After his election, Luciani’s first words were, “God will forgive you for what you have done to me.”24 If he was surprised by his selection, it was not evident by how quickly he announced his Papal name when Villot asked.
“I will be called Gianpaolo One.” (John Paul I, in a tribute to the influence of John XXIII, who had made him a bishop, and to Paul VI, who had given him the red hat; it was the first original name chosen since 913 when a short-lived Pope had chosen Lando.)25
Luciani had made it clear even before the conclave that he thought the church should emphasize spiritual obligations over politicking.26 Bishops, priests, and even laymen worldwide were demanding a more decentralized church, one in which the Curia no longer held the Pope hostage to its byzantine ways. And that fit with Luciani’s view that the Pope should be less a monarch and more a pastor.
His background offered a sharp contrast to his predecessor. As opposed to Paul, who had spent decades in the Curia, Luciani’s career was mostly free of Rome. The eldest of four children from his father’s second marriage, he was born on October 17, 1912, in the remote northern Italian village of Canale d’Agordo.27 The family was poor even by the standards of a region devastated by World War I. His father, a bricklayer, spent years as a migrant worker in Switzerland and Germany before getting a regular job as a glassblower on the Island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon.28 Luciani was only eleven when his devout mother entered him into a minor seminary at Feltre.29 Ordained a priest on July 7, 1935, the twenty-two-year-old Luciani spent two years as a chaplain and teacher at Agordo’s Technical Mining Institute.30 In 1937 he received his doctorate in theology from Rome’s Gregorian University.31 And that year he became the vice rector at the Seminary of Belluno, where for the next decade he taught everything from canon law to philosophy.32 In 1958, John XXIII consecrated him bishop of Vittorio Veneto, a small city south of Belluno. It was another eleven years, December 15, 1969, before Paul VI appointed him the Patriarch of Venice, in part because he was a likable administrator not hobbled by too great an ego and ambition.33 After three and a half uneventful years as Venice’s Patriarch, Pope Paul gave him his red hat in 1973.34
The man who once told a friend, “Had I not become a priest, I would have liked to have been a journalist,” was a traditionalist when it came to church dogma.35 He agreed with his predecessor on every major issue except for the ban on all artificial birth control. Luciani had been on the Pontifical commission that had recommended an exception be made for the pill, but had been overruled by Paul VI in his much-debated encyclical Humanae Vitae.36 The mere suggestion that the new Pope might liberalize that core doctrine alarmed traditionalists.37
Luciani left no doubt from the outset which clerics had his ear. Cardinal Benelli had made the difference in the conclave by throwing his support to Luciani.38 Now it was clear that the hardworking Benelli had a direct line to John Paul. It was odd to some that the Pope who spoke about reforming the Curia might rely on the Florentine cardinal who had been a martinet Deputy Secretary of State and general administrator, sometimes even called the “Vatican’s Kissinger.” But once he left the Curia, Benelli had begun talking about reforming it. Some feared that for Benelli reform was a code word for revenge. But while a debate over his motivation raged, it was acknowledged that if anyone knew how to trim the Vatican’s redundant bureaucracy, and had the will to fight the Curialists, it was Benelli.39
For Marcinkus, it was hard to imagine a worse combination of news than Luciani’s election and Benelli’s resurging influence. Luciani was the cardinal whom Marcinkus had dismissed in 1972 when the Venetian Patriarch contested the IOR’s sale of Banca Cattolica to Calvi and the Ambrosiano. “Eminence, don’t you have anything better to do?” Marcinkus had asked him at the time, ending the conversation and sending Luciani back to Venice in a fury.40 Their chilly relationship had not improved during the ensuing six years. Calvi had reneged on his promise to maintain all of Banca Cattolica’s preferences for Venice’s Catholics and the diocese. And when the Sindona scandal tarred the Vatican it further convinced Luciani that Marcinkus’s judgment was poor.
Benelli, meanwhile, had met in 1973 with FBI agents who visited the Vatican in their investigation into counterfeit securities and the IOR. Benelli counseled Paul VI that Marcinkus was involved in too many questionable ventures and that he required more oversight. He had even offered to monitor the IOR and Marcinkus. But the Pope had sided with Marcinkus and dispatched Benelli out of the Vatican to Florence.
