God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

by Gerald Posner

  Villot’s hands were trembling as he walked over to the body.84 The French cardinal used the same silver mallet by which he confirmed the death of Paul VI a month earlier. After tapping John Paul’s forehead three times, saying his name aloud, and getting no answer, he pronounced the 263rd Pope of the Roman church dead. Once again, Villot was the Camerlengo.85

  Villot summoned Sister Vincenza and the other aides. After learning what had happened, he was immediately concerned about the public perception of an unaccompanied nun discovering the Pontiff’s corpse. The mere fact that a woman had the authority to enter on her own volition the Pope’s private bedroom might spark gossip, or as Villot dubbed it, “unfortunate misunderstandings.”86 So the Cardinal Secretary of State made a critical decision, one that would set the groundwork for conspiracy theories to flourish in the wake of the sixty-five-year-old John Paul’s untimely death.

  “I can’t put that the sister found him dead,” an exasperated Villot told Magee.87 All of them were to keep what had really happened a secret. Villot ordered Sister Vincenza to move to a convent outside Vatican City as soon as it was feasible. She was to avoid any public comment for the rest of her service to the church.88

  Magee would instead say that he had discovered the body upon entering the chamber to check on why the Pope was late for morning prayers. No mention would be made of any file of papers.89 Instead, when Father Francesco Farusi, Vatican Radio’s chief reporter, learned from a “Vatican source” that on the Pope’s nightstand there was a copy of De Imitatione Christi (The Imitation of Christ), a fifteenth-century devotional handbook, he put out the story that the Pope had been reading that at the time of his death.90 The tip was false. “[That book] was in the chapel, not by his bedside,” Farusi later recounted. “I suppose it [the tip] was to avoid anyone saying he was reading a pornographic magazine . . . or, you never know what they’ll say, a cowboy story.” (Only four days later, Vatican Radio retracted that story as “inaccurate,” but by then it had been repeated so many times that it was a widely accepted fact.)91

  Sometime after 7 a.m., two glum-looking men, dressed in black raincoats, arrived. They were brothers, Arnaldo and Ernesto Signoracci, respected morticians from a family firm founded in 1870 (“We’ve fixed up three dead Popes,” Arnaldo later told a journalist. “When they’re dead, they’re all the same to us.”)92,VI Villot had telephoned Professor Cesare Gerin, a renowned University of Rome professor and director of Italy’s Institute of Legal Medicine. Gerin in turn called the Signoraccis.94 But Villot had not summoned them to remove the body. Instead, they took out a rope from a small canvas bag. They tied some around the corpse’s ankles and knees. Then they straightened his legs and secured the rope to each end of the bed’s frame. The Signoraccis looped it around John Paul’s chest, and both pulled his arms and torso until the corpse was flat (a false rumor later made its way around the Vatican that the morticians had broken the Pope’s back when straightening the body).95 They closed his eyes and pulled the bedsheet just under his chin.96

  The Signoraccis left for a Vatican guesthouse where they spent the next few days.97 (When they returned a few hours later to get the body ready for public viewing, they began embalming the corpse. That meant opening the femoral arteries and injecting an anti-putrefaction liquid. Ernesto had trouble getting the injection in since there had been some clotting around the Pope’s neck.)98

  By 7:30 that morning, Villot had collected the Pope’s personal papers and disposed of his prescription pills (it is not known if the Pontiff had filled any medications from the Vatican pharmacy during his month in office, since the pages that cover that time are missing from the dispensary’s records).99 Villot had also prepared the official press statement. Father Romeo Panciroli, the chief of the press office, began telephoning the major Italian and foreign wire services. The first wire story of the Associated Press carried the sanctioned version:

  Today Sept. 29 around 0530 the Rev. John Magee, the pope’s private secretary, entered the bedroom of His Holiness John Paul I; since he had failed to see him in the chapel as usual, he looked for him in the room and he found him dead in the bed with the light on as with a person who had been reading.

