✥ A recent update from a pastor in the Archdiocese of Detroit:
My Dear Parishioners:
I hope your Lent is going great and you are, day by day, finding yourself closer in friendship with Christ Jesus through your turning away from the very temporary, very disposable things of this world; I hope you find Lent a time of purification, a time where, by setting things of the world aside, we open ourselves up to the glory that only God can bring to our lives, the very otherworldly stuff that makes being human, made in the image and likeness of God Himself, so utterly fascinating; each of us must make a special effort to get to confession and do our Easter duty between now and the Triduum, so make it happen, set your ego aside, and make things right between you and our Lord.
A few parish things: I have been assured that the wonderful artisans renovating our gorgeous church will be all packed up and gone by Holy Week, I have seen some of their work behind the curtain and it is nothing short of beautiful, and I can’t wait to see our fabulous church in its full glory in a month or so.
Second, I will be moving back into the rectory by the end of March, as our second-floor renovation to provide your priest with such wonderful inventions as running water and non fire hazard filled electrical power will be completed very, very soon; as you know, we have spent a tidy sum making all these changes, we still have a large savings account, but we have to preserve that because in a very old place like ours something very expensive is only a few weeks or months away from breaking or collapsing or worse; I know many of you have warm feelings toward the Spiritan order who left last summer, however the degree of negligence in not maintaining this facility led to a great many issues, and the amount of work we have had to undertake in eight short months is more than most parishes would have to complete in a decade, and that must never happen again.
I am hearing mumblings from the back benches about the new daily Mass schedule, and if you have a son or grandson or nephew or great-nephew in seminary studying to be ordained a Catholic priest you have speaking privileges to complain, if not, how about no, we simply don’t have priests my friends, when the Spiritans were here this was their only job to run this parish, which from a maintenance perspective they woefully failed to do, right now to cover daily Mass I have to hire a priest and it is costing us nearly $4,000 per month for complete Mass coverage, we cannot afford that on an indefinite basis, thus the new weekly schedule with yours truly celebrating the Sacraments, moreover are you aware that sometimes two or three people come to the daily Mass, that is not worth the expenditure of a visiting priest for that date, and by the way are you aware that the parish only pays for 25% of my salary, which is pretty tiny, so I am a cheap date when all is said and done.
I am also hearing mumblings that people have been deprived of their “right” to Sunday donuts, coffee, and soda/pop, seriously, this luxury has been costing our parish $1,000 a month at least, no more, I have invited the Knights of Columbus to undertake a similar service but to be honest we are only serving 25 or so people, the same people every Sunday, many pack their purses with soda and donuts and go home, sorry but we are not in that business, when I asked for donations we received $30.00 when the cost each week is $200.00, frankly from a financial perspective it is time, pun intended, for our parishioners to wake up and smell the coffee, the collection from the people of God at Old St. Mary’s is pretty lousy and accounts for less than a few percentage points of our annual income, if we did not have the casino renting our school building or were not renting our parking lot this jewel of Detroit would unquestionably be closed, our savings that have allowed us to fix our parish did not come from our people at Mass but from losers at the slot machines, sorry but the truth can be tough, we need to support our parish with greater vigor, so ask yourself in this Lenten season is having this parish a priority for your family for you, are you here simply to be served or to serve, please show it in the collection basket.
See you at Mass.
✥ Even if the Vatican had been honest about the events surrounding the death of John Paul I, the likelihood is that disbelief would have prevailed—at least temporarily. The popular pope’s passing was too sudden and too traumatizing to be comprehensible. John Paul was only sixty-five years old. In his public appearance just the day before his death he had exuded vitality. He had been animated and joyful. He had laughed good-naturedly while delivering a stirring talk. He had looked and sounded like a healthy, cheerful man. Further, there had been no public disclosure or discussion about any pre-existing physical ailment prior to or after his election. And now he was dead of a massive heart attack? The very notion that natural causes had snuffed out his life seemed preposterous. There had to be a more plausible explanation.
