In God's Name (4 page)

It was abundantly clear that on September 28th, 1978, these six men, Marcinkus, Villot, Calvi, Sindona, Cody and Gelli had much to fear if the Papacy of John Paul I continued. It is equally clear that all of them stood to gain in a variety of ways if Pope John Paul I should suddenly die.

He did.

Sometime during the late evening of September 28th, 1978 and the early morning of September 29th, 1978, thirty-three days after his election, Albino Luciani died.

Time of death: unknown. Cause of death: unknown.

I am convinced that the full facts and the complete circumstances which are merely outlined in the preceding pages hold the key to the truth of the death of Albino Luciani. I am equally convinced that one of these six men had, by the early evening of September 28th, 1978, already initiated a course of action to resolve the problems that Albino Luciani’s Papacy was posing. One of these men was at the very heart of a conspiracy that applied a uniquely Italian solution.

Albino Luciani had been elected Pope on August 26th, 1978. Shortly after that Conclave, the English Cardinal Basil Hume said: ‘The decision was unexpected. But once it had happened, it seemed totally and entirely right. The feeling he was just what we want was so general that he was unmistakably God’s candidate.’

Thirty-three days later ‘God’s candidate’ died.

What follows is the product of three years’ continuous and intensive investigation into that death. I have evolved a number of rules for an investigation of this nature. Rule One: begin at the beginning. Ascertain the nature and personality of the dead subject. What manner of man was Albino Luciani?

The Road to Rome

The Luciani family lived in the small mountain village of Canale d’Agordo,
*
nearly 1,000 metres above sea level and approximately 120 kilometres north of Venice.

At the time of Albino’s birth on October 17th, 1912, his parents Giovanni and Bortola were already caring for two daughters from the father’s first marriage. As a young widower with two girls and lacking a regular job Giovanni would not have been every young woman’s dream come true. Bortola had been contemplating the life of a convent nun. Now she was mother to three children. The birth had been long and arduous and Bortola, displaying an over-anxiety that would become a feature of the boy’s early life, feared that the child was about to die. He was promptly baptized, with the name Albino, in memory of a close friend of his father who had been killed in a blast furnace accident while working alongside Giovanni in Germany. The boy came into a world that within two years would be at war, after the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife had been assassinated.

The first fourteen years of this century are considered by many Europeans to have been a golden age. Countless writers have described the stability, the general feeling of well-being, the widespread increase in mass culture, the satisfying spiritual life, the broadening of horizons and the reduction of social inequalities. They extol the freedom of thought and the quality of life as if it were an
Edwardian Garden of Eden. Doubtless all this existed, but so did appalling poverty, mass unemployment, social inequality, hunger, illness and early death. Much of the world was divided by these two realities. Italy was no exception.

Naples was besieged by thousands of people who wanted to emigrate to the USA, or England, or anywhere. Already the United States had written some small print under the heroic declaration, ‘Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ The ‘wretched refuse’ now discovered that disease, insufficient funds, contract labour, criminality, and physical deformity were a few of the grounds for rejection from admission to the United States.

In Rome, within sight of St Peter’s, thousands lived on a permanent basis in huts of straw and brushwood. In the summer many moved to the caves in the surrounding hills. Some did dawn to dusk work in vineyards at fourpence a day. On farms others worked the same hours and received no money at all. Payment was usually in rotten maize, one of the reasons that so many agricultural labourers suffered from a skin disease called pellagra. Standing waist deep in the rice fields of Pavia ensured that many contracted malaria from the frequent mosquito bites. Illiteracy was over 50 per cent. While Pope after Pope yearned for the return of the Papal States, these conditions were the reality of life for many who lived in this united Italy.

The village of Canale was dominated by children, women and old men. The majority of men of working age were forced to seek work further afield. Giovanni Luciani would travel to Switzerland, Austria, Germany and France, leaving in the spring and returning in the autumn.

The Luciani home, partly converted from an old barn, had one source of heating, an old wood-burning stove which heated the room where Albino was born. There was no garden – such items are considered luxuries by the mountain people. The scenery more than compensated: pine forests and, soaring directly above the village, the stark snow-capped mountains; the river Bioi cascaded down close to the village square.

Albino Luciani’s parents were an odd mix. The deeply religious Bortola spent as much time in the church as she did in her small home, worrying over her increasingly large family. She was the kind of mother who at the slightest cough would over-anxiously rush any of her children to the nearby medical officers stationed on the border. Devout, with aspirations to martyrdom, she was prone to tell the children frequently of the many sacrifices she was obliged to make on their behalf. The father,
Giovanni, wandered a Europe at war seeking work that ranged from bricklaying and engineering to being an electrician and mechanic. As a committed Socialist he was regarded by devout Catholics as a priest-eating, crucifix-burning devil. The combination produced inevitable frictions. The memory of his mother’s reaction when she saw her husband’s name on posters which were plastered all over the village announcing that he was standing in a local election as a Socialist stayed with the young Albino for the rest of his life.

Albino was followed by another son, Edoardo, then a girl, Antonia. Bortola added to their small income by writing letters for the illiterate and working as a scullery maid.

The family diet consisted of polenta (corn meal), barley, macaroni and any vegetables that came to hand. On special occasions there might be a dessert of carfoni, pastry full of ground poppy seeds. Meat was a rarity. In Canale if a man was wealthy enough to afford the luxury of killing a pig it would be salted and last his family for a year.

