Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  UNTIL HIS APPOINTMENT as Archbishop of Milan in 1954, Giovanni Battista Montini had spent virtually his whole working life in the papal Secretariat. The son of a prosperous lawyer and parliamentary deputy, already in 1937, at the age of forty, he had been appointed assistant to Cardinal Pacelli, then secretary of state, at whose side he was to remain for the next seventeen years. In 1953 he had declined a cardinal’s hat, knowing that this would remove him from his unique position of power; but it seems likely that soon after this his influence began to decline anyway. As a relative liberal, he almost certainly antagonized the reactionary old guard, including Pius himself, who began to want him out of the way; and he knew perfectly well that by his appointment to Milan he was being kicked upstairs. It was a further mark of disfavor that, despite strong and repeated representations from the Milanese themselves, membership in the Sacred College continued to be withheld from him; without a red hat he was obviously not qualified to be elected, as many would otherwise have expected, as the next pope.

  It is a characteristic of dictators—and Pius XII was a dictator if anyone was—to give little or no thought to their successors. Perhaps it was an aspect of Pius’s autocratic instincts—“Après moi le déluge,” he is said to have murmured—that he seems to have mistrusted his cardinals and taken curiously little interest in them. In nineteen years he held just two consistories, and when he died the Sacred College, whose full complement had been set by Sixtus V at seventy, had only fifty-one members, half of whom were well over eighty years old. All this had been immediately rectified by Pope John on his accession. At his first consistory, when Archbishop Montini at last received his red hat, he abolished Pope Sixtus’s maximum, and by 1962 the College numbered no fewer than eighty-seven.

  Of these cardinals, eighty assembled on the evening of June 19 for the conclave. Montini was the favorite but was nevertheless elected only on the fifth ballot, taking the name of Paul VI; he wanted, he said, to reach out to the modern Gentiles. Few pontiffs have accepted the triple crown with greater or more genuine reluctance. Now sixty-five, he knew—no one better—what it meant to be pope: not just the responsibility but the aching personal loneliness. He knew, too, that he had just a hundred days before the second session of the Council began. The first, in which he had played a significant part, had not been an unqualified success: there had been several angry clashes of ideas and several more of personalities. But that had been inevitable, for never in papal history had there been such outspokenness, such freedom of expression; in the words of Thomas Roberts, formerly Archbishop of Bombay, the children of God had been able to slide down the banisters in the house of the Lord.

  It was only with the second session that the Council got into its stride, proving itself to be the most revolutionary Christian phenomenon since the Reformation. It contradicted Pius XII’s pronouncements on almost every main issue: ecumenism, liturgical reform, communism, freedom of religion, and above all Judaism. The key document was Lumen Gentium, the Decree on the Church. Pius would have hated it, above all the section which took care not to identify the Roman Catholic Church with the Church of Christ. The latter, it maintained, simply “subsisted” within it, “although many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible structure.” This meant effectively that it could coexist equally with other churches: Catholicism no longer claimed the monopoly on divine truth. Elsewhere, the decree undermined the whole concept of papal autocracy by emphasizing the importance of the bishops and indeed of the laity. The Church is described as a pilgrim Church, the faithful as a pilgrim people.

  Of the several other decrees approved by the Council, the Decree on the Liturgy transformed Roman Catholic worship, establishing the principle of greater participation in the Mass by the laity, introducing the vernacular in place of Latin, and requiring that the celebrant face the congregation rather than the altar. The Decree on Ecumenism made the quest for religious unity central to the Church’s work. The Decree on Religious Liberty, primarily an American initiative, declared that freedom of worship was a fundamental element of human dignity. The Decree on Other Religions (Nostra Aetate), vehemently opposed by the still anti-Semitic Curia, was of particular importance in defining the Church’s attitude to the Jews:

  True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; yet what occurred in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ. Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism, directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone.

  The Council continued for just over three years, being finally closed by Pope Paul on December 8, 1965. From the first preparations until the end, its success had been very largely due to him. The opposition of the old guard had continued throughout, and it is unlikely that Pope John, even had he lived, could have forced most of the measures through. Paul, by contrast, who had spent his whole working life in the Vatican bureaucracy, possessed the knowledge and experience to steer the Council with a firm and confident hand. He dealt with the old guard by imposing on all bishops—an exception was made only for the pope in his capacity of Bishop of Rome—compulsory retirement at the age of seventy-five. Cardinals would be obliged to retire from the Curia at eighty, after which they would no longer be permitted to participate in papal conclaves, the only privilege to which their rank entitled them. On the other hand, the size of the Sacred College was drastically increased, with the appointment of many new cardinals from the Third World; henceforth the Italians would never again enjoy an absolute majority.

  The Church had been transformed to the point of unrecognizability. For many Catholics, it had at last moved with the times. For many others, it had destroyed itself. Congregations, even in old strongholds such as Spain and Sicily, fell away. Priests tore off their collars; several orders of nuns put away their old habits in favor of uniforms inescapably reminiscent of those worn by airline hostesses. Particularly among the older generation, the disappearance of the familiar and beloved Latin proved hard to accept; to some it was even heartbreaking. Apart from its intrinsic beauty, Latin had served as a lingua franca; in every country of the world, the Mass had been identical and thus immediately familiar. Now, just at the moment when civil aviation was opening up and people were traveling more than ever before, the faithful were all too often obliged to hear it in languages of which they understood not a word.

