On Pilgrimage

Was Pope John Paul I Murdered? Part VI

Because of a great overload of work, I have had to divide my study of Yallop’s latest work into two parts. I’ll put up the second one as soon as possible.

Update (October 11): I have come across more information in my research, referring to the “Cardinal Vagnozzi dossier” and the source for the information on it, so I have updated this section to reflect that..

In 2007, Yallop brought out a new edition of In God’s Name. The book is still attracting attention and sales. Little seems to have been changed or revised in the book, except for the new introduction and Postscript, in which Yallop does impart some new information, and answers his critics. I will pick out a few points to answer from both of those areas.

New Information?

Yallop says that his original sources are now dead. He still doesn’t name them directly, but he does bring forth some actual names of people who he says know the truth about the changes in the Curia that the Pope was supposedly going to make. So what do these people say? And does it support Yallop’s thesis? Yallop’s main points:

“Father Germano Pattaro brought from Venice by Pope John Paul I as an adviser has stated that among the documents that the Pope was studying were his notes covering the range of changes he had discussed with Cardinal Villot a few hours before retiring for the night.” (1)

As usual, Yallop’s statement is completely undocumented, so his exact source for this is not known. There is to my knowledge, however, only one place where Pattaro spoke of his meetings with John Paul I, and that was to Venetian author Camillo Bassotto, who reprinted an account of those conversations in his book Il mio cuore è ancora a Venezia (Venice: Adriatica, 1990) – an account that extends over more than twenty-five pages. Nowhere in those twenty-five pages is there any discussion of dismissing Marcinkus from the Vatican Bank getting rid of Freemasons or dramatic changes in the Curia. (2) No doubt Bassotto’s book is what Yallop meant, because he also mentions it elsewhere. But he could not have gotten his information from this book. He doesn’t seem to have gotten it directly from Pattaro, who died in 1986. So the information Yallop prides himself on apparently doesn’t exist.

“. . . Camilo [sic] Bassotto is also on record as having discussed with Luciani the various changes he was proposing to make.” (3)

This is another example of Yallop’s carelessness about details; he is wrong about Bassotto himself having had any discussion with the Pope on this subject. It was actually an anonymous “person in Rome,” who some people think was a highly placed prelate in the Curia, who sent Bassotto his notes of his discussions with Pope John Paul I in May 1989, and which, once again were published in his book about the Pope (4). There have been attempts to identify this person, none conclusive. (5) Once again, Yallop ends up using an anonymous source, though at least the actual text of this one is available.

I myself have some problems with the credibility with this part of Bassotto’s work. Once again, there are some twenty pages of lengthy reconstructed conversation; it’s not clear if any written notes were taken. And if the person in question really was a friend of and close to John Paul I, and specifically wanted to defend the late Pope, as he claims, why did he not allow his name to be published?

Yet the tone of the remarks and many of the details are far more consonant with Albino Luciani’s character than anything that Yallop puts forward. The great majority of this text is spiritual in tone, and in it the Pope supposedly discusses his plans for encyclicals, his upcoming travels, etc.

This account does, in fact describe a discussion between the Pope and Villot about the Vatican Bank. However, the details don’t agree at all with those of Yallop’s sources. The discussions supposedly took place about three weeks into his pontificate (roughly September 16-17), and not the night before his death, when Yallop says notification of these changes was given to Villot. The Pope is recorded as saying to his confidant:

One afternoon, before leaving me, Villot spoke to me about the IOR, saying to me: ‘the IOR is a hot potato which is sizzling in everyone’s hands. Some people may end up burning themselves.’ I answered that the Church must be transparent in money matters, it must work in the light of day. Its credibility is at stake.

I am also telling this to you, (6) the Church cannot have power, nor must it possess riches. I know that the Institute for Religious Works was established in its present form by Paul VI, in order to aid, assist and promote the works of religion and charity throughout the world. I want it to be the bishops and cardinals, through their representatives, who decide what to do about the IOR: whether to maintain it or suppress it, and what new structure to give it. I ask that its actions all be licit and clean and in harmony with the Gospel spirit. The world must know what it is, what the IOR does: what are its real ends, how the money is gathered and how it is spent. We must achieve transparency in the Vatican economic account books: we must publish the balances audited in their entirety.

The president of the IOR [i.e. Marcinkus] must be replaced: as soon as you think the time is right. It must be done in the proper way and with respect for the dignity of the person. A bishop cannot be chairman of and govern a bank. The See that is called the See of Peter, the See which is also called the Holy See, cannot degrade itself to the point that it mingles its financial activities with those of bankers, for whom the only law which holds good is profit, and where usury is practiced, a kind that is permitted and accepted, but it is still usury. We have lost the sense of evangelical poverty: we have made ours the rules of the world. I have already suffered bitterness and insults as a bishop because of events connected with money. I don’t want it to be repeated when I am Pope. The IOR must be completely reformed.

Don’t forget that Masonry, hidden or open, as the experts call it, has never died, it is more alive than ever. Just as that horrible thing called the Mafia has never died. They are two powers for evil. We must courageously set ourselves against their perverse actions. We must be vigilant, everyone: lay people, priests, and especially pastors, and bishops. We must protect the people of our communities. It is a subject that we will one day deal with more clearly in front of everyone. (7)

So this anonymous person not only has Villot in agreement with the Pope that something had to be done about the IOR, but actually being the first to broach the subject with him; in addition, he has the Pope saying that Marcinkus should be removed “as soon you [Villot] think the time is right” – in other words, no order by the Pope for an immediate removal of Marcinkus; it is left up to Villot’s discretion. Nor was the date given the last day of his life. Nowhere does the Pope speak of any wrongdoing on Marcinkus’ part. The reason is simply that a bishop should not run a bank.

The allusions to Masonry and the Mafia evidently refer to Gelli, Calvi and Sindona. However, this source has nothing about the long list of removals of Masons in the Curia that Yallop’s anonymous sources suggested to him. There is no evidence here that Villot objected to these changes, or John Paul distrusted him because he was a Mason. In fact, the source took pains to collect information from others in the Vatican who had spoken to Villot and who were able to confirm the admiration Villot had for the Pope and the close relationship between the two. In other words, more evidence that Villot could not have been involved in any conspiracy to kill the Pope – and his involvement, as I mentioned in Part IV, would be crucial if such a plan were to succeed. All in all, not very good evidence for any of Yallop’s theories. Yallop does not quote a single word from this source, yet brazenly contrives to make it support his theories when it does nothing of the kind.

This source does mention some changes that the Pope was planning to make in the Curia, but they did not have to do with getting rid of Freemasons, but simplifying the structures of the Church bureaucracy, and making it possible for the Pope to delegate some of the work to others. (8)

“Then there were others. Men such as Archbishop Giuseppe Caprio who had taken a leading role in the investigation ordered by the late Pope, or Monsignor Giovanni Angelo Abbo, the man chosen by the pope to replace Marcinkus, or Cardinal Ugo Poletti, the man the Pope planned to place in charge of the Florence archdiocese.” (9)

Yallop says that the authors of the Vatican memorandum about his book released in 1984, could have gained information from these men about the Pope’s plans. He himself conveniently comes out with their names after they are dead and cannot contradict him. (Msgr. Abbo, the secretary to the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See died in 1985, Cardinal Poletti in 1997, and Cardinal Caprio in 2005). Once again, Yallop gives no documentation of how he learned what these prelates supposedly knew.

But finally we come to Yallop’s triumphantly displayed “smoking gun.” He describes it as “the crucial dossier that the late Pope was studying shortly before his death. If there was ever within this entire affair a smoking gun it is the Vagnozzi dossier.” He goes on:

As of September 1978 Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi knew more about the inner workings of Vatican finances than anyone else in or out of the Vatican. From 1967 he had been in control of the Prefecture of the Economic Affairs of the Holy See. His role was comparable to that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom or the Auditor General in the United States. Vagnozzi had intimate knowledge of the Sindona and Calvi relationships with the Vatican and their various dealings with the Holy See. As recorded earlier in this book in 1968-69 Vagnozzi was still struggling to prise out many of the Vatican’s financial secrets that lay buried but long before Pope John Paul I was elected he had the answers.

When Albino Luciani sought an urgent investigation the information that Vagnozzi had acquired over a decade ensured that a highly detailed dossier was soon in the pope’s hands. Immediately after the discovery of the Pope’s body, the Vagnozzi report along with the papers covering the various changes were removed by Cardinal Villot, whose deputy Caprio was most certainly aware of the contents of that report. An indication of just how explosive the contents were can be gauged by the fact that Roberto Calvi subsequently became aware of the Vagnozzi report and its contents and after being offered a copy by a Vatican contact for three million dollars haggled the price down to one point two million dollars then kept the copy close to himself for the rest of his life. (10).

