The first ballot on October 14 put Siri at the top with twenty-three votes, an unprecedented fourth time in twenty years he had gathered the largest bloc of support at the conclave’s outset. But it was a poor showing for a man whose pre-conclave expectations were at least fifty first-ballot votes.126 Only one vote behind was Florence’s Benelli. Three other Italian cardinals were next, Felici, Ursi of Naples, and Palermo’s Salvatore Pappalardo (famous for being the first Sicilian cardinal ever to condemn the Mafia). Those five Italians had pulled ninety-five votes, twenty more than required to be elected Pontiff. König worried that the conclave might have already turned into an Italian-only fight. If the Italians struck a deal and consolidated their support behind one candidate, the conclave would be over. The Viennese cardinal thought however that it was just as likely the intense dislike each had for one another might make it difficult for them to reach a consensus.
Kraków’s Karol Józef Wojtyla had gotten the votes of five cardinals. Besides being a pastor of one of Poland’s biggest cities, Wojtyla was one of the church’s most prolific theological authors. König liked him and reflected the view of many others that Wojtyla’s humility and low-key approach was a welcome respite from the frenetic narcissism of some of the more flamboyant Italians. American cardinals Cody and Cooke also liked Wojtyla. Both the Americans oversaw large Polish American congregations. (Cody had sent more than a million dollars to Wojtyla to support the Polish church.) But Poland’s senior cardinal, Warsaw’s Stefan Wyszyński, told König before the voting that he thought his fellow Pole was “too young [58], he’s unknown, he could never be Pope.”127
Nevertheless, König and the Americans started lobbying for Wojtyla, suggesting to some colleagues that at the very least they should vote for him to slow the Italians. “They were planning a palace coup, but no one believed they could pull it off,” according to Father Andrew Greeley.128
Siri faded by the second ballot. His supporters had moved to Benelli, who now had forty votes, and Felici followed with thirty.129 The top five were the same Italian cardinals, but this time they had 107 votes. König’s and Cody’s efforts on behalf of Wojtyla had almost doubled his support to nine. To the Italian frontrunners, he was too far behind to matter.
After that second ballot, König brought in a major ally for Wojtyla: Madrid’s Vicente Enrique y Tarancón threw his support to the quiet Polish prelate. That opened the door to the Latin and South American cardinals, who had so far shown little desire to look beyond Italy.
The third ballot narrowed the field. Benelli pulled away from the other Italians, now corraling forty-five votes. Wojtyla was still stuck at nine. During a break between votes, Benelli met with some of the other first-ballot contenders. On the fourth ballot, he surged to sixty-five votes, only ten short of victory. Benelli had momentum. One more ballot might put him over the top.130 Many of the cardinals were tired, having made the trek to Rome for their second pressure-filled conclave in less than two months. A quick resolution would demonstrate to the faithful that they were in sync about the future of the church. But on the fourth ballot Wojtyla had jumped from nine votes to twenty-four. That indicated Benelli’s supporters might not be firm. If that was the case, König intended to politick during the next break to build support for the cardinal from Kraków.131
On the third day, Monday, October 16, the Benelli camp seemed confident during breakfast. They boisterously dominated the center dining table. Some Italians had decided that as much as they disliked Benelli, he was preferable to a non-Italian.
In the next vote, Benelli scored seventy votes, just five short of becoming Pope. Villot ordered an hour between ballots. Can you live with Benelli and his imperious ways, König asked his colleagues? The next ballot changed the race. Benelli lost eleven cardinals. Wojtyla was now at fifty-two. Although Benelli’s table was downhearted, Wojtyla also seemed glum, simply staring at his food. More than once he had told his Polish colleague Wyszyński, as well as König, that he did not want to be Pope.
“You simply must face the truth,” König told him. “This is what the Holy Spirit wishes.”
“It’s a mistake,” Wojtyla whispered.132
The first ballot of the afternoon confirmed that the momentum belonged to Wojtyla. He pulled seventy-three votes, just two short of winning. Benelli had dropped almost in half to thirty-eight. The eighth ballot, taken at 5 p.m., put Wojtyla over the top with ninety-seven votes.133 Wojtyla looked so grim that Cardinal Hume felt “desperately sad for the man.”134
With his white hair and weathered face he seemed the contemporary of Benelli and Felici, men a decade older. At fifty-eight he was the youngest Pope since the fifty-four-year-old Pius IX in 1846. He was the first non-Italian since the Dutch Adrian VI in 1522. And Wojtyla also had the fewest connections to the Curia of any Pope in centuries.