On September 5, only two days after John Paul became Pope at a simple outdoor ceremony without much pomp, the new Pontiff read Il Mondo, a weekly news magazine of Italy’s preeminent Il Corriere della Sera, Italy’s preeminent financial newspaper. There was a damning front-page story about the Vatican Bank that highlighted the uncertainty and danger over Sindona’s eventual extradition to and trial in Italy. That morning, after an early breakfast, John Paul assembled a thin manila folder with his notes about what Benelli and another career Curialist, Cardinal Pericle Felici, had shared with him about the church’s finances (the Vatican will not disclose to the author if those notes are preserved, but if so, they would likely be in the Secret Archives and not available for review until at least 2063).41
The information passed along by the two cardinals was not good. Peter’s Pence had dropped precipitously during the entire fifteen years of Paul VI’s Papacy.42 Bequests to the church from well-to-do worshippers had slumped by 30 percent in just five years. After adjusting for inflation, the church was collecting just over half of what it took in a decade earlier.43
As for Marcinkus, his secrecy and arrogance was a poor combination for the chief of the Vatican Bank. Benelli and Felici contended the IOR was not fulfilling its charter’s primary directive to “provide for the custody and administration of capital destined for religious works.”44 The Vatican Bank had more than eleven thousand accounts, but only a thousand belonged to Catholic organizations and religious orders, and another five hundred to parishes worldwide. The rest belonged to individual prelates, Black Nobles and some of their wealthy friends, a few diplomats, and even possibly some foreign companies who did business with the church. Marcinkus was the problem, they told John Paul, not the solution. After spending ninety minutes reviewing the notes, the Pope informed Benelli that Marcinkus’s position as the chief of the IOR was under review.
Later that day, which was packed with audiences by visiting dignitaries and church officials, the new Pope met with Leningrad’s archbishop, Metropolitan Nikodim, the second-ranking prelate of the Russian Orthodox Church. At six feet and three hundred pounds, with an enormous long beard, Nikodim attracted attention, even inside the Vatican. Nikodim and John Paul met in the Pope’s private study. The Pontiff later shared with his private secretaries what happened next. Nikodim sipped coffee from a cup the Pope had just poured. Then the bishop dropped his cup and saucer. He clenched at his throat as he gasped for air, and fell over backward, smashing a small table as he slammed into the floor.45 Luciani called for help and dropped to his knees to administer the last rites. By the time Dr. Renato Buzzonetti, the deputy chief of the Vatican medical service, arrived a few minutes later, the forty-eight-year-old Nikodim was dead.46
No autopsy was performed. Given that Nikodim had suffered several previous heart attacks, few were surprised in a few days when a massive heart attack was listed as the official cause of death.47 But even before that announcement, a conspiracy theory swept through the Vatican: a poisonous brew that had been intended for the new Pope had killed Nikodim.48 Some Russian Orthodox prelates thought instead that Nikodim, a strong advocate of Christian unity, was the real target and the murderers were Catholic traditionalists who opposed the increased interfaith dialogue that Paul VI had begun. Some anticommunists thought it was the work of the KGB, a not subtle signal from Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, who had resisted any effort to legalize the Catholic Church and had waged a relentless war of attrition against it.49
Nikodim’s dea
th, although personally unsettling for John Paul, did not distract him from focusing on the work at hand during his transition. He made solid progress that first month. And what stood out was how ordinary Catholics embraced him. After just a couple of weeks there was considerable talk about the large crowds and exuberance Luciani attracted. “St. Peter’s Square was jammed to the brim for the noon blessing the past two Sundays, something that has occurred only very seldom previously,” said eighty-five-year-old Carlo Confalonieri, the Dean of the College of Cardinals.
John Paul’s natural warmth and willingness to talk to anyone in the Vatican, no matter how lowly their rank, was refreshing in an institution in which his predecessor’s chronic illnesses and depression had added a grim mixture to his innate detachment. When John Paul left the Vatican on September 23 to say Mass at the nearby Lateran Basilica, mobs swarmed his entourage in a frenzy not seen since John XXIII was Pope twenty years earlier.50 Four days later, fifteen thousand worshippers crammed into the Sala Nervi to hear his sermon.