Once again, Yallop provides absolutely no documentation, especially for the part about Calvi. Given Yallop’s habitual lack of accuracy, not to mention his penchant for sheer fantasy, an intelligent reader might wonder what if anything can be believed of all this.

Yallop refers what the Pope was holding in his hands as the “Vagnozzi dossier.” For all that Yallop trumpets Vagnozzi’s importance in the Postscript, he apparently merited only a couple of brief mentions within the actual text of his book, even in the same new edition that contains this postscript. Both of these mentions detailed Vagnozzi’s work drawing up a balance sheet for the various departments of the Vatican for the Prefecture. He evidently had difficulty doing so. Through the juxtaposition of these ideas in the Postscript, the reader is lead to believe that the “secrets” that Vagnozzi was unearthing referred to Sindona and Calvi, in the book itself, they refer only to getting the departments to release the actual total on their balance sheets. In reality, the Vatican Bank was not under the authority or jurisdiction of the Prefecture. In Yallop’s book itself, there is nothing detailing Vagnozzi’s supposed intimate knowledge of the relations between Marcinkus and Sindona (11).

Here is what appear to be the real facts behind this from documented source. First, there is an account by long-time Vatican analyst, Benny Lai, who had close ties to a number of Curial cardinals. As head of the Prefecture for Economic affairs, Vagnozzi had for some years been coordinating the economic administrations of the various departments under his control, and putting together an annual balance based on income and expenditures. He had written his first report on this for Pope Paul VI in 1969, more or less consonant with the facts and date Yallop mentions. But it was nothing more than a balance sheet, concerned exclusively with the various departments of the Vatican under the Prefecture — which did not include the Vatican Bank.

During the pre-conclave period in August 1978, Vagnozzi had written, at the request of Cardinal Villot, a report or balance sheet of income and expenditures to inform the cardinals meeting in the General Congregations about the general financial state of the Holy See. This was the first time that information like this had been shared with the majority of the Sacred College. Most of the cardinals would not even have known if the Vatican was solvent or not, or what its operating budget was. Villot had instructed Vagnozzi, nevertheless, to not dwell on the value of the Vatican’s stock portfolio, real estate holdings and gold reserves. “The African cardinals,” he said, “would not understand these things, and would draw from them who knows what conclusions.”

Someone who actually was known to have been collecting information on the Vatican Bank, Marcinkus, and his relationship with Calvi and Sindona, was Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, who was a member of the Curia, but not directly a part of the financial administration. During the General Congregations, Palazzini challenged the parameters of the report Villot had asked for, and asked why the Vatican Bank was not under the Administration of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs, and presumably also why its affairs could not be reported on to the cardinals. Cardinal Villot had at first dismissed his request. In all probability, he didn’t consider discussion of a lightning-rod issue like the controversial Vatican Bank appropriate at a moment when all the cardinals needed to work for unity in electing a new Pope. But Palazzini pressed his case, and a commission of cardinals was selected to look into the matter: they eventually reported that the IOR was not under the administration of the Prefecture for Economic Affairs. (12).

Palazzini’s request was going to have to wait until later. No doubt he would have been eager to take up the matter with the new Pope. And Cardinal Luciani, who regularly attended the pre-conclave General Congregations, would have been sitting in on these discussions. But whether Palazzini or Vagnozzi ever spoke to John Paul I about his information either before or after his election, has never been made clear, and certainly not by Yallop. Nor does it seem that at the time of John Paul I’s election, either Palazini or Vagnozzi knew much about the IOR’s relationship with Sindona or Calvi; they were simply trying to find information.

I think that Yallop’s source for his information about Vagnozzi was ultimately the story told by Francesco Pazienza, an associate of Roberto Calvi, who later went to prison for his part in the Banco Ambrosiano affair. In his memoirs, published from prison, Pazienza said that he in 1981 he was asked to do some work for a faction in the Vatican that wanted to oust Marcinkus; Pazienza was asked to dig up dirt on him.

Pazienza went to a rather dubious contact of his own — a man named Giorgio Di Nunzio, who moved in P2 circles and who peddled Vatican gossip to the right-wing magazine Il Borghese. Di Nunzio claimed to be in possession of a dossier on Marcinkus and Sindona drawn up by Cardinal Vagnozzi, who had died the previous year (1980), before he had any chance to use the information himself. Instead of taking this information to the Vatican, Pazienza sold it to Calvi to the tune of 1.2 million dollars.

If this dossier genuinely contained any dirt about Marcinkus and Sindona, it would have been ideal fodder for Calvi, who was looking for every possible way to blackmail Marcinkus and the Vatican bank into continuing to participate in his schemes. Pazienza, a convicted criminal, who has changed his story a number of times, was probably the “Vatican contact” mentioned, though he he is a very dubious source of information.

This account of Pazienza’s memoirs was given by Philip Willan in his 2007 book The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi. (Willan, coincidently, was Yallop’s original researcher for In God’s Name). The account in Willan’s book, however, makes no mention of Pope John Paul I. Pazienza’ original memoir may contain more, but so far, there is no real credible credible information behind Yallop’s statement. (13)

However, at least one statement Yallop reported can be connected with Vagnozzi. Shortly after John Paul I’s election, Vagnozzi spoke to author Lai. They talked about how John Paul I seemed hemmed in by the Curia and Vagnozzi said: “I don’t know how long this state of affairs will last, because he has his own ideas and will want to implement them. They have told me he has no love for Marcinkus. He once came to Rome to speak his mind about the sale of the Banca Cattolica del Veneto, and Marcinkus treated him brusquely. We’ll see how it will end up.” (13). Here is a very clear summary of Yallop’s own version of the relationship between Luciani and Marcinkus. But not that it was based on a rumor – “they told me” (m’hanno detto) — who is “they? In short, he had heard a rumor. Nothing here is evidence that Vagnozzi had any direct information from conversations with the new Pope.

So in the first matter, that of new evidence about John Paul I’s supposed changes in the Church, Yallop basically provides nothing of value.

(To be continued)

_______________________________________________

NOTES

(1) Yallop, In God’s Name, 2007 ed., p. 319.

(2) Bassotto, Il mio cuore, pp. 121-147

(3) Yallop, In God’s Name, 2007 ed., p. 319.

(4) Bassotto, Il mio cuore, pp. 227-248.

(5) For instance, Jesus Lopez Saez, a Spanish priest who has two books of his own theorizing that the Pope was murdered, has carried out an investigation to determine the identity of Bassotto’s source. He believes that it was the late Cardinal Eduardo Pironio, who did live in the Vatican in 1989, and who was a friend of Luciani’s. However, he is unable, at least in my opinion, to provide any convincing evidence for this claim. See his The Day of Reckoning (English version of the Spanish original El Dia de Cuenta) at http://www.comayala.es/Libros/ddc2i/. Incidentally, if Yallop, who apparently doesn’t know Italian, read any version of Bassotto’s work, it was probably the English translation of long extracts from it that are available on this website, including most or all of the revelations of “the person in Rome.” It is the only English translation so far available, except for the extracts I am providing here. Interestingly, Yallop consistently misspells Camillo Bassotto’s first name as “Camilo,” which is, in fact, the Spanish version of his name, and which Lopez uses even in the English translation on the website.

(6) Because of the general lack of quotation marks, and the somewhat confusing editing of Bassotto’s book, it’s difficult to tell whether this sentence alone is part of the apparent aside to his confidant, or whether the following sentences were supposed to have been spoken to him as well, or to Villot. I am presuming it was to Villot, for there is no reason to believe the confidant could have been anyone with any authority to fire Marcinkus.

(7) Bassotto, Il mio cuore, pp. 237-38. One of my problems with the credibility of this source, in fact, is the space given to John Paul I speaking about Freemasonry as an power for evil in the world. I have studied his writings for more than twenty-five years, and have translated a great many of them, and I have never come across a single mention of Freemasonry good or bad, in them. He was certainly not the type to be obsessed about Freemasonry, as many of the traditionalists are. That is why I think that the words attributed to him here were more than likely filtered through the sensibility and thought of the anonymous confidant, whoever he may have been. At most, the Pope’s original comment referred to the Masonic organization P2, and was expanded in transmission to Masonry in general.

(8) Bassotto, Il mio cuore, pp. 229-30.

(9) Yallop, In God’s Name, 2007 ed., p. 319.

(10) Yallop, In God’s Name, 2007 ed, pp. 319-320.

(11) Yallop, In God’s Name, 2007 ed, pp. 81, 94-95.

