Was Pope John Paul I murdered? John Julius Norwich's burning question...



A sealed bed chamber. An archbishop with links to the Mafia. An embalming carried out with indecent-improper-haste...



'The clear impression was that the Vatican was anxious to conceal evidence,' said John Julius Norwich

On 26 August 1978, Cardinal Albino Luciani was elected Pope on only the fourth ballot, taking the name of John Paul I.



He came from near Belluno, some 80 miles north of Venice, 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.’

Just 33 days later, on Thursday, September 28, the Pope sat down to dinner in his Vatican apartment with his two secretaries, the Italian Father Diego Lorenzi and the Irishman Father John Magee. It was a simple meal – clear soup, veal, fresh beans and salad.



The secretaries had a glass of wine each; the Pope drank only water. When it was over, the three briefly watched a news programme; then, soon after nine, John Paul I retired for the night, setting his old wind-up alarm clock for the hour at which he normally rose, 4.30am.

The next morning at exactly that time a nun named Sister Vincenza carried a flask of coffee to his study, as she had done every day for 20 years since his time in Vittorio Veneto, knocking at his bedroom door and bidding him good morning. Most unusually, there was no reply. A quarter of an hour later she returned and knocked again. Still no sound.



By now seriously alarmed, she gingerly opened the door. There was the Pope sitting up in bed, wearing his spectacles and with some sheets of paper clutched in his hand. She felt his pulse. There was none; the wrist was icy cold. Panic-stricken, she rushed to wake Lorenzi and Magee, who immediately telephoned the Secretary of State, Cardinal Jean Villot, in his apartment two floors below.

Villot took matters in hand. It was now 5am. First he telephoned two or three of his senior colleagues; then he called the papal morticians and embalmers, the Signoracci brothers, telling them that an official car would be leaving at once to collect them and bring them to the Vatican.



Finally, having forbidden any of those present to say a word to anyone until he gave them permission, he summoned the deputy head of the Vatican’s health service, Dr Renato Buzzonetti.

Buzzonetti had no idea of the Pope’s medical history; as he himself admitted, ‘the first time I saw him in a doctor/patient relationship he was dead’.



Nevertheless, after the most cursory of external examinations he unhesitatingly diagnosed a heart attack, putting the time of death at about 11pm.



Meanwhile Father Lorenzi, despite Villot’s strictures, telephoned John Paul I’s personal doctor, Giuseppe da Ros, in Venice. Astonished and horrified, da Ros jumped into his car and headed for Rome.



He later declared that he had given the Pope, aged 65, a thorough examination as recently as the previous Saturday, and had reported to Lorenzi: ‘Non sta bene, ma benone’ – ‘He’s not well, he’s very well.’

Pope John Paul I's body lies in state in St Peter's Basilica, 1978. The behaviour of the authorities made a striking contrast to the way that the deaths of his predecessors had been handled for a century and more

Such are the bare facts of the Pope’s death and the discovery of the body. Why, however, over the next 24 hours, were so many suspicions aroused?

First of all, Villot had behaved very strangely. He had instantly pocketed the bottle of pills – Effortil – that the Pope took for his low blood pressure, together with his spectacles, his slippers, and the papers from his study desk. None of these were ever seen again.



The Secretary of State had also ordered the whole papal apartment – all 19 rooms of it – to be cleared of all John Paul I’s possessions; by six that evening there was no trace of the dead Pope anywhere to be seen. The apartment was then sealed until the arrival of his successor. That same evening – little more than 12 hours after its discovery – the Signoracci brothers returned to embalm the body.

The clear impression – as the Italian press was not slow to emphasise – was that the Vatican was anxious to conceal evidence; and the case against it was strengthened by its categorical refusal to permit any kind of post-mortem.



Buzzonetti’s diagnosis was simply not acceptable: a British heart specialist is quoted as saying: ‘For a doctor, any doctor, to diagnose myocardial infarction as the cause of death (when he does not know the patient extremely well) is wrong… He is taking a very grave risk and he certainly would not be entitled to take such a risk and make such a diagnosis in this country. Such a diagnosis can only be given after an autopsy.’

It should be remembered, too, that John Paul I was a lifetime non-smoker, that he drank seldom and sparingly, and that he had a long history of low blood pressure. Anyone less likely to succumb to a sudden, fatal heart attack can hardly be imagined.