Not all Curialists were as enthusiastic about the new Pope as the average Catholic. His common touch generated the same snide commentary that had greeted the likable John XXIII. Some sarcastically dubbed him the smiling Pope because of his seemingly perpetual grin. Others were dismissive of what they judged his “Reader’s Digest mentality,” a tendency to simplify complex issues.51
Luciani had no time for Curia gossip. He was instead immersed in learning as much as possible about several pressing matters that demanded his early attention. As part of that, he met with Marcinkus for an hour. It was awkward. They traded niceties and John Paul asked few pointed questions. Since the new Pope had not been a career Curialist, Marcinkus knew he had latitude to press some denials for which the Pontiff would have to take his word. And it was also common knowledge that John Paul did not like confrontations. Marcinkus felt it unlikely he would find a hostile reception.
Sindona was on everyone’s mind because of his pending extradition. Marcinkus tried to distance himself from the Sicilian financier. He claimed to have met Sindona maybe a dozen times, once at a baptism, and another time for only a minute. What was most important, said Marcinkus, was that he did not do business with him. “The ones that had a dealing with him were APSA. They sold him the shares for Immobiliare. . . . I had nothing to do with it.”52
John Paul did not have to work in the Curia to know that Paul VI’s 1967 creation of APSA, the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, was at Sindona’s urging. Moreover, while APSA might have been the department responsible for divesting the church’s interest in SGI Immobiliare and other companies, the Vatican Bank executed the decision.
Marcinkus tried deflecting John Paul away from Sindona by talking about how much money was available to the Pope from different Vatican foundations. But according to Marcinkus, John Paul “couldn’t care less. He didn’t want to know. And he talked about the Secretariat of State reports that they bring him, and what a burden it was.”53 Monsignor Magee, one of John Paul’s trusted personal secretaries, thought the number and complexity of the IOR issues were too much to grasp for a Pontiff whose primary financial concern during his first month was whether he might lose his state pension since he was now head of a sovereign state (in fact, the pension ends for any Italian elected Pope).54
It was an unofficial custom that word about what transpired in a Pope’s private meeting spread around the halls of the Vatican as soon as the door to the Papal study reopened. Sometimes a Pope instructed his aides to say something sub rosa to prepare the Curia for an upcoming decision. The person who had met with the Pontiff might leak his own version to try to get ahead of any pending Vatican action. And at other times, Curialists who had no idea of what had transpired spread rumors as if they had been present, all to further their own interests. The source for the persistent gossip that started after Marcinkus and John Paul’s meeting ended is not known. But what is not in dispute is that a glum Marcinkus returned to the IOR offices and announced to no one in particular, “I won’t be around much longer.”55 (Ten years later, Marcinkus denied saying he thought John Paul was about to let him go, claiming that instead back at the IOR he said only, “Gee, he [the Pope] looks tired.” When he later heard that John Paul had intended to let him go, he said, “I said that’s the funniest way to fire a guy. He couldn’t have been nicer.”)56
Marcinkus and the IOR were not the only problems the new Pope faced. Cardinal Baggio had presented him with the Cody file and the news the Chicago prelate had rebuffed his predecessor’s effort to ease him out of office. A plan that Paul VI had long considered to internationalize the Curia was also waiting for a ruling.57 Approving it would cause a minor revolt among the dominant Italians inside the church’s bureaucracy. And there was the question of what to do about the prominent Swiss theologian, Hans Küng, whose teachings and writings served as the intellectual sustenance for a growing movement challenging many core church doctrines. Paul VI had dithered for years and had died without censuring Küng. John Paul would have to decide if Küng could carry on without incurring the wrath of the Vatican (on December 18, 1979, the church revoked Küng’s missio canonica, his license to teach as a Catholic theologian).