(12) Lai, I segreti del Vaticano, pp. 137-42. Cardinal Palazzini himself later testified in the Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy trial that he had indeed pressed for access to the IOR’s accounts at the time of John Paul I’s election, but had not succeeded. See the Banco Ambrosiano bankruptcy verdict, April 16, 1992, pp. 3081-85; cited in Philip Willan, The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi (London: Robinson, 2007), p. 187.

(13) Willan, The Last Supper, p. 143.

(14) Lai, I segreti del Vaticano, p. 159.

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Was Pope John Paul I Murdered? Part V

There is still one more part of my original work that I feel I should post before I get to Yallop’s newest claims. I had originally intended to save the question of the true cause of the Pope’s death until later, but I now think that both this and the question of why there was no autopsy should be put here so that my later analysis of Yallop and Cornwell will be clearer. But I needed some time to revise this part slightly. Then a few days ago, I came across some information, soon to be published, that includes some very interesting details confirming what I already knew, and throwing new light on the whole question. I’ll include or link to that information when it’s published. Sorry to be so mysterious! In the meantime, here are my original findings.

Update, October 22, 2008: Unfortunately, the information I was hoping to put here has not yet been published. I hope to track down and interview the person who has it myself in the near future.

The Lack of an Autopsy

Cardinal Villot was widely blamed for not having ordered an autopsy on the Pope at the time of his death, and this is, of course, one of Yallop’s major causes of suspicion against him. What’s the truth here? Did Villot somehow decide unilaterally not to have an autopsy, and make the decision on the morning of the Pope’s death or even before his “murder”? Certainly if he really knew of, or had participated in the Pope’s murder by poison, he would have had to be absolutely sure there was no autopsy.

In fact, this is very far from the case. Villot himself submitted the question to the first General Congregation of cardinals meeting on September 30, the morning after the Pope’s body was discovered. He informed the cardinals that the doctors who had examined the Pope’s body wanted to carry out an autopsy so that they could sign the death certificate, which had not yet been published. He wanted their opinion. This was noted by Benny Lai, an Italian journalist who was a Vatican “insider” and who had access to some of the cardinals in the Curia. (1) Clearly this was not the action of someone who wanted to be 100 percent certain of not having an autopsy! The cardinals discussed the question, and there were various opinions for and against. Some thought a good idea, given the climate of public opinion in Rome. Others didn’t want to set a precedent, and thought that the provisions of the Apostolic Constiutions on the death and election of a Pope should be strictly adhered to – and these made no provisions for an autopsy. On the other hand, according to the same source, the cardinals didn’t consider themselves competent to confirm the medical diagnosis on their own.

In fact, steps were taken preserve the Pope’s body on the evening of September 29, before any question of an autopsy was publicly raised. An autopsy after that time would perhaps not have been impossible, but was rather impractical. And even though public opinion was taken into account, the cardinals themselves, including Villot, did not seem to have had any suspicions of foul play.

In addition, Vatican spokesmen insisted several times to the press in the days following John Paul’s death that an autopsy would not satisfy those who were clamoring for it. Since this reference was probably to the traditionalists, it was made with good reason. An autopsy may have established the cause of John Paul’s death with medical certainty, but it would probably not have stopped the absurd murder plot theory that is still being spread today, since the fanatics who believe that John Paul I was murdered do so on ideological, not medical grounds. There are, of course, other people whose confusion and suspicion are not ideologically motivated, and who would have welcomed some medical proof of the cause of Pope John Paul’s death. But although it is unfortunate that an autopsy was not performed, and also unfortunate that the Vatican rarely seems to give as much importance as it should to public opinion, there is no reason to think that the decision not to have an autopsy was made in order to cover up a murder.

The True Cause of the Pope’s Death

There is one final question: What was the real cause of the Pope’s death? Yallop claims that the lack of an autopsy is suspicious, and that John Paul I, who was, he claims, in excellent health, and had never suffered from heart trouble, could hardly have died of a heart attack, as the Vatican said.

According to the statement released by the Vatican, Dr. Buzzonetti said that the Pope’s sudden death “could be related to acute myocardial infarction,” (2) As I indicated above, the doctors were uncertain about the cause of death and wanted clarification. Dr. Buzzonetti’s original opinion was evidently just a rough guess that would have required an autopsy to clarify. In reaching his first opinion, he relied primarily on the age of the victim, the external appearance of the body and the suddenness of death. According to later interviews by Lorenzi and Magee with John Cornwell and others, they did state that the Pope had chest pains the night before, but never told the doctor about this (I will talk about these when I discuss Cornwell’s book). There is an element of doubt obvious in Buzzonetti’s diagnosis, which is natural, since he made it from external evidence only, and without having any exact knowledge of the Pope’s previous medical history.

It is true that Pope John Paul had never shown any cardiopathic symptoms in the medical tests carried out at various times during his life, and his low blood pressure made the development of coronary heart disease unlikely. Perhaps it is true that to someone who was acquainted with Albino Luciani’s medical history, a diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction would not have been immediately apparent. But Dr. Buzzonetti did not have this knowledge. Yallop did an investigation into the Pope’s medical history, and trumpets the fact that he had no heart trouble as evidence for murder. He ignored the fact that there are a number of other causes of sudden death, including some that John Paul I was susceptible to. Yallop was also either ignorant of or kept from his readers many of the details of Luciani’s medical history. Now let’s turn to those details and those possible causes of death.

Yallop failed to mention the fact that Luciani suffered from hardening of the arteries, or arteriosclerosis, a contributing factor in heart attacks and strokes. In January 1978, Luciani had told a priest in Venice that arteriosclerosis had been causing his difficulties with his vision, and that he thought it would mean “a quick old age” for him. (3) While arteriosclerosis is most common in those with high blood pressure, it is by no means confined to these people. Yallop claims that Luciani’s low blood pressure lessened his chances of a heart attack. Perhaps this is true, but as Dr. Baima Ballome explains, his low blood pressure might mean that he was “inclined to collapse and thrombosis.” (4) That is, he may have been particularly subject to the formulation of a thrombus, or blood clot, which can block a blood vessel, causing what is known as an embolism. It is an embolism which usually causes myocardial infarction, which is the blockage of a blood vessel in the heart. One form of stroke, a cerebral embolism, is caused by a clot blocking the arteries in the brain, and a pulmonary embolism is a clot which blocks the pulmonary artery leading to the lungs. Both of these types of embolisms rank with myocardial infarction among the leading causes of sudden death.

Luciani did suffer from such an embolism in a blood vessel in his eye in 1975. According to Dr. Rama, who treated him for it, it may have been that sign of a vascular problem that could have caused his death. After explaining this to Yallop, Rama told him, “I was very surprised that they did not ask me to come and examine the Pope’s body.” (5) It is amazing that after hearing from the Pope’s doctor that he had such a condition, and publishing the information in his book, Yallop still thought that a death due to natural causes was unlikely.

Msgr. Senigaglia, who was Luciani’s secretary from 1970-76 in Venice, and in fact had known him since 1964, when he was bishop of Vittorio Veneto, told me that the embolism he suffered at that time was probably linked to circulatory problems, although nothing showed up on the medical tests that were performed afterwards in Venice to show the exact cause. He explained that some years before while bishop of Vittorio Veneto, Luciani had experienced rheumatic back pains, of the type that are often linked to circulatory disturbances, and in fact, he had worn a body corset for a time because of them. (This is another thing that Yallop neglects to mention, in spite of his frequent boast that he is the only author to have Luciani’s compete medical history). Senigaglia also said that for a long time after coming to Venice, Luciani had not suffered from these disturbances, but that he began experiencing them again in 1978, including some circulatory disturbances in his legs. (6) Then in the spring, at a meeting of the bishops of the Triveneto, he told his friend Archbishop Gottardi of Trent that he had been having some chest pains. He said he didn’t know whether the pain had to do with heart trouble or his respiratory problems, which dated back to an episode of severe viral pneumonia he had gone through as a young priest (7) It was these various pains, including swollen ankles and knees, that prompted Luciani to spend some time at the Stella Maris Institute on the Lido, a seaside resort in Venice, at the end of July and beginning of August 1978, less than a month before was elected Pope. His doctor, Dr. Da Ros, had advised him to do some sunbathing, because this could relieve rheumatic symptoms. (8) At the same time, Luciani went to a hospital for some medical tests, but they did not indicate the cause of the disturbances. (9) Yet is it impossible that these circulatory disturbances may have led to his death a few weeks later, especially when several hours before his death he experienced a recurrence of the pains? Yallop says nothing of these pains, and maintains instead that this stay in the hospital was intended “to counter-act a possible recurrence of gallstones.” But he does not say where he got this information. (10)