  The doctor, immediately summoned, ascertained his death, presumably occurred around 2300 hours yesterday Thursday because of sudden death from acute myocardial infarction. The venerated body will be placed on display around noon in a hall of the Apostolic Palace.100

  The cover-up that Villot had engineered, mostly to hide the fact that a woman—albeit a nun—might be alone with the Pontiff in his bedroom in the early morning, was poorly thought out and certain to unravel. The Secretary of State, raised and steeped in the church’s cult of secrecy, had made a bad situation far worse.101 But it all came apart sooner than might have been expected. Shortly after the official statement was released, an unidentified insider with knowledge of what happened got in touch with Civiltà Cristiana (Christian Civilization), a bellicose right-wing Catholic group that boasted some fifty thousand members in dozens of countries. At the start of the conclave that elected John Paul a month earlier, Civiltà Cristiana had plastered Rome with brightly colored posters sarcastically insisting: “Elect a Catholic Pope.” Now, when the group’s Secretary General, Franco Antico, answered the telephone at its Rome headquarters, the anonymous person on the other end told a remarkable story that exposed the Vatican’s version as a lie.

  Antico, no stranger to the press, was on the phone by 8 a.m. with ANSA, Italy’s wire service. Villot and John Paul’s aides were lying, Antico claimed. He demanded an autopsy for the just deceased Pope. ANSA sent Antico’s demand worldwide.102 When reporters clamored for a comment from Panciroli, he checked with Villot. The Secretary of State ordered him to issue a “no further comment.” Meanwhile, by mid-morning, Antico had gotten more information from his source. He now told reporters they should interview Sister Vincenza and Monsignor Magee. When Villot heard that, he compounded his run of bad decisions by ordering Magee and Lorenzi to promptly leave for a private seminary outside Rome. Villot told them he would call when it was safe to return.103 (Sister Vincenza had already been driven away a couple of hours earlier.)

  Monsignor Magee moved into the Maria Bambina Institute adjacent to St. Peter’s Square, but he was increasingly distraught and wanted “to stay with my sister Kathleen, who lives outside Liverpool.”104 Villot’s office was slow to help him, so Magee went to Marcinkus. The IOR chief got him airline tickets in twenty minutes, and ordered a car and driver to take him to the airport. Two days after John Paul’s death, while reporters were still badgering the Vatican switchboard asking for Magee, the monsignor was a thousand miles away in England.105

  But Antico’s source knew not just many details about how the dead Pontiff was discovered, but he also had the scoop on Villot’s cover-up. Antico next told reporters they should ask where Vincenza and Magee had moved. On Villot’s orders, Panciroli told reporters that Sister Vincenza was “inaccessible” and Monsignor Magee had “left the country.”106

  The problem was made worse because the journalists covering the Vatican had little faith in the accuracy of anything Father Panciroli told them. Since assuming control of the press office a couple of years earlier, his dismissive ways and frequent misstatements and obfuscations had earned him the nickname “Padre Non Mi Risulta” (Father I Don’t Have Anything on That).107

  Villot called an emergency meeting for the following morning of all cardinals in Rome. By that time, Villot had cleared the nineteen rooms of the Papal residence of all of John Paul’s goods, and the Pontiff’s apartment was sealed pending the conclave.

  At 11 a.m. on Saturday, the thirty-four cardinals who had already arrived in Rome gathered in the enormous, gilded Sala Bologna, built in 1575 as a Papal dining room befitting a grand Pope-Monarch. None of them, other than Villot, knew the real story. Most speculated that Antico and Civiltà Cristiana were being duped by someone who wanted to plant a fake story to tarnish the church. A few, including V
ienna’s Franz König, thought the false reports were part of a Soviet disinformation plot.108

  Villot first addressed the burial date. The cardinals agreed on a funeral in five days, on the Feast of Italy’s patron saint, Francis. Then Cardinal Confalonieri brought up all the sinister whispers about John Paul’s death. Although he understood it violated church protocol, Confalonieri suggested an autopsy might best settle all suspicions. Some cardinals gasped.109 Cardinal König said he thought at the very least all the cardinals should be in Rome before voting to break such long-standing precedent. Moreover, König suggested that the autopsy would be difficult to keep secret. Conducting a historic postmortem exam, he averred, might further fuel the gossip that something untoward ended John Paul’s life.