When it came to doctrines of faith, Wojtyla had a reputation as a moderate with an open mind. He had been a firm and popular leader of Kraków’s two million Catholics.135 And although he had distinguished himself for developing a productive church-communist dialogue in Poland, he also maintained a hard line when it came to the godless political philosophy that ruled his homeland. In his writings, he condemned persecution against Catholics by those who see it as “the opiate of the people,” a reference to the slogan made popular by Karl Marx.136
Standing in front of the cardinals who had just elected him, Wojtyla suddenly seemed energized. Because of his respect for his two predecessors, he had settled on the Papal name John Paul II.137
As word spread into the packed crowd at St. Peter’s, there were cries of “E il Polcacco” (It’s the Pole). That the College of Cardinals had done the truly unexpected was settling in fast.
* * *
I. This phrase was first used by the Catholic press in 1978, and subsequently by the mainstream media. It was also the title of a book by the late Vaticanologist Peter Hebblethwaite.
II. Vatican Radio succeeded in planting a rudimentary transmitter disguised as a shirt button on one of the lay attendants in the Sistine Chapel. It was not capable of picking up voices but instead sent a low-pitched ping to a receiver hidden inside the Vatican Radio office. The attendant was instructed to press it three times when a Pope was elected.10
III. Monsignor Lorenzi, who arrived after only a few minutes, recalled much later, “The sheets of paper were quite upright. They had not slipped out of his hands and fallen on the floor. I myself took the sheets out of his hand. I did!” Unknown to Lorenzi, Sister Vincenza had picked up the scattered papers and put them back in the folder before he had arrived.68
IV. The only flight to Rome from Venice that morning was completely booked, so da Ros jumped in his car for what turned out to be a nine-hour drive to Rome. The corpse was off limits by the time da Ros arrived. In an interview with an Associated Press reporter a few days later, da Ros admitted that when he examined his longtime patient the week before his death, “the stress of his new post was great. . . . He was not prepared, accustomed to that responsibility. I told him that he could not continue at that pace and he replied he could not do anything about it.”78
V. The question of whether John Paul had a heart condition was later hotly debated. Initial information from the Vatican was that he “was not known to have had any chronic heart trouble.” Subsequent unconfirmed press reports were that Luciani had suffered four heart attacks, but there is no confirmation of that based on interviews with his family and information provided later by his doctors. Monsignor Petri Lina (Pia) Luciani, John Paul’s physician niece, told the Associated Press in 1978 that he had no history of heart disease: “He is delicate, but, I advise you, he is not a traveling hospital.” A decade later she said that her uncle had been hospitalized in 1975 for a thrombosis of the retinal artery at Rome’s Gemelli Hospital. But that has never been confirmed. Also a decade after the Pope’s death, Monsignor Lorenzi told an Italian reporter that he remembered that the evening before John Paul died, he had “a dreadful pain” in his
chest, but he “absolutely forbade” Lorenzi from calling a doctor. “And I obeyed, because one should obey the Pope.” Lorenzi never told anyone of his refreshed memory, he claimed, because “I didn’t connect this [the heart pain] with a round-the-corner heart attack, because I’d never studied these things.” Monsignor Magee a decade later told author John Cornwell that the Pope “was constantly talking of death.” The night John Paul died Magee supposedly said to Sister Vincenza, “It would be terrible to lose a Pope now after losing Paul VI. How many days is it now? Thirty-three?”82
VI. An ANSA wire service story incorrectly reported that on the morning of the death an unidentified person had telephoned the Signoraccis at 5 a.m.—before the Pope’s body was discovered—and dispatched a Vatican car to bring them to the Apostolic Palace. That was incorrect. Mario di Francesco, the journalist who wrote the story, got the wrong time from Renato Signoracci, yet another brother in the family business, but one who did not go to the Vatican. Conspiracy theorists nevertheless continue to cite this as proof of foul play in John Paul’s death.93