Circulatory problems also run in the Luciani family. In an interview he gave after Yallop’s book was published, Edoardo Luciani reacted to the charges that his brother’s death was not due to natural causes by saying:

Sudden deaths are frequent in our family. My great-grandfather and two of my aunts died suddenly, without ever having felt any pain: he while he was putting wood in the fireplace, one of my aunts while she was gathering potatoes in the fields, and the other while she was working in the kitchen. They were all around 65 or 66 years old–which was my brother’s age. I am convinced that had he stayed in Venice, nothing would have changed. His time had come, that’s all there is to it. When I heard about his death, I thought right away about my great-grandfather and my aunts . . . I have never had the least perplexity about his death. (11)

It is therefore quite possible that John Paul I may have died from a cerebral or pulmonary embolism. The Pope’s niece Lina, who is a doctor, said: “According to my professor of pathological anatomy at the Gemelli [Mario Alberto Dina] he heard that when they were preserving the body they had great difficulty injecting the fluids. This could be further indication of massive blockage in the pulmonary artery.” (12)

A conversation between the Pope and Sister Vincenza on the last day of his life, September 28, confirms this theory as well. The sister had been in Luciani’s household for about 12 years. She was a trained nurse and often reminded him about taking his medication. She said that she had noticed that morning that the Pope’s hands and feet were swollen, and that he confessed to her that his knees were swollen as well; a sign that he earlier troubles had returned. Nevertheless, he didn’t think it serious enough to see the doctor about, at least not immediately. Sister Vincenza was well acquainted with the Pope’s medical history, and she told Venetian author Camillo Bassotto: “I am of the opinion that the Pope died of a pulmonary embolism and not of an heart attack.” (13)

Msgr. Senigaglia also told me that he thought an embolism was a likely answer, because of Luciani’s medical history. He thought that the effect of stress on a man with John Paul’s sensitive personality may have helped to trigger it. “It had been a summer when he hadn’t had a vacation,” he said. “Then there was the added stress of the papacy. It could also have been the effect of fatigue.” He added: “There was no need for an autopsy. The family didn’t request it. If there had been the least doubt about a death that was not natural, I’m sure the Vatican would have had an autopsy done. But no one thought of a violent death. Given his [the Pope's] personality type and the family precedents, there was no problem.”(13)

Yet in spite of all the evidence provided by the Pope’s doctor, his secretaries, his nurse and his family, Yallop still stands by his opinion that John Paul I was in perfect health when elected Pope. During the course of a debate on Italian television with Father Lorenzi in October 1987, Yallop dismissed Lorenzi’s statement that the Pope had experienced chest pain a few hours before he died as a mere fantasy. Yet Yallop offered nothing that would support his own theory. (15)

There are many other errors in very simple facts, as well as many contradictory statements in In God’s Name. Many of Yallop’s statements are heavily loaded with hyperbole and a large number are partially or completely undocumented. He also distorted or even ignored statements by important witnesses which did not happen to suit his theories. But Yallop’s greatest mistake was to trust his anonymous sources blindly. In order to measure the usefulness of the information he gathered from them, he would have had to have been better acquainted with affairs in the Catholic Church, especially with the persistent campaign by the traditionalists and the right in general against the Curia, but, as he himself states, he was almost totally ignorant about the Vatican when he began his investigation. (16) This is perhaps the most telling point against him: ignorance. Yallop has at least one thing in common with the authors of many other recent sensational works about the Vatican: their ignorance of the history and theology of the Catholic Church. Those who write about the Church should have at least a little bit of knowledge about it first. Their failure to realize or admit this has caused untold damage.

_________________________________________

NOTES

(1) Benny Lai, I segreti del Vaticano, pp. 163-64.

(2) See the declaration in L’Osservatore Romano, 29 September 1978, p. 1. Drs. Renato Buzzonetti and Mario Fontana did eventually sign the death certificate, stating the death to be by “acute myocardial infarction” but it was not immediately released by the Vatican. It was later published in the Acta Apostolica Sedis for 1978.

(3) Arturo D’Onofrio, Giovanni Paolo I: Il Papa del sorriso (Napoli-Roma: La Redenzione, 1978), p. 198.

(4) Baima Ballone, “Si distrugge da solo,” p. 17.

(5) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 255.

(6) Personal interview with Mario Senigaglia, November 2, 1985.

(7) Gottardi related his conversation with Luciani in La Vita Trentina (Trent), September 30, 1978; quoted in Huber, Giovanni Paolo I: o la vocazione di Giovanni Battista (Rome: Edizioni “Pro Sanctitate”, 1979), p. 167.

(8) Bassotto, Il mio cuore, p. 203.

(9) Personal interview with Mario Senigaglia, November 2, 1985.

(10) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 247.

(11) Edoardo Luciani, “Mio fratello non è stato ucciso,” p. 92.

(12) Interview with Lina Petri in Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 243. I have some difficulty with the accuracy of many of Cornwell’s statements; even his translations of his interviews are often not correct (more about this later); in this case, however, the statement has been confirmed by other family members and friends of the Pope. According to Don Licio Boldrin, a priest from the Veneto who was a friend of John Paul I, indicates that when the preserving injections were performed, a swelling was found on the Pope’s arm that could indicate the presence of an embolism; Licio Boldrin, “Ma come è morto Giovanni Paolo?” Papa Luciani Humilitas, 2 (August 1985), p. 11.

(13) Bassotto, Il mio cuore, p. 212.

(14) Personal interview with Mario Senigaglia, November 2, 1985.

(15) Orazio Petrosilli in Il Tempo, October 4, 1987; Willi, In Namen des Teufels?, p. 147.

(16) Yallop ignorant about the Vatican: “Le incredibili rivelazioni,” p. 5.

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Was Pope John Paul I Murdered? (Part IV)

Update: September 16. Just two days after I posted this istallment, with lengthy excerpts from a long-ago interview of mine with Msgr. Mario Senigaglia, John Paul I’s secretary when he was Patriarch of Venice, I learned that Don Mario, as he was always called, died in Venice on August 9. He was 70 years old. He first became aquainted with Albino Luciani, then bishop of Vittorio Veneto in 1964, when Senigaglia was secretary to Cardinal Urbani, then patriarch of Venice, and the two bishops were attending the Second Vatican Council together. When Luciani was named patriarch of Venice himself in 1969, he asked Don Mario to be his secretary as well. Don Mario served Luciani faithfully in that job for almost seven years, until Luciani gave him his long desired parish work in 1976, as pastor at Santo Stefano, one of the largest parishes in the city. He remained there for more than 30 years.

I would have dearly loved for Don Mario to be able to read what I have put here, because he was very upset by Yallop’s book. But I hadn’t yet had time to inform him. I also greatly hoped to be able to see him again if I returned to Italy to continue my research. I’m truly saddened by his loss, but grateful for the kindness he showed in granting me those two interviews in 1985, between pressing obligations in the parish to which he was so devoted. I’m happy that he was able to write a great deal about “his” patriarch and Pope over the years, especially for Humilitas, the Italian periodical devoted to him. These writings were also an act of great devotion to this great man and to the truth. May he rest in peace with Papa Luciani.

An Inside Job?

Yallop tried as hard as he could to prove Marcinkus’ involvement in the murder plot, and failed. But Marcinkus is not the most important potential conspirator. After all, he was not in the Pope’s bedroom that morning. But Cardinal Villot was. If there were a murder plot, Cardinal Villot’s involvement would be absolutely essential, since every single decision, including verifying the Pope’s death, the disposition of his body and his burial was in his hands as Camerlengo and the interim head of the Holy See. The conspirators would have to depend on him to make absolutely certain that there would be no autopsy, and that no evidence of the murder would remain. But what motives could the cardinal have had participating in a plot to kill the Pope?

Yallop considered Villot his main suspect partly because Villot was also the main suspect for his anonymous traditionalist sources, who wanted to demonstrate that the Cardinal murdered the Pope to keep him from carrying out his plans to put conservatives in all the key posts in the Vatican and the Italian hierarchy. Yallop faithfully reports their version; he says that Villot called the Pope’s policies “a betrayal of Paul’s will” and “a triumph for the restoration” — a word-for-word quotation from the story that Gennari gathered, which appears to be linked to the ANSA story. (1) Yallop says that his sources also told him of the Pope’s supposed plans to remove Cardinal Baggio, who was also accused of being a Mason, as head of the Congregation of Bishops. (2) The haters of Masonry who thought that Baggio and other prelates were keeping the “truth” about the Lefebvre movement from the Pope, were hoping that once Baggio was out of the way, the Pope might decide to re-instate Lefebvre as a bishop. Yallop obviously did not understand his sources’ explanation of the motives for the Pope’s “murder,” since throughout his book, he portrayed John Paul I as a liberal champion of Vatican II. Or he preferred to ignore this contradiction, as he did many others. And as has already been made clear, John Paul I was not a supporter of the traditionalists and would not have made any of these changes to begin with.