  The problem with waiting until all the cardinals had arrived was that some from distant countries would likely not be in Rome until after the funeral. An autopsy would have to be done before that. Cardinal Felici suggested that a Rome pathologist and two doctors examine the Pope’s body. Within forty-eight hours they would report back on whether or not they recommended an autopsy. That compromise was approved by a 29–5 vote.110

  Two days later, Monday, October 2, eighty-five cardinals gathered in the Sala Bologna. The public clamor about John Paul’s death had picked up momentum. German, British, and Spanish papers suggested the cardinals should order an autopsy since the Vatican constitution did not explicitly forbid it.111 Respected Catholic writer Carlo Bo wrote a front-page editorial for Corriere della Sera, arguing that given the church’s long history of murders and intrigue surrounding medieval popes, they could best eliminate any doubts about this death by embracing modern science.112

  By the time of their new gathering, the cardinals knew that Villot and Buzzonetti had directed the Signoracci brothers to embalm the deceased Pope. “The reason they embalmed him on the first evening was because of Paul VI,” Monsignor Lorenzi later recalled, “who had begun to swell up and smell unpleasantly.”113 “It’s a problem because they go on view for four days, the heat and all that” admitted Ernesto Signoracci, one of the morticians who prepped the body.114

  Despite having been there early on the morning the body was discovered, the Signoraccis knew the corpse was unattended for at least several hours after the death. It might deteriorate faster than they hoped. A contemporaneous Associated Press report about the first day the body was on public display noted: “The pope’s face looked gray and waxen, and the basilica was shut down periodically Monday so morticians could retouch it.”115

  The cardinals were not familiar with the science of postmortems. They did not pay attention to the recommendation of some forensic pathologists that they preserve samples of John Paul’s blood and tissue before the embalming so it might be possible to test in the future for foreign substances, poisons, or drugs. They did not know that the chemicals used by the morticians reacted with bodily fluids, making it difficult if not impossible to spot poisons since they would be masked or washed out during the embalming.VII

  While the mainstream press urged an autopsy, Franco Antico and his Civiltà Cristiana gained an ally inside the church. Blas Piñar, president of a prominent Spanish lay organization, Fuerza Nueva (New Force), noted the Pope’s death had “raised so much suspicion.” Piñar cited a speech Paul VI gave before his death in which he cryptically said, “From some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Piñar insisted, “An autopsy must be carried out.”117

  At their Monday meeting, Villot presented the recommendations and findings of the three doctors who had examined the body at the cardinals’ request. Two concluded the cause of death was a massive heart attack. They based their conclusion on their interviews with the Vatican’s deputy chief of medicine, Dr. Buzzonetti, and on a summary that Villot had ordered created about John Paul’s health history. As far as they were concerned, no autopsy was necessary. The pathologist disagreed. While he also thought a heart attack the most likely cause of death, he could not be certain without an autopsy.118

  When Villot asked if there was any objection to accepting the majority medical opinion, most cardinals turned to Felici, who a couple of days earlier was the chief proponent of an autopsy. Felici scowled, his arms folded in front of him. But he did not say a word (later, he claimed he felt it was useless to protest since two of the doctors had decided no).119

  Villot called for a vote. The cardinals agreed by unanimous acclamation that no autopsy should be conducted. The consensus was that the rumors and gossip about the sudden death would blow over with the election of a new Pope in just twelve days. The cardinals were otherwise preoccupied with their unprecedented second conclave in just six weeks.120,VIII

  Villot lit a cigarette first thing in the morning. And it was the last thing he did before turning in for the night. He smoked three packs a day. But during this time of great stress he was up to four. The Italian press had questioned whether all the cardinals who were papabile should be required to undergo a full physical before the first ballot. Not only was it ludicrous, thought Villot, but the church was already straining under the weight of costly back-to-back conclaves. Sending all 111 cardinals for expedited comprehensive exams was an expense he had no intention of incurring.122 In any case, there was no time. The cardinals had a tight schedule for burying the Pope and starting the conclave. It all had to be accomplished in half the leisurely pace Villot had set after the death of Paul VI.