John Paul had expected to be briefed about Cody, Küng, and the pending Curia reform. One matter, however, took him by surprise: the severity of a spat between the Jesuits and Paul VI. Jesuit theologians had ignored Paul’s many requests to refrain from intense political activism. The sight of the black-uniformed prelates being dragged away by police at the front lines of massive protests over the war in Vietnam or efforts to ban the bomb were too frequent as far as the Vatican was concerned. Even worse was their enthusiastic dissemination of liberation theology, the combination of Catholicism and Marxism that fueled communist movements in El Salvador and Guatemala. The Jesuits’ Superior General, Pedro Arrupe, was an avowed political leftist and had resisted all requests for moderation from Rome. If John Paul did not bring the Jesuits into line, Arrupe might well judge the new Pope as indecisive as his predecessor.58
It is little wonder that with so many critical matters pending, John Paul sometimes seemed frazzled. He joked with one of his aides, Monsignor Giuseppe Bosa, that he wished there was a machine that could help him do all the reading that piled up daily.59 “Une charge très lourde”—it is a heavy burden—the Pope conceded to Cardinal Villot.60 Marcinkus later recounted, “This poor man . . . comes out from Venice; it’s a small, aging diocese, 90,000 people in the city, old priests. Then all of a sudden he’s thrown into a place and he doesn’t even know where the offices are. He doesn’t know what the Secretary of State does. They called him the ‘smiling Pope.’ But let me tell you something . . . that was a very nervous smile. So, he takes over. He sits down; the Secretary of State brings into him a pile of papers, says, ‘Go through these!’ He doesn’t even know where to start.”61
Much of the progress John Paul made during this tough transition was a result of his sixteen-hour workdays. The new Pope was a man with a reputation for little sleep. He was also someone who liked to adhere to a schedule.62 Every morning, Sister Vincenza Taffarel, the head of his household who had been with him for twenty years, brought him coffee no later than 5:00.63 In Venice, she brought it into his bedroom and put it on a side table. But in the Vatican, since many thought it improper for a nun to enter the Pope’s bedroom unannounced, she had left a small tray in front of his bedroom door. John Paul put the tray back into the hallway when he was finished and Sister Vincenza retrieved it.64 He was in the chapel by 6:00, where Monsignor Magee joined him for prayer. By 7:00, Monsignor Diego Lorenzi, his other private secretary, arrived and the three celebrated Mass, after which they had a light breakfast.65
On Thursday morning, September 28, Sister Vincenza left the tray a few minutes before 5:00.66 It was untouched when she went to collect it thirty minutes later. She never knew the Pope to oversleep. She put her ear against the door but heard nothing. Vincenza knocked softly. Silence. She kno
cked louder. Still nothing.67 She knelt and peered through the keyhole, but could not see him. If he was awake, why was he not answering? She decided to enter the room. John Paul was sitting upright in bed. An open file was clutched in his right hand and some papers were strewn across the bed and floor.III His reading glasses were resting on the tip of his nose and his eyes were open.69
“Santissimo Padre? Albino?”70
When he did not respond she ran out of the room to Magee’s bedroom one floor above and roused him from a deep sleep. “Santissimo Padre. Something’s happened!”71
Magee sprinted to John Paul’s private chamber. He put his hand on the Pontiff’s cheek. It was cold. Rigor mortis had begun to set in. Magee telephoned Villot, whose residence was two floors below. He worried about calling the seventy-two-year-old Secretary of State because he knew Villot had a heart condition. Nevertheless, he was blunt.72
“The Holy Father is dead.”
“No, no, no, no . . . he couldn’t be dead. I was with him last night!”
“Listen, he’s stone-cold dead.”73
The normally unflappable Villot sounded more agitated than the monsignor had ever heard him.74 Magee then telephoned Dr. Renato Buzzonetti, who lived only minutes away.75 Lorenzi, meanwhile, who was well acquainted with John Paul’s longtime Venetian doctor, Giuseppe da Ros, called with the news. “He had seen the Pope the previous Sunday afternoon,” Lorenzi later recalled, “and he found him in very good health.”76 (One of Dr. da Ros’s few subsequent comments about that physical was that he had concluded John Paul was “very well.”)77,IV
By the time Villot rushed into the room, Monsignor Lorenzi was leading a Rosary at the foot of the bed together with Sister Vincenza and several nuns.79 When Dr. Buzzonetti arrived he inspected the body. He had never treated the Pope and knew nothing about his medical history: “The first time I saw him in a doctor-patient relationship, he was dead.”80 After a few minutes, Buzzonetti stepped away from the bed and announced that the Pontiff had died of an “acute myocardial infarction” (an arterial blockage that quickly causes the heart muscle to die).81V As for the time of death, he estimated it was between 10:30 and 11:00 the previous night. His conclusion was based on the Pope’s just-from-the-crypt ashen complexion, a sign that the skin had been starved of blood, consistent with a myocardial infarction. He did not know that John Paul suffered from chronic low blood pressure, making it less probable—but not impossible—that he was a victim of a massive coronary. Nor did he ever review any of the medications the Pope took or talk to Dr. da Ros, John Paul’s personal physician.83
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