Yallop himself seems to have had little interest in the traditionalists’ theories; he preferred to concentrate on P2, Calvi and Sindona as the masterminds of the plot. If Yallop is correct, Villot would have to have been under direct orders from Gelli or Gelli’s lieutenant Ortolani in order to make sure the plot was carried through. But Yallop absolutely fails to provide any evidence of a connection between Villot and these men. He doesn’t even seem to try very hard. Villot was not on the list of P2 members, as I showed in the previous instalment. Yallop only says vaguely that since Villot was the head of APSA, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, which he claims helped bring Sindona into the Vatican world, then he must have been involved with Sindona. But he offers absolutely no proof for his involvement. (The administration of APSA is completely separate from that of the Vatican Bank).

A Rebel on Birth Control?

Yallop himself seems to have been uneasy about the plausibility of the motives he brings forth for Cardinal Villot’s supposed complicity in the murder plot, so he adds another one: the Secretary of State was determined to prevent the Pope from carrying out his plans to liberalize the Church’s teaching on birth control. (He apparently did not notice that this was in contradiction to the statements of his sources that the Pope was planning some very conservative changes — and this is further evidence of Yallop’s lack of understanding of Church issues).

Almost immediately after Cardinal Luciani’s election, the news stories began to pour out suggesting that as John Paul I, he might change the Church’s stand on birth control. This was based on the fact that while bishop of Vittorio Veneto in the 1960’s, and the special papal commission on birth control had been set up, Luciani had studied the problem of in great depth. More than once he had expressed a hope that a good pastoral solution could be found that would correspond to the hopes of many couples that the pill and other forms of artificial contraception might be allowed. (3)

In 1968, Pope Paul VI, dissatisfied with the commission’s conclusions, asked the episcopal conferences of Lombardy and the Veneto (where Luciani’s diocese was located) for their advice. Luciani drafted the document that came out of the meeting of the two conferences and that was sent to the pope. The text, a private internal Church document, has never been released. But those who knew him have said that it expressed a great deal more openness than Humanae Vitae showed. And yet, when the encyclical came out shortly afterwards, Luciani fully adhered to it, and asked his people to do the same. In his pastoral letter, he said:

I must confess that I hoped in my heart, even though I didn’t let it out in writing, that the very serious existing difficulties might be overcome and that the reply of the Teacher, who speaks with a special charism and in the name of the Lord, might coincide, at least in part, with the hopes raised in so many couples. . . I know for certain that concern for these souls in pain and an ardent desire to bring them light and comfort were the only reasons for the notable delay in the coming of the Pope’s answer. . . Now he gives his judgment, conscious that he is performing a duty and in a spirit of great faith. He knows indeed, that he is going to be the cause of bitterness in many people, he knows that a different solution would probably have brought him more human applause; but he puts his faith in God, and in order to be faithful to His word, he re-proposes the traditional teaching of the Magisterium in this very delicate matter in all its purity. What about the recent scientific discoveries? The social evolution of our times? The increasing need for “responsible parenthood?” The need to harmonize this “responsible parenthood” with the demands of conjugal love? All of these things are kept in mind, but they do not postulate a new doctrine. The doctrine that has always been taught, presented in the new framework of positive and encouraging ideas on marriage and conjugal love, better guarantee the true good of man and the family. . . I am confident that I have everyone with me in a sincere adherence to the papal teaching, and in this assurance, I bless and greet you (4)

Luciani continued to defend the Pope’s teaching on many occasions throughout his time as Patriarch of Venice. Nevertheless, Yallop was convinced that Luciani still wanted a change in the Church’s teaching on birth control, and this, along with the new Pope’s desire for a poorer Church and his supposed stand against financial corruption in the Vatican, is what attracted Yallop most to him.

Here, as elsewhere in the book, Yallop provides long descriptions of “reconstructed” conversations that the Pope was said to have had with his co-workers in the Vatican, but many of the details of these conversations are open to serious question. In this case, Yallop states that, on September 19, after hearing that a U.S. Congressional delegation wanted to discuss birth control with him, the Pope decided that this meeting was so important that he gave up the idea of going to the Latin American Bishops’ Conference in Puebla in October, but instead asked Villot to set up an October meeting with the congressional delegation in Rome. Yallop claims that this decision of the Pope may have convinced Villot to help murder him. (5)

The truth, however, is that the announcement that the Pope had decided not to go to Puebla had already been made by the Vatican — and published in newspapers all over the world — more than two weeks earlier, on September 2. (6) Consequently, the Pope could hardly have still been planning to go to Puebla on September 19. Also, it is hardly likely that even if John Paul did decide to make a change in the Church’s doctrine on birth control, he would reveal it to U. S. Congressmen before he discussed it with moral theologians, or his fellow bishops. This is particularly true of someone who valued episcopal collegiality as Luciani had always done. The very unlikeliness of all these details and the ignorance they betray of the way the Church functions indicates that they are largely the product of imagination.

Apart from this fantasy, what can actually be said about the subject? We can go to the eyewitnesses. Father Lorenzi, who certainly would have known, denies that the Pope had yet even spoken to Villot about the subject of birth control. (7)

The person who knows perhaps the most about Luciani’s feelings on the subject is his secretary in Venice, Mario Senigaglia. When I asked him what he thought Luciani might have done about birth control as Pope, he told me: “He would have carried on the discussion. He had studied a great deal about the subject.” But he added: “The line he would have taken as Pope can’t be determined from the line he took as a bishop. The line he took in Belluno was different from the line he took in Vittorio Veneto and the line he took in Vittorio Veneto was different from the one he took in Venice. The same with any Pope. Pope John — we thought he was a nice little old man and that he would be a ‘transitional Pope’. Instead he turned the world upside down. The same with Wojtyla, whom I also knew. He is different now than when I knew him as a bishop. I am sure that as Pope, Luciani would have learned about Paul VI’s documentation on Humanae Vitae and that he would have found the scientific and pastoral motives for his decision. Maybe it could have convinced him [that Pope Paul was right]. I do know that he suffered over the drama of couples in difficult situations.”

“Do you think he would have been in a hurry to make a decision on birth control?” I asked.

“No! It wasn’t his style. He was very prudent, he knew how to listen to people. Some decisions in Venice he made only after eight and a half years there.” (8)

In fact, it is certain that Luciani was always sensitive to all ramifications of every problem, and especially that of birth control. He had seen the availability of birth control lead to an “abortion mentality,” including the legalization of abortion in Italy, to an increase in sexual immorality outside of marriage and other evils as well. Whatever he had to say about birth control as Pope would certainly have been influenced by these considerations. But above all, he would have been obedient to whatever he had determined was the real teaching of Christ.

The question of how John Paul I might have handled the difficult pastoral problems connected with the Church’s teachings on birth control as Pope is certainly a legitimate one, but it deserves a much more serious treatment than Yallop gives it. And he utterly fails to prove that such a change was imminent.

Villot in Charge of a Coverup?

But the evidence against Villot that Yallop believes most important is his claim that the Cardinal lied about the circumstances of the Pope’s death, obviously in order to cover up his murder. He says Villot lied about what time the Pope’s body was discovered, who discovered it, and, most importantly, what he was reading at the time of his death. Once again, Yallop obtained all his information directly from the authors of the ANSA story. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that these people were eyewitnesses to any of the events they claimed to be describing. It cannot be proved that even one of them was anywhere near the Pope’s bedroom on the morning of September 29, 1978. There is a possibility that they may have known some Curial monsignors, even a Curial cardinal who sympathized with their views, and were able to pick up rumors from them. But that would have provided them with only a very remote link with the actual events. For the most part, Yallop’s sources simply seized on the few confused or contradictory details contained in the Vatican statements and news stories about the Pope’s death and embroidered on them, in order to spread their insinuations about the “evil” cardinals in the Curia. Most important of all, their story contradicts that of the eyewitnesses to the scene at a number of points.