How Pope John Paul I's death was reported in Corriere Della Sera. The headline reads: 'His smile lasted only 33 days'

The Vatican tried to plead that post-mortems for popes were forbidden, which was untrue – they were performed on Pius VIII and Clement XIV for a start – and over the next few days several other official statements were similarly disproved.



It was asserted, for example, that the body had been found by Magee rather than by Sister Vincenza; that the Pope had been reading Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation Of Christ; and that he had had a long history of heart trouble (of which his medical history had never revealed the slightest trace).



The first two of these claims are not important; they were clearly fabricated simply to improve the image. The last, however, can have been intended only to confirm Buzzonetti’s diagnosis and so make a post-mortem seem unnecessary. One wonders, too, why the embalmers were called at 5am. Was Villot hoping to persuade them to do their job on the spot?

To the Italian press it was clear the Vatican had for some reason lost its head. The Pope’s death had admittedly come as a surprise; but the subsequent behaviour of the authorities made a striking contrast to the way that the deaths of his predecessors had been handled for a century and more, when the public announcements and funeral arrangements had always been detailed, dignified and unhurried. No wonder the Corriere Della Sera, the Roman Il Tempo and their fellows started asking awkward questions, to which the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano could only bluster in reply.

So far we have established that John Paul I’s death had many suspicious circumstances; we have said nothing of motive. Why should anyone have wished to kill this gentle, smiling man, who seemed to overflow with genuine kindness and piety?



Many reasons have been suggested. Some of them accuse leading figures in the Church hierarchy – including Villot himself, several other members of the Papal Curia and even Cardinal Cody, the notoriously corrupt Archbishop of Chicago – who with good reason suspected that they were about to be dismissed, transferred or demoted.



We now know that John Paul I, who despite his mild appearance never lacked courage, had been appalled at the inefficiency – and worse – in the way that the Vatican was conducting its affairs and had determined to clear out the stables; and that there was more than one highly placed churchman who would have been only too relieved to see him out of the way.



Had any of those men really wished to do the job himself, he would have found it easy enough; the Vatican has no police force – the Italian police may enter its territory only if invited, which they weren’t. Moreover the Vatican’s own newspaper had actually published an illustrated map of the Papal Apartments on September 3.

It is surely not too naive to doubt that any man of God would go as far as murder. There were others, however, who had just as strong a motive and for whom murder was a way of life: principally the Mafia, which was almost certainly behind a financial racket involving the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan, and, unfortunately, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, better known as the Vatican Bank, the president of which was an American of Lithuanian extraction, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus.

The fact that Marcinkus was born in the Chicago suburb of Cicero, where Al Capone had his headquarters, should obviously not be held against him; despite his many years in Rome, however, he had retained the image of a golf-playing, cigar-chewing American tough guy, which had singularly failed to endear him to his colleagues.

‘You can’t run a Church on Hail Marys’, he used to say; he certainly ran the bank – and a good many quite unrelated companies as well, one of which made the contraceptive pill – with firm efficiency.

He also maintained close contacts with Sicilian Mafioso banker Michele Sindona – with whom he was fellow director of a bank in the Bahamas, and who in 1980 was sentenced in New York to 25 years’ imprisonment on 65 counts, including fraud – and the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano (the ‘Priests’ Bank’) Roberto Calvi, whose body was found in June 1982 hanging under Blackfriars Bridge.

The details of the activities of these men are far too long and complicated to go into here; but John Paul I, who had a remarkably good head for figures and could read a balance sheet like a thriller, was hot on their trail. He had already discovered – and revealed to the world – one nasty financial scandal in Vittorio Veneto; if he were allowed to remain, it was only a question of time before many more guilty heads would roll.

In short, there was plenty of motive for murder; plenty of opportunity; and plenty of suspicious circumstances. That is all we can say. There is absolutely no conclusive proof of anything untoward, and John Paul I may have died a perfectly natural death.



Those wishing to know more are referred to two remarkable books: In God’s Name by David Yallop, who believes the worst, and A Thief in the Night by John Cornwell, for whom this is all just another baseless conspiracy theory. Both are the results of deep and meticulous research, yet they reach diametrically opposite conclusions.



The mystery remains.







‘The Popes: A History’ by John Julius Norwich is published by Chatto & Windus, priced at £25