VII. Italian law barred embalming within the first twenty-four hours of death. The Signoraccis were not concerned about violating Italian law. “We did the same with Pope John,” Ernesto later told author John Cornwell. “We began the same day that he died. There’s no problem, because the Vatican is a foreign country. . . . They’re not bound by the Italian magistrates . . . especially with sudden-death.”116
VIII. In 1984, the rumors of foul play in the death of John Paul I were at the center of a salacious nonfiction book, In God’s Name, by British author David Yallop. He mixed suspicions about Marcinkus and Cody into a convoluted murder plot masterminded by none other than Sindona, Calvi, Cardinal Villot, and P2’s Gelli. John Paul was most likely poisoned, contended Yallop, by an overdose of digitalis, a heart medication. Villot’s cover-up after the Pope’s death, combined with the failure to do an autopsy—actions that Father Andrew Greeley called “just plain stupid”—was grist for Yallop. In God’s Name was criticized by many, who deemed it a speculative theory unsupported by credible evidence. The Vatican, which normally ignored such books, issued multiple condemnations, calling it “infamous rubbish,” “absurd fantasies,” and “shocking and deplorable.” The more the Vatican damned it, the more the book sold, an estimated six million copies. Elton John and his partner David Furnish added ultimately to the church’s angst by buying its film rights.
In 1989, author John Cornwell published A Thief in the Night, in which he demolished Yallop’s assumptions. Cornwell offered his own tantalizing theory that rested instead on negligence. In his account, one of John Paul’s secretaries, Monsignor Magee, discovered the Pope was dead at 11 p.m. the previous night. Magee convinced Monsignor Lorenzi to help him put the Pope into his bed and fix him so Sister Vincenza would discover him the next morning.
By 1988, a decade after the Pope’s death, a new theory had gained momentum: the CIA had murdered John Paul because he was about to reveal the identity of the American-backed assassins of Aldo Moro. In this plot, Marcinkus worked for the CIA.121
21
The Backdoor Deal
The cardinal they picked, Karol Józef Wojtyla, was the youngest of three children born into a devoutly Catholic household in Wadowice, a small town thirty miles outside Kraków. His father was a noncommissioned army soldier, and his mother, a schoolteacher, died during childbirth when he was eight.1 In 1938, a year before the start of World War II, Wojtyla enrolled in Kraków’s Jagiellonian University where he studied Polish literature, was an avid member of the drama club, and played as goalkeeper on the soccer team.2 When the Nazis and Soviets divided Poland, he avoided deportation to Germany by working at menial jobs the Germans assigned him, including at a limestone quarry, then a chemical plant, and even as a messenger for a restaurant.3 After his father died in 1941, the twenty-one-year-old entered an underground theological seminary and spent the last year of the war studying for the priesthood.4 On August 6, 1944, the so-called Black Sunday on which the Nazis rounded up more than eight thousand young men, he escaped to safety in the palace of Kraków’s cardinal.5,I
After the war, Wojtyla studied for a doctorate at Rome’s Pontifical Athenaeum Angelicum, and he returned to Poland in 1948 as a parish priest in a small town just outside Kraków. He remained in Poland when the country became a full-fledged Soviet satellite in 1952. Wojtyla was a prodigious writer about church history and canon law. As a popular teacher of moral philosophy at Lublin’s Catholic University and at the Kraków seminary, he had a reputation far beyond Poland.7 At thirty-eight, he became the second youngest bishop in the world, and five years later Pope Paul VI elevated him to an archbishop.8 Most parishioners in Kraków thought he was smart and likable.9 And although he was undoubtedly spiritual and a serious scholar, his strong character was forged by his experience as a Polish prelate living under a communist government. To do something in his own diocese, he had to apply for permission to a special government ministry that oversaw all church matters. The freedom of religion taken for granted in America and many Western European countries was still a distant dream for him.