John Magee, who was the Pope’s secretary at the time, has stated that Sister Vincenza discovered the Pope’s body and then ran to wake him up at 5:25.(9) Father Lorenzi had stated, long before Yallop’s book appeared, that he was awakened at 5:45, shortly after the Pope’s body was discovered. (10) Sister Vincenza herself stated that she discovered shortly before 5:00 that the Pope had not drunk his morning coffee placed outside his door, and yet it was some time after that before she entered his room (11) But Yallop says nothing of this, although he claims to have interviewed both the secretaries and the nun. Instead, he stands by his sources’ version, that the Pope’s body was discovered an hour earlier. Upholding his own version, Father Lorenzi told me: “I was there. Yallop wasn’t.” (12)

Yallop regards the time that the Pope’s body was discovered as especially important. He believes that the actual discovery took place shortly after 4:30 a.m., not at the time announced by the Vatican, which was about 5:30. During this hour, he says, Cardinal Villot concocted the details of the cover-up of the Pope’s murder. But Yallop’s version is not only contradicted by all the eyewitnesses, it is also illogical. The Pope’s co-workers in Venice had stated for the press at the time of his election that he habitually got up around 5 a.m. According to Father Lorenzi, he usually rose between 4:30 and 5:00 in the Vatican. If the Pope’s alarm was set for 4:45, (or even granting that Yallop is correct, 4:30), why would Vincenza have become concerned over his failure to appear and gone into his bedroom at or even before the time his alarm was due to ring? Shouldn’t she have at least allowed him some time to get up before deciding he was late?

The Signoracci brothers, who embalmed the Pope, told Yallop that they do not remember exactly when they were summoned on the morning of September 29. Yet Yallop ignores this and insists that they were brought to the Vatican at 5:00 a.m., a half hour before the Pope’s body was “officially” found. This is also inconsistent with the statement of Father Lorenzi, who Yallop quotes, saying that the embalmers did not arrive until 11:00 a.m.

As for what the Pope was reading at the time of his death, Lorenzi, who was among the first in the Pope’s bedroom that morning, had indeed stated publicly on September 30 that John Paul was holding some papers in his hand when his body was discovered. But Lorenzi denies that they were a list of changes in the Curia. He told me emphatically: “He would not have had any list of cardinals in his hands!” He says that they were John Paul’s own personal notes, sermons, articles, and so on, and that he was “trying to get ideas from his old writings for his next Sunday Angelus sermon, because that was coming up very quickly.” (13) Magee has also very clearly said that the Pope was holding some pages from a homily. (14) Villot, another eyewitnesses, said they were pages from a discourse, as I described in Part II above. Yet Yallop does not quote their description of these papers. Once again, he believes that his sources, who were not present, somehow infallibly knew what was in the Pope’s hands.

It is difficult to believe that Yallop did not ask the eyewitnesses what time the Pope’s body was discovered, what he was holding in his hands, and so on. If he did, why didn’t he publish their answers? Yallop states several times that Magee, Lorenzi and Vincenza gave him the facts in his interviews with them. And yet by maintaining silence on every point where their accounts differ from that of his sources, he leads his readers to believe these eyewitnesses are in agreement with his version of events, while in fact they contradict it on almost every point.

Even if there were reason to believe that the members of the papal household lied, and that their testimony should be rejected, (and I have not found the slightest reason to believe this), there would still be no reason to regard sources whose names are not given and who may be totally dependent on hearsay as the only source of the truth about Pope John Paul’s death. The story that these sources gave to ANSA and later to Yallop did contain one correct unpublished detail which could have been obtained from someone working inside the Vatican — that Sister Vincenza was the first person in the Pope’s bedroom that morning — but that is almost the only true statement in it. By ignoring the eyewitness accounts, Yallop not only misrepresents the statements of the Pope’s co-workers, but also seriously misleads his readers.

Yallop claims that Cardinal Villot invented the story about the Imitation of Christ, in order to cover up the fact that the Pope had his list of proposed changes in his hands. As I have already pointed out, this story originated not with Villot, but with speculation was broadcast by all the news sources, not just Vatican Radio. At any rate, it could scarcely have been invented to cover up what the Pope had in his hands when he died, since it did not refer to what was in his hands, but rather to a book open on the covers beside him. The only statement that can possibly be connected to Cardinal Villot is the original Vatican press release, which did not say what the Pope had been reading.

Yallop portrays the relationship between John Paul and Cardinal Villot as a cold and reserved one. This may have been the view of Yallop’s traditionalist sources, who hated Villot, but it is contradicted by the rest of the witnesses, including some of the people Yallop himself interviewed, who were in a position to know, and who state that Villot admired the new Pope. Mgr. Ausilio Da Rif of Belluno, a friend of John Paul I, whose statements Yallop uses, pointed this out to me with some indignation. (15) In short, the story that Villot covered up the murder of John Paul I is about as probable as the story that Villot substituted a double for Paul VI.

In addition, those who knew Pope John Pau I most intimately completely reject Yallop’s theory that he was planning any sweeping changes in the Curia. Father Lorenzi, who as the Pope’s secretary in the Vatican, was in a better position to know than anyone else, said to me: “In 1973, Pope Paul had appointed well-informed and competent cardinals to high posts. Did Luciani have any reason to put them aside? Luciani was intelligent and had keen insight into men and events. But the virtue of prudence always kept him good company. He had to rely on people who were experienced in different fields and who had been serving and helping Paul VI for a number of years.” (16)

Mgr. Senigaglia agrees. “The person described by Yallop is the opposite of Luciani,” he said. “He wouldn’t have moved people from the Curia. He didn’t do it in Vittorio Veneto or Venice. He never even really appointed me as his secretary. He always said, `Wait, stay with me until I can find someone else, do me this favor.’ He was always respectful towards people.” (17) In fact, Luciani had followed his usual policy in regard to his co-workers when he reappointed the Curia of Paul VI across the board two days after becoming Pope.

There is simply no way that Yallop’s contentions about any of these points holds up. The same is true of his opinions about the supposed murder method.

Murder method?

Yallop believes that the Pope was poisoned by digitalis added to his low blood pressure medicine. But Pia Basso, the Pope’s niece, has said that he had stopped taking his blood pressure medication two weeks before his death. (18) And Father Lorenzi told me: “The Pope was not taking any liquid medication at the time of his death, only pills. There was no medicine that could have been doctored. So that destroys Yallop’s theory right there.” (19)

Even presuming that there was a way for the poison to be administered, the theory of digitalis poisoning itself is implausible. According to Pier Luigi Baima Ballone, an Italian expert on legal medicine, the time necessary for digitalis to take effect and the fact that even then it would not cause loss of consciousness for several hours, means that the Pope would have had ample time to summon help. (20)

Yallop suggests that Villot hid the Pope’s glasses and slippers because they were stained by vomiting from the digitalis poisoning. This is mere speculation. If there had been signs of vomiting, the two priests and the sister would surely have noticed them, since they saw the Pope’s body before Villot even entered the room. But Yallop provides no statements from his interviews with them that they noticed anything of the kind. In addition, there is no evidence that the objects in question ever disappeared. According to Antonietta Luciani, absolutely nothing was missing from the Pope’s personal effects when they were returned to their home. Above all, she declared emphatically, “None of the pairs of glasses were lost.” He actually had three pairs: Sister Vincenza had kept one, and she had kept the others. In fact, Antonietta was wearing his bifocals herself. She showed me both pairs of glasses, with his name embossed, and the prescription from Dr. Rama. (21) Finally, since vomiting also frequently accompanies heart attacks and other illnesses as well, how can it be used, even if it did take place, to prove that the Pope died from digitalis poisoning?

Yallop makes a great deal of the fact that John Paul’s will disappeared. He believes that Villot destroyed it because it contained some important evidence. But once again, the Pope’s family denies this. Antonietta Luciani explained to me that the Pope had asked his secretary who had remained in Venice, Don Carlo Bolzan, to destroy his will because he wanted to make another. Don Carlo instead brought it to the Vatican, and presumably the Pope destroyed it there. (22) He evidently wrote another one before he died, but Edoardo Luciani says that it would not be at all surprising if the will was not discovered, since it probably would have been written, like the first one, on a small piece of paper and put it in an ordinary envelope. It might not even have been noticed among his other papers. (23) At any rate, it is only speculation on Yallop’s part that the will contained something important that needed to be hidden.

I hope I have shown definitively that every single one of Yallop’s contentions is flawed, almost always fatally so. Conspiracy theorists love his book, but very few serious reviewers find his work credible. Nevertheless, more than 20 years after the original was written, Yallop issued a new edition, with an afterward that attempts to deal with evidence that came out after the first edition was published. I will go over this evidence in the next installment.

NOTES

(1) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 301.

(2) Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 242.

(3) See for instance, Albino Luciani, Il Buon Samaritano (Padua: Edizioni Messaggero, 1980), p. 244.

(4) Albino Luciani / Giovanni Paolo I, Opera Omnia (Padua: Edizioni Messaggero, 1989), 4:198-99.

(5) Yallop, In God’s Name, pp. 171-73, 206-207.