  The press began its guessing game of who would be the next Pontiff. Father Andrew Greeley got wide coverage when he announced that a previously unknown Chicago group called the National Opinion Research Center used a “complex decision-making model” to pick the likely winner: Corrado Ursi, the moderate seventy-year-old cardinal of Naples. Church insiders were as dismissive of Greeley’s model as they were of Ladbrokes bookmaking odds.

  This time the politicking for the Papacy seemed more brazen, even among the most reserved cardinals. There was a widespread sentiment that the modern church was at a crucial juncture. The death of Paul VI, followed by the sudden start-stop nature of John Paul’s brief Papacy, only added impetus to the sense that the next selection was important.

  Conservatives, as they had just a month earlier, rallied behind Genoa’s Siri. It was the fourth conclave at which the seventy-two-year-old cardinal was embraced by the Curia’s traditional wing as the rightful heir to Pius XII. Some of them interpreted John Paul’s untimely death as a providential sign to redouble their efforts for the autocratic Siri.

  But Siri had plenty of competition. Many thought that if John Paul were alive, he might well select someone who reflected his pastoral emphasis and charismatic temperament, possibly Pericle Felici. What better way to honor the late Pontiff’s memory than by putting into the Papacy the man considered his closest copy? Of course, John Paul had relied on the advice of Florence’s Benelli. Although Benelli’s curt ways irritated many in the Curia, even his detractors admitted that he managed to get work done in an institution where delay and equivocation seemed unyielding. When Benelli arrived at the conclave carrying a portable typewriter, some colleagues joked that he was preparing to type a long acceptance speech.123

  There was also talk about whether—after 455 years—it was time for a non-Italian Pope. That was unlikely. Although some foreign cardinals had substantial prestige inside the church, and ran populous foreign dioceses that had more Catholics than any Italian city, they carried no weight inside the Curia. If anything, their outsider status meant that most church officials considered them powers to be appeased from a distance, but never to be embraced to sit on the throne of St. Peter.

  In the last conclave, the Italians had cut enough deals to keep the support of the chief foreign cardinals. There were only a handful strong enough to persuade others to follow their endorsement. A diverse group, they were from England, Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Samoa, and Austria.124 The problem for Siri and the traditionalists was that Pope Paul VI had appointed almost all of them as cardinals, and he had pi
cked them because they were among the most progressive bishops in their countries. Some press reports even touted Cardinal Bernardin Gantin as a long shot. The Benin native had worked in the Curia since Paul VI put him there after the Second Vatican Council. His reputation as a moderate pragmatist did not upset the traditionalists, but few seemed ready to make history by electing the first black Pope.

  The non-Italians had a different view of the church than those who worked inside the closeted Curia. Kinshasa’s cardinal, Joseph Malula, told Gantin, “All that imperial paraphernalia, all that isolation of the Pope, all that medieval remoteness and inheritance that makes Europeans think that the church is only Western—all that tightness makes them fail to understand that young countries like mine want something different.”125

  The unquestioned dean of the non-Italian cardinals was Vienna’s seventy-three-year-old Franz König. He feared nothing more than heading into the eighty-third conclave with the possibility that Siri, whom he considered an unyielding reactionary, might at long last become Pope and reverse two decades of reforms. Siri tried repositioning himself as a centrist but few electors believed he had moderated his hard-line positions.

  Some press reports and Vaticanologists speculated before the conclave about whether even König could become Pope. But he confided in a few of his closest colleagues that he had no interest in the Papacy. However, König allowed the speculation to build in the hope that it might give him more influence at the conclave.