorded Luciani’s secretary from Venice, Don Diego Lorenzi, vividly recalled a reporter from the Vatican paper saying to him in wonder, “However did you manage to hide this man from all of humanity for so many years?” (10)
Unfortunately, he remains all too hidden still. But I’m going to make sure it doesn’t always stay this way.
(1) Kay Withers, “Pope John Paul I and Birth Control.” America, 24 March 1979, pp. 233 34.
(2 Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 168.
(3) “Pane profetico, pane amaro,” article in Il Gazzettino, February 27, 1971, Opera, 5:171.
(4) Interview with Cardinal Caprio, “E’ stato un vero pastore,” 30 Giorni (September 1993): 42; cf. comments by Caprio in Nicolini, Trentatre Giorni., 3rd ed., p. 134.
(5) Andrew Greeley, The Making of the Popes 1978, p. 170.
(6) Napoli and Marcucci, Giovanni Paolo I: Papa per trentatre giorni (Bologna: Cappelli, 1978), pp. 66-67. A transcription of the Pope’s actual remarks was printed in Lucio D’Orazi, Tre mesi per tre papi (Bologna: Ponte Nuovo, 1983), pp. 337-39.
(7) L’Osservatore Romano, September 7, 1978, p. 1.
(8) L’Osservatore Romano, September 21, 1978, p. 1.
(9) “E’ stato un vero pastore,” p. 42
(10) Diego Lorenzi, “Luciani, una lezione vivente per il mondo,” interview in Gente Veneta, September(?) 2003; this article is online in Italian at www.amicipapaluciani.it/dondiego.htm.