Albino’s vocation for the priesthood came early and was actively encouraged by his mother and the local parish priest, Father Filippo Carli. Yet if any single person deserves credit for ensuring that Albino Luciani took his first steps towards priesthood it is the irreligious Socialist, Giovanni. If Albino was to attend the minor seminary at nearby Feltre it was going to cost the Luciani family a considerable sum. Mother and son discussed this shortly before the boy’s eleventh birthday. Eventually Bortola told her son to sit down and write to his father, then working in France. Albino was later to say it was one of the most important letters of his life.

His father received the letter and thought the problem over for a while before replying. Then he gave his permission and accepted the added burden with the words, ‘Well, we must make this sacrifice’.

So, in 1923, the eleven-year-old Luciani went off to the seminary – to the internal war that was raging within the Roman Catholic Church. This was a Church where books such as Antonio Rosmini’s
The Five Wounds of the Church
were banned. Rosmini, an Italian theologian and priest, had written in 1848 that the Church faced a crisis of five evils: social remoteness of the clergy from the people; the low standard of education of the priests; disunity and acrimony among the bishops; the dependence of lay appointments on secular authorities; and Church ownership of property and enslavement to wealth. Rosmini had hoped for liberalizing reform. What he got, largely as a result of Jesuit intrigue, was the condemnation of his book and the withdrawal of the cardinal’s hat which Pius IX had offered him.

Only fifty-eight years before Luciani’s birth the Vatican had proclaimed the
Syllabus of Errors
and an accompanying encyclical,
Quanta Cura.
In these the Papacy denounced unrestricted liberty of speech and the freedom of press comment. The concept of equal status for all religions was totally rejected. The Pope responsible for these measures was Pius IX. He also made it clear that he disliked intensely the concept of democratic government and that his preference was for absolute monarchies. He further denounced ‘the proponents of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion’ as well as ‘all of those who assert that the Church may not use force’.

In 1870, this same pope, having summoned a Vatican Council, indicated to the assembled bishops that the main item on the agenda was Papal infallibility.
His
infallibility. After much intensive lobbying and some very unChristian-like pressure the Pope suffered a major moral defeat when, out of over 1,000 members entitled to take part in the Council, only 451 bishops voted for the concept. By an agreed strategy all but two of the dissenters left Rome before the final vote was taken. At the last meeting of the Council on July l8th, 1870, it was decided by 535 votes to 2 that the Pope was infallible when defining a doctrine concerning faith or morals.

Until they were liberated by Italian troops in 1870 the Jews in Rome had been locked in a ghetto by the Pope who became infallible. He was equally intolerant of Protestants and recommended the introduction of prison sentences for non-Catholics who were preaching in Tuscany. At the time of writing considerable efforts are being made to have Pius IX canonized and made a saint.

After Pius IX came Leo XIII, considered by many historians to have been an enlightened and humane man. He was followed by Pius X, thought by many of the same historians to have been a total disaster. He reigned until 1914 and the damage he did was still very evident when Albino Luciani entered the Feltre seminary.

The Index of books which no Roman Catholic was allowed to read grew ever longer. Publishers, editors, and authors were excommunicated. When critical books were published anonymously, the authors, whoever they were, were excommunicated. The Pope coined a word to encapsulate all that he was attempting to destroy: ‘modernism’. Any who questioned the current teachings of the Church were anathema. With the Pope’s blessing and financial help an Italian prelate, Umberto Benigni, created a spy system. The purpose was to hunt and destroy all modernists. Thus in the twentieth century the Inquisition was re-born.

With the diminution of his worldly powers through the loss of the
Papal States the self-proclaimed ‘prisoner in the Vatican’ was not in a position to order any burnings at the stake, but a nudge here, a wink there, anonymous and unsupported allegations about a colleague or possible rival were enough to destroy many careers within the Church. The mother was eating her own children. The majority of those whom Pius and the men around him destroyed were loyal and faithful members of the Roman Catholic Church.

Seminaries were closed. Those that were allowed to remain open to teach the next generation of priests were carefully monitored. In one encyclical the Pope declared that everyone who preached or taught in an official capacity had to take a special oath abjuring all errors of modernism. He further declared a general prohibition against the reading of newspapers by all seminarians and theological students, specifically adding that his rule also applied to the very best journals.

Every year Father Benigni, the man in charge of the spy ring that eventually reached through every single diocese in Italy and right across Europe, received a subsidy of 1,000 lire ($5,000 is an approximate modern equivalent) directly from the Pope. This secret organization of spies was not disbanded until 1921. Father Benigni then became an informant and spy for Mussolini.

Pius X died on August 20th, 1914. He was canonized in 1954.

So at Feltre Luciani found it was a crime to read a newspaper or periodical. He was in an austere world where the teachers were as vulnerable as the pupils. A word or comment that did not meet with the entire approval of a colleague might result in a teaching priest losing the right to teach, because of Father Benigni’s spy ring. Although officially disbanded in 1921, two years before Luciani entered Feltre, its influence was still prevalent throughout his entire period of training for the priesthood. Critical questioning of what was being taught would have been anathema. The system was designed to give answers, not to encourage questions. The teachers who had been marked and scarred by the purge in turn would mark and scar the next generation.