(6) Among others, Correio do Povo, September 3, 1978, p. 3. More information has come to light since I originally wrote this, from those who talked to the Pope, that suggests John Paul I might have later asked that the conference be postponed until February of 1979 so that he might go, but in no way was this decision said to be connected with birth control or a desire to meet with the American delegation (Il mio cuore e ancora a Venezia, pp. 145, 231).

(7) Personal interview with Diego Lorenzi, October 24, 1985

(8) Personal Interview with Mario Senigaglia, November 2, 1985.

(9) John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, pp. 194-95.

(10) Diego Lorenzi, Il Gazzettino, 28 September 1978, p. 5; cf. Ch. 22 and Yallop, In God’s Name, p. 218-19.

(11) Sister Vincenza told this to Venetian author Camillo Bassotto; see his Il mio cuore e ancora in Venezia (Venice, Adriatica, 1990), p. 209.

(12) Personal interview with Diego Lorenzi, October 24, 1985.

(13) Personal interview with Diego Lorenzi, October 24, 1985.

(14) Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, p. 196.

(15) Personal interview with Mgr. Ausilio Da Rif, October 15, 1985.

(16) Personal interview with Diego Lorenzi, October 24, 1985.

(17) Personal interview with Mario Senigalia, November 2, 1985.

(18) Michael Schwartz, “Hard Cover Hate Book Mere Yelps from Author Yallop,” Our Sunday Visitor, 22 July 1984, p. 3;

(19) Personal interview with Diego Lorenzi, October 24, 185.

(20) Dr. Pier Luigi Baima Ballone,”Si distrugge da solo lo scrittore-detective,” Jesus, 10 November 1985, p. 17.

(21) Antonietta Luciani to author, October 1, 1985.

(22) Antonietta Luciani to author, October 1, 1985.

(23) Edoardo Luciani, “Mio fratello non e` stato ucciso: lo ha,” [interview] Gente, June 21, 1985, p. 92.

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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.

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Was Pope John Paul I Murdered? (Part II)

As I said in the first installment, understanding the origins of the controversy surrounding the Pope’s death requires me to backtrack a little to the morning his body was discovered. I am attempting to write this account chronologically as much as possible, however difficult it might be, because this is the best way to understand the origins of the conspiracy theory and the way it snowballed, beyond all the evidence, into certainty into so many people’s minds. In this installment, I will start with the events of a morning that aroused shock, grief and above all confusion all over the world, not the least in Vatican City itself, and how they gave rise to doubts and suspicions. Following that, I will go back and analyze what happened, and what the actual evidence is.

Many people don’t remember it well after thirty years, but the people of the world, and especially the people in Rome, felt Pope John I’s death deeply: the whole spring and summer of 1978 had been filled with an atmosphere of gloom in Italy because of the clash of left and right, and the terrorist attacks, especially by those of the Red Brigades who had kidnapped and executed Italian politician Aldo Moro just that May. And then John Paul I had been elected, and his smile, his joyful manner and his captivating words had dispelled the gloom. He was the Pope, the teacher, even the saint people had been waiting for. They reacted to him with instant love. Long-time Vatican watchers were amazed at his radiance. Father Diego Lorenzi, the new Pope’s secretary, who had come with him from Venice, vividly recalls a journalist who wrote for L’Osservatore Romano saying to him: “However did you manage to hide this man from the whole of humanity for so many years?”(1) No one could have remotely imagined what was to become of this bright beginning. And the reaction to what happened next was explosive.

From around 6:00 a.m. on the morning of September 29, 1978, early risers began to notice some unusual activities in St. Peter’s square, including prelates going in and out of the Apostolic palace at a very early hour, the arrival of a doctor, the movements of the Swiss Guards and the closing of the bronze doors of St. Peter’s basilica.

At 7:30, Vatican Radio interrupted its programming with the incredible news: The new Pope was dead, after just 33 days in office. Italian radio and TV gave the news at the same time. Within ten minutes wire services all over the world were typing out the news. Nothing but the bare fact of the Pope’s death was known until 7:42, when the Vatican Press Office distributed the following bulletin:

This morning, September 29, 1978, about five-thirty, the private secretary of the Pope, when contrary to custom, he had not found the Holy Father in the chapel of his private apartment, looked for him in his room and found him dead in bed with the light on, like one who was intent on reading. The physician, Dr. Renato Buzzonetti, who hastened to the Pope’s room, verified the death, which took place presumably toward eleven o’clock yesterday evening, as “sudden death that could be related to acute myocardial infarction.”

The declaration was also published on the front page of that day’s Osservatore Romano in a story “Pope John Paul I in the Peace of the Lord.” The accompanying story said: “The first person to become aware of the Pope’s death was his private secretary, Father John Magee, who immediately informed the Secretary of State by telephone.” (2).

People were incredulous because the Pope’s health had seemed perfect at the audience just two days before. The people of Rome, who had immediately loved the Pope, were devastated. And in accordance with the general atmosphere I mentioned, some suspected a dark plot. In the neighborhood of Albergone in Rome, where a Communist youth had been shot to death the night before by a right-wing youth, a 16-year-old student said of John Paul, “He was a revolutionary Pope who wanted to get closer to the people. That’s why they eliminated him.”(3). Who “they” were didn’t really matter. It could have been any number of corrupt “higher-ups.” People didn’t need any evidence to suspect that their beloved Pope had been murdered.

Vatican Radio and various news agencies later announced that the Pope was reading the devotional classic The Imitation of Christ when he died. The next day, however, the Pope’s other secretary, Father Diego Lorenzi said that he was looking at some of his old sermons while working on his Sunday Angelus address. This seeming contradiction with the official source aroused suspicion. Father Andrew Greeley, an American priest in Rome, writing a book about the election of the Pope, told his tape-recorded diary: “If they [the Vatican] lie about little things, they’ll lie about big things. There’s no reason to trust anything they say’ (4). There was mounting talk about having an autopsy on the Pope.

By October 3, some of the common people of Rome were convinced that the Pope was killed by the Curia – or by whoever else they blamed for all the problems in the world. They cried out as they walked by his bier: “Who did this to you?” (5)

On October 4, John Paul I’s funeral Mass was celebrated in St. Peter’s Square in the pouring rain, amid universal grief. On October 6, Civilta` Cristiana’s spokesman Franco Antico said that his organization had “concrete evidence” to back up his calls for an investigation into the Pope’s death. Perhaps it was no coincidence that same day, a number of major papers published a story which the Italian news agency ANSA had obtained the day before from what it called a “good source.” It gave an account of the events surrounding the Pope’s death which seemed to suggest that he had spent his last hours in conflict with Villot and other members of the Curia. It said, without giving specific details or names, that John Paul was about to make some important personnel changes in the Curia and among the Italian bishops. and hinted that some in the Curia were opposed to these changes. It also said that the Pope had argued about them at length with Cardinal Villot on the day of his death, and that he had also spoken about them with Cardinal Colombo of Milan that evening. It was not a discourse nor notes for a homily, but four sheets of paper, containing notes for one of these executive acts, the source said, that the Pope took to bed with him that night, and which were found in his hands when his lifeless body was discovered in the morning.

The source also gave an account of the discovery of the Pope’s body that differed in many respects from that given by the Vatican’s official statement. It said that the first person to discover the Pope’s body was not Father Magee, but Sister Vincenza, a nun in the papal household, who then ran to wake up Father Magee, and that the discovery took place at 4:30 a.m., a whole hour before the time given in the Vatican press statement. (6). Before publishing the story, ANSA obtained from the Pope’s brother, Edoardo Luciani confirmation of the fact that Sister Vincenza had discovered the Pope’s body, which had been relayed to them by Don Diego Lorenzi when he gave them the news of his death. This apparently convinced the agency that the rest of the account was accurate, and it decided to publish it. (7). Of course, it caused a sensation in the world press.

This story about a disagreement between the Pope and Villot, and plans to remove some highly-placed prelates from their posts, seems to have come from a traditionalist source. Is there any direct link between it and Civilta Cristiana? In their popular 1983 book about the Vatican, Pontiff, Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts state that Antico received a very similar story early on September 29 in a phone call from “someone with good Vatican connections” and that he immediately afterwards phoned the story to ANSA. (8). Considering the notorious inaccuracy of this book, (for one thing, it gives the wrong date for the news story), I am cautious about accepting this at face value. However, I believe that it is quite possible some members of Civilta` Cristiana were the source behind the story. Did Antico’s statement that the “concrete evidence” could not yet be released perhaps mean that he thought that the news agency was still hesitating over whether to publish the story? However, the source may equally well have been another similar group of traditionalists.