  It was Paul’s task to hold all these conflicting elements together. This he managed, on the whole, successfully—though he was unable to prevent the breakaway traditionalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre from founding his Society of St. Pius X, which firmly upheld the old order together with the full Tridentine Mass. He drove the Council forward and ensured that there was no backsliding when it was over; but in other respects he remained staunchly conservative. On the question of priestly celibacy he refused to budge, while the stand he took on birth control did immeasurable damage to his reputation.

  Perhaps unwisely, he had considered this subject too hot a potato for the Council; instead he had entrusted it to a special commission of theologians, doctors, scientists, and—somewhat surprisingly—married couples. This commission recommended that the Church’s traditional teaching should be modified to allow artificial contraception, at least in certain circumstances, and it was generally expected that the pope would accept the recommendation, which had already been endorsed by the majority of a panel of bishops. Alas, he did nothing of the sort: his consequ
ent encyclical, Humanae Vitae, of 1968 simply reconfirmed the old Vatican line. It caused much disappointment and, in many cases, disgust. Particularly in pullulating South America, hundreds of priests resigned; hundreds more continued to encourage contraception among their flock, just as they always had.

  Paul should perhaps have visited South America himself; he certainly could have, for he was the first pope to travel on a grand scale—seeing it, indeed, as part of his pastoral duty. In 1963 he addressed the United Nations in New York, in 1964 the International Eucharistic Congress in Bombay. That year also saw him in Jerusalem, where he and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras took what seemed to be the first step in the ending of the Great Schism which had split the Eastern and Western churches from 1054.4 In 1967 he was the first pope since the Ottoman Conquest to visit Istanbul, where he made the embarrassing mistake of falling on his knees on entering St. Sophia, giving the hard-line Islamists the opportunity to accuse him of attempting to convert the building back into a Christian church.5 In 1969, for the World Council of Churches—where his presence would have been unthinkable before Vatican II—he was in, of all places, Geneva; in that same year he went to Uganda, thus becoming the first pontiff ever to set foot on the African continent; and in 1970 he visited the Philippines—where he narrowly escaped assassination—and Australia.

  By this time, however, he was giving several of his closest associates cause for concern. His responsibilities were becoming too much for him; he was a deeply unhappy man. The loneliness of his position, his increasing unpopularity, especially after Humanae Vitae, the increasing tensions within the Church as the full consequences of Vatican II slowly became apparent, the increase in international terrorism, and the Italian Red Brigades all took their toll and increased his depression. In 1974 there were even rumors of his possible resignation, and in 1978 the kidnapping and subsequent murder of his close friend the Christian Democratic politician Aldo Moro, at whose funeral he presided, was a blow from which he never properly recovered. He died that same year—of acute cystitis, culminating in a massive heart attack—in his summer palace of Castel Gandolfo. It was on the evening of Sunday, August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration.

  CARDINAL ALBINO LUCIANI was elected pope on the fourth ballot, on the first and last day of the conclave of August 26, 1978. He was of a poor, working-class background from near Belluno, his father passing much of his working life as a seasonal worker—bricklayer and electrician—in Switzerland. Luciani had been Bishop of Vittorio Veneto and subsequently, for nine years, Patriarch of Venice; he was, however, little known outside Italy, and it was a matter of considerable surprise that the 111 voting cardinals—of whom only 27 were Italian—should have chosen him so quickly. The English Cardinal Basil Hume had an explanation: “Seldom have I had such an experience of the presence of God.… I am not one for whom the dictates of the Holy Spirit are self-evident. I’m slightly hard-boiled on that.… But for me he was God’s candidate.”

  Paul VI had, as we have seen, accepted the Papacy only with extreme reluctance; his successor felt much the same. After the penultimate ballot, when he was well in the lead and within seven votes of the Papacy, he was heard to murmur, “No, please no.” Many of his closest associates thought he might well refuse, but slowly and sadly he nodded his head. He took the name of John Paul I, the first double-barreled name in papal history. In his first speech to the people of Rome he explained why:

  Pope John had wanted to consecrate me with his own hands here in the Basilica of St. Peter. Then, though unworthy, I succeeded him in the cathedral of St. Mark—in that Venice that is still filled with the spirit of Pope John.… On the other hand, Pope Paul not only made me a cardinal, but some months before that, in St. Mark’s Square, he made me blush in front of 20,000 people, because he took off his stole and placed it on my shoulders. Never was my face so red.… And so I took the name “John Paul.”

  Be sure of this. I do not have the wisdom of heart of Pope John. I do not have the preparation and culture of Pope Paul. But I now stand in their place. I will seek to serve the Church and hope that you will help me with your prayers.