By selecting a cleric from Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, the cardinals had selected the most fervently anticommunist Pope since Pius XII. Just three days after Wojtyla’s election, the CIA’s National Foreign Assessment Center circulated a four-page confidential memo that concluded that the election of a Polish Pontiff would complicate matters for the Soviet Union and would “undoubtedly prove extremely worrisome to Moscow.”10 And just as Pius XII’s zeal about fighting communism was shared by contemporaneous, secular Western leaders like Harry Truman and Winston Churchill, similarly like-minded heads of state would soon join Wojtyla. Margaret Thatcher began her eleven-year tenure as Britain’s Prime Minister just five months after he became Pope.11 And Ronald Reagan came into office two years later. Reagan and Thatcher would lead the fight to break the Soviet empire. They had Wojtyla’s full support.
As he settled into the Papacy, John Paul II met with CIA analysts, who briefed him on American efforts to destabilize communist governments behind the Iron Curtain. Egyptian intelligence agents gave him a better understanding of events in the Middle East. Italy sent security service officers to update him on the fight against the Red Brigades.12 The message from the new Pope was clear: he was not going to rely only on the traditional channels of information filtered first by the Curia.
Inevitably, John Paul II would revive Pius XII’s policy that the church had a duty to be involved in secular politics when it came to standing against communism. Covert money would be needed for anticommunist cells in Eastern Europe. The Vatican Bank was proven to be as instrumental in this new phase as it was in safeguarding the church’s fortune during World War II.
On December 1, 1978, less than two months after assuming the Papacy, John Paul summoned Marcinkus for a meeting at the Apostolic Palace. It was the first time since his election that the two met alone. Six weeks earlier, Cardinals Benelli and Felici had given his predecessor a damning file about the IOR chief and the unchecked manner in which he ran the Vatican Bank. They worried that John Paul might not give it the attention it deserved. Although Kraków was a large, cash-poor diocese that he managed well, he was known not to like money matters. He did not even have his own bank account.13 Before the Pope met with Marcinkus that day, Felici checked to make sure the Pope had read the file. He had.14
When Marcinkus arrived, he sat on the far side of a large desk, across from the Pontiff. Marcinkus remembered enough of his parents’ Lithuanian dialect that they made some small talk in Polish.15 It was a good start. The duo had in common their outsider status, and the Pope knew that Cody and Marcinkus had facilitated contributions from American Poles in Chicago that had helped support his Kraków diocese.
Instead of talking about finances, John Paul surprised Marcinkus by discussing his plans for a foreign trip. Mexico would be his first stop, John Paul told him, since the church was challenged
on many fronts there, from ingrained poverty, corruption, a power surge by leftists, and even the growth of rival Pentecostals. Would Marcinkus organize the trip and accompany him? The fifty-six-year-old IOR chief must have felt great relief. He had gone from almost certain banishment a couple of months earlier under Luciani to being offered a chance by the new Pope to reprise his insider’s role on foreign trips.
And there was something else addressed—revealed here for the first time. For several years there had been a simmering financial scandal about a group of Pauline monks that ran a Philadelphia-area shrine to Our Lady of Czestochowa, the “Black Madonna” revered by Polish Catholics for having spared a holy monastery from a seventeenth-century Swedish siege.16 A month before John Paul became Pope, the scandal about the Polish monastic order went public in the United States when Gannett News Service published an investigative series.17 The Vatican, with assistance from U.S. cardinals, had appointed in 1975 two hard-nosed prelates—Camden, New Jersey’s, Bishop George Guilfoyle and the Reverend Paul Boyle, the provincial chief of Chicago’s Passionist Fathers—to look into possible financial mismanagement at the shrine and monastery.18
What they discovered shocked church officials. The Pauline Fathers had not only squandered nearly $20 million in charitable contributions, but there was evidence of “mismanagement, dubious business practices and what Vatican investigators described as ‘chaotic’ and ‘immoral’ life styles.”19 Guilfoyle and Boyle compiled a long list of problems. The Paulines had raised $400,000 for bronze plaques for the shrine but never made a single one. Donors gave $250,000 for Masses that the priests never celebrated. Sixty-four thousand dollars went to cemetery upkeep that was never performed. Making matters worse, the monks had violated their poverty vows. Although the order had defaulted on $4.3 million in church bonds bought mostly by Polish American Catholics, Guilfoyle and Boyle concluded the Paulines ran their 130-acre hilltop monastery “more like a resort hotel than a monastic institution.” A majority of the thirty monks had their own cars, paid for by contributions from the faithful, and all had credit cards that were charged against donations.20
God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican Page 37