In a 1981 interview, Giovanni Gennari, a former priest and a member of Italy’s leftist Catholic dissent, gave some details about the changes that the Pope was supposedly planning which he said he had obtained in 1978 from some Vatican employees. Like many other leftist Catholics, Gennari believed that Luciani was an extreme conservative. Unlike the traditionalists, Gennari had actually known Luciani personally. But, since he was also affected with ideological presuppositions — this time those of the left — he is scarcely the type of person to give an objective opinion of his views. Nevertheless, Gennari believed that Luciani was “the man most congenial to the Old Curia’s hopes for a restoration.” (9). In other words, he was going to replace all the liberals in the Curia and the Italian hierarchy with men who were favored by the most conservative faction in the Curia.

According to Gennari’s sources, Villot and Casaroli were among those to be removed. Another was Ugo Poletti, the vicar of Rome, who was known for his concern for the city’s working class population. Villot was to be replaced by Cardinal Benelli and Poletti by Cardinal Felici. When Villot heard of the proposal he became alarmed and told the Pope that such changes would be “a betrayal of the legacy of Paul VI, the end of Ostpolitik, and the complete triumph of the restoration.” Cardinal Colombo was also supposed to have strenuously opposed these plans during his telephone conversation with the Pope on the night of September 28. Gennari did not say that the Pope was murdered, but he said that he was “profoundly shaken” by the controversy, and hinted that the stress may have led to his death a few hours later.

Unfortunately, while the above story was given wide publicity, most journalists who speculated about it were ignorant of the real motives of Civilta` Cristiana and the other traditionalist groups who originated it. But Church officials understood these motives very well. While the controversy was raging in the days after the Pope’s death, Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia explained that Civiltà Cristiana was trying to prove that some “unidentified leftists, inside or outside the Vatican” had murdered the Pope, and as a result, suspicion was spreading like “a subtle poison” among people who did not know the group’s motive. “The American public has a right to know how the rumors started, and how the rightists used them to advance themselves and their cause,” Krol said. (10). But the damage was already done. His explanation was largely ignored while the press had a field day with the theory that the Pope was murdered.

The story that originated in this fashion has had a long and fruitful life in the past thirty years. Several books have been published amplifying the traditionalists’ beliefs about the Pope’s death. In 1984, Jean Jacques Thierry, who had been a correspondent for L’Aurore, the French newspaper that had launched accusations of Freemasonry against much of the Church hierarchy, published a novel called La vraie mort de Jean Paul Ier (The True Death of John Paul I), in which he suggested that if Villot was guilty of the substitution of a double for Paul VI, then he could well have been guilty of murdering John Paul I, and then covering up the murder, when the new Pope found out about him and his Freemason friends. (11). There have been other recent books, articles and even Internet pages, which I will discuss later.

In Pontiff, Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts give Civilta Cristiana` as the source for their account of the discovery of the Pope’s body. Their account agrees in many details with the ANSA story. Although the authors do not say directly that the Pope was murdered, they do say that Cardinal Villot lied about who discovered his body and about what he was reading at the time of his death. Though they follow the traditionalists’ story closely, the authors do offer a different explanation of the mysterious papers the Pope was holding: they contained a severe condemnation of the Jesuits, and their General, Father Pedro Arrupe, for their disobedience to the hierarchy and their support of Marxism and liberation theology. They add that Cardinal Villot was determined to conceal this condemnation, so he forbade its release and instead concocted the story that the Pope had been reading The Imitation of Christ (12).

Either version would certainly be pleasing to the right, where theories of conspiracies among the Jesuits are also common. For instance, in his book The Jesuits, Malachi Martin, who is famous for his accusations against those in the Church whom he believes to be leftists, insinuates that the Jesuits were in league with the Freemasons who worked in the Vatican, and that John Paul I planned to “liquidate” the Society of Jesus if it did not reform itself immediately. Nothing would be more natural to those who believe in these theories than to suspect Cardinal Villot of obeying Masonic orders to prevent the condemnation of the Jesuits from being publicized. (13).

Now for the analysis. First, and most important, the motives for the murder are all utterly without credibility, because the picture of John Paul I presented in this theory is completely at odds with his real beliefs as evidenced by his actions and writings as a bishop and cardinal (This is what my whole book is going to prove). He was a strong supporter of all the Vatican II reforms and Pope Paul’s Ostpolitik as well. There is no way he would have been responsible for the “restoration” of the pre-Vatican II Church some were hoping for. Second, he was anything but sympathetic to the traditionalists’ claims against Paul VI and the Church hierarchy, and began speaking out against them, especially after the Lefebvrites began spreading their accusations against the hierarchy in his diocese. When in 1977 Lefebvre launched accusations against some bishops he considered leftists or outright Communists, Cardinal Luciani responded in an article in the city newspaper of Venice, Il Gazzettino, in which he pointed out that Lefebvre’s statements about leftist bishops were “not backed up by any proof.” Besides, he added, “isn’t the French prelate aware of the almost daily accusations [of the left] against the episcopate in Italy because it declares that Christianity and Marxism are incompatible?” He also expressed his pain that the French archbishop had launched similar charges against Pope Paul VI, “to whom Lefebvre professes himself, in words to be so devoted. I said ‘in words’; in deeds, he aligns himself with Voltaire, who used to say: ‘The Pope is a holy person; therefore let us kiss his foot, but tie his hands.’” (14). When a Lefebvre supporter wrote a letter to the editor criticizing his article, and denouncing Pope Paul for receiving Hungarian Communist Party Secretary Kadar at the Vatican, Luciani replied, “I simply cannot understand this criticism from Catholics. With his mandate to evangelize the world, and with two-thirds of which is under the influence of Communism, the Pope must try every means. There are some risks, and he knows it better than we do; let us help him, not by criticizing him, but by praying for him and supporting him.” (15)

Luciani was well aware, as were all other sensible Catholic bishops, of the fanaticism exhibited by many of Lefebvre’s followers. It is absurd to suggest that as Pope he would have actually believed the accusations of Masonry that they directed at their enemies.

Nor did John Paul have any animosity against the Jesuits or their leader. In fact, when he was still studying at the seminary, he had ardently desired to enter the Jesuits himself, but his bishop would not allow it, because of the great need of priests in the diocese. He had had a Jesuit confessor, Father Leandro Tiveron, in Venice. The activities of some Jesuits may have caused problems, but John Paul was sensible enough not to apply them to the order as a whole, or to Arrupe. In fact, a few days after becoming Pope, he had written a warm letter to Arrupe, in which he recalled that he had admired the Jesuit General’s intervention at the 1977 Synod enough to personally ask him for a copy of it. (16) The Pope had indeed been planning to deliver an address to a meeting of the Jesuits in Rome on Saturday, September 30. However, no one in the Vatican ever tried to conceal the text of this speech. In general, undelivered or unpublished documents that a Pope leaves at his death are not made known unless his successor wishes it. What happened here was no different. Father Arrupe had asked Cardinal Villot if the Jesuits could have the text of John Paul I’s talk, and the cardinal, now John Paul II’s secretary of State, delivered it to him on November 18, 1978, with the approval of the new Pope.

The address was published in the Acta Apostolica Sedis, which contains all the official papal texts. There is no condemnation in it, and certainly no hint of the immediate demise of the order. It did warn the Jesuits against secularist tendencies and abandoning the order’s spiritual mission for tasks that could be better left to the laity, but it also said that the Jesuits should concern themselves with social problems, and urged them to announce the Christian message with fidelity, but also in a language adopted to the modern mentality, something that neither Martin or the traditionalists would agree with. (17).

So whatever the Pope may have had in his hands, he most certainly would not have been holding papers detailing the suppression of the Jesuits or a traditionalist restoration in the Church. So why all the discrepancies in the Vatican accounts? And why the lie about who discovered the Pope’s body?

The first official statement, which witnesses later said that Villot put together, said that a secretary discovered the body, when it was really Sister Vincenza. According to Father Magee (now the bishop of Cloyne, Ireland), who had been alerted by Vincenza, he insisted that his name not be put into the statement, because he didn’t want to be a party to the fabrication. But Villot insisted that he couldn’t release the information that a nun was in the Pope’s bedroom. (18) This might seem surprising to American readers, but the Vatican is very straight-laced. It would be regarded as scandalous to admit that a woman had been in the Pope’s bedroom at that early hour of the morning. And in fact, there was actually some reason for this uneasiness. If the frequently anti-Catholic secular press in Italy, or, much worse, the Communist press, got hold of the facts, they would make the most of it. When questioned, the Vatican had to admit that the secretary in question was Fr. Magee. This is an attempt at a cover up of sorts, the truth of which was not admitted by the Vatican until much later. The issue of who discovered the Pope’s b