  This informal, familiar tone set the seal on John Paul’s papacy. No pope had ever been more approachable; no pope had ever had such a warm and captivating smile—a smile that reached out to everyone he met. Pomposity he detested. Some was of course inseparable from his position, but he reduced it to a minimum. He was, for example, the first pope to refuse a coronation; there were no more triple crowns, no more gestatorial chairs in which he would be carried shoulder-high through the crowds, no more swaying ostrich feathers, no more of the royal “We.” He longed to take the Church back to its origins, to the humility and simplicity, the honesty and poverty of Jesus Christ himself.

  But how was it to be done? First of all, there was the Curia to contend with. He had no enemies in it; indeed, at the time of his election he had no enemies at all. But his refusal to be crowned with all the usual trappings had horrified the traditionalists, and his decision that the extra month’s salary normally paid on the election of a new pope should be cut by half had not increased his popularity. He soon found, too, that the Vatican was a hotbed of petty hatreds, rivalries, and jealousies. “I hear nothing but malice, directed against everything and everyone,” he complained. “Also, I have noticed two things that appear to be in very short supply: honesty and a good cup of coffee.”

  In such an atmosphere it was inevitable that he would be misinterpreted and misrepresented. L’Osservatore Romano, for example, in a special edition published within hours of his election, reported that he was among the first of the bishops to circulate the encyclical Humanae Vitae “and to insist that its teaching was beyond question.” This was completely untrue. It was well known that in 1968, as Bishop of Vittorio Veneto, he had submitted a confidential report to his predecessor as Patriarch of Venice, recommending that the recently developed contraceptive pill should be permitted by the Church, and that this report, having been approved by his fellow bishops, was submitted to Paul VI. As we know, Paul rejected it, but John Paul had not changed his opinion. In 1978 he had been invited to speak at an International Congress in Milan to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Humanae Vitae but had refused to go. Within days of his election he agreed to receive the American Congressman James Scheuer, who headed the House Select Committee on Population. “To my mind,” he remarked to the secretary of state, Cardinal Jean-Marie Villot, “we cannot leave the situation as it currently stands.”

  Had he lived his full term, this quiet, gentle, smiling man might well have achieved a revolution in the Church—a revolution even more dramatic and profound than that created by Pope John’s Second Vatican Council. But he did not live. Shortly before 5:30 A.M. on Friday, September 29, 1978, he was found dead in his bed. He had been pope for just thirty-three days, the shortest reign since that of Leo XI in 1605.

  Was John Paul I murdered? Certainly, there were reasons to believe so. For a man of sixty-five he was in excellent health; there was no postmortem or autopsy; the Curia obviously panicked and was caught out in any number of small lies as to the manner of his death and the finding of his body; and if, as was widely believed, he was on the point of exposing a major financial scandal in which the Vatican Bank and its director, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, were deeply implicated, there were at least three international criminals—one of whom, Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano, was later found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London—who would have gone to any lengths to prevent him from doing so. The Vatican, moreover, is an easy place for murder. It is an independent state with no police force of its own; the Italian police can enter only if invited—which they were not.

  The arguments for and against the conspiracy theory are long and complicated. To set them out here would mean devoting twenty or thirty pages to a pope who reigned for only a month and would hopelessly unbalance this already overlong book. Those who would like to study them—and they are well worth studying—should read t
wo books: In God’s Name by David Yallop (in favor of the theory) and A Thief in the Night by John Cornwell (against it). They can then decide for themselves.6

  IT WAS REMARKABLE that the first non-Italian pope to be elected since Hadrian VI in 1522 should have been elected on only the second day of voting, gaining 103 of the 109 votes cast; but Karol Wojtyła was a remarkable man. Still only fifty-eight, he was a published poet and playwright, an accomplished skier and mountaineer, and fluent in six—some say ten—languages. He studied at the University of Cracow, but after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the university had been closed down. He then took several laborer’s jobs, including one in a quarry, and is said to have had a relationship with a local girl before deciding on the priesthood at the comparatively late age of twenty-two. Thereafter he rose fast. After only three years as a parish priest he returned to the university to study philosophy and to lecture on social ethics. He was nominated bishop at the early age of thirty-eight, and five years later Paul VI appointed him Archbishop of Cracow.

  Two days after his election as John Paul II, in his first important speech as pope, he emphasized his international role as head of the universal Church. “From now on,” he said, “the particular nature of our country of origin is of little importance.” It was, of course, nothing of the kind. Poland, where he had lived for the first fifty-eight years of his life, remained his spiritual home. It colored all his policies, all his decisions, all his public pronouncements. During his pontificate he went back there on no fewer than nine occasions, far more than to any other country. He remembered all too clearly the Warsaw Rising and the Holocaust. On “Black Sunday,” August 6, 1944, the Gestapo had rounded up 8,000 young Polish men in Cracow; Wojtyła had escaped by hiding in a basement while the Germans searched upstairs. After the war he endured nearly half a century of communism, and from 1980, when the Communist monolith began to crack, he gave every encouragement to the Polish Solidarity movement and its leader, Lech Wałęsa, to whom he may well have secretly channeled funds through Archbishop Marcinkus and the Vatican Bank. As Mikhail Gorbachev once remarked, “The collapse of the iron curtain would have been impossible without John Paul II.”