Others would seize the public imagination. Initially, conjecture—flimsy but uncomplicated—prevailed. But as time passed, ever more elaborate conspiracy hypotheses emerged, taking on lives of their own; and, eventually, in the minds of millions, the outrageous became believable. All the murder “theories” had three fundamental characteristics in common: They weren’t built on foundations of firm facts, poisoning was the consensus murder method, and the culprit was someone in the Vatican bureaucracy. For those who became convinced that John Paul had been slain, three fundamental questions demanded answers. Who was the culprit? What was the motivation for the murder? How had the evil deed been carried out? No shortage of answers swirled about, though not one was credible.
Murder advocates believe that the killer was either someone in the Vatican who opposed or feared what John Paul might do to the institution or its key personnel or an insider acting on behalf of a rogue organization. The first individual suspected of killing the pope was his secretary, Father John Magee. He had ready access to the Holy Father and could have poisoned a drink or substituted a lethal pill in place of the pope’s prescribed medication. And because he was the person who found the body, it was evident that he had private access to the papal bedchamber. Left unanswered is what motive Magee could have had for wanting the pope dead. Under pressure, he panicked; and with the aid of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Institute for Religious Works, he fled for England right after the funeral. Escaping the Vatican in haste to an undisclosed destination where Magee remained incommunicado was a rash decision that only intensified belief in his culpability.
Marcinkus himself also became the object of understandable suspicion. A powerful figure, nearly six and a half feet tall, with an imposing muscular physique, he was a haughty, autocratic administrator. In some Vatican circles he was known as “the gorilla.” It was well known that his position at the Vatican Bank (the name by which the Institute for Religious Works is more widely known) had brought him into connection with unsavory characters. His business associates included such villainous characters as Roberto Calvi, who was at the center of scandals at Banco Ambrosiano and was later suspiciously found hanging from a London bridge. Rumor had it that in a meeting with the future pope years earlier, Marcinkus had treated him disrespectfully, and now he feared that Albino Luciani was about to fire him because of the scandal-ridden institution he headed.
More names emerged: the mafia, the C.I.A., and, especially, the Freemasons, among whose ranks (it was rumored) Marcinkus himself numbered along with Cardinals Baggio and Villot. But there was no credible evidence. Still the rumors proliferated. Some hardened into established conspiracies. But it was not until 1987 that the Vatican decided to act. Archbishop John Foley, president of the Vatican’s Commission for Social Communications, asked the journalist John Cornwell, a former seminarian, to write a book about the pope’s death. Foley himself imposed no restrictions on Cornwell’s research, but he was stonewalled by most churchmen, including those familiar with his subject. It was only through sheer persistence that he succeeded in interviewing many important persons, and when A Thief in the Night: Life and Death in the Vatican appeared two years later, it was widely praised. But it did not bring an end to the rumor-mongering.
This is unfortunate. Cornwell’s book is indispensable to anyone who hopes to understand the circumstances surrounding John Paul’s death. Not only did he uncover information that contradicted various popular misconceptions; he also, by interviewing a number of Vatican authorities, showed how the Church functions. His depiction is not flattering. Marcinkus, for example, told Cornwell that he had had a cordial relationship with the pope, despite rumors to the contrary. His own criticism of John Paul was couched in sly sympathy. “This poor man . . . all of a sudden, he’s thrown into a place, and he doesn’t even know where the offices are. He doesn’t know what the secretary of state does.” Cornwell found some of what he heard disturbing. “They called him the ‘smiling Pope.’ But let me tell you something . . . that was a very nervous smile.” Marcinkus alluded to the pope’s ill health and denied any truth to the widespread rumors that John Paul was about to fire him. He was not alone in belittling the pope. An unnamed monsignor with inside information about the operations of the Vatican was cruel in his assessment of John Paul. “He was out of his depth. Everybody here knew it.” The same senior figure called the late pontiff “ungainly” and even mocked his manner of walking: “He used to waddle along, flat-footed, like a duck.”
Cornwell maintained that Luciani’s poor health, lack of experience, and overwrought disposition made him an ineffective pope. He was overwhelmed by the amount of work required of him and the endless decisions he had to make, and he had little assistance. His health was neglected, and he found himself “suffering from blinding headaches, loneliness, and claustrophobia.”
Cornwell suspected that the pope had died of a coronary embolism. John Paul “required rest and monitored medication. . . . The warnings of a mortal illness were clear for all to see; the signs were ignored.” But he was never examined by a Vatican doctor. Cornwell obviated the claims of murder; his was still an indictment of the Vatican: “The whisperings, the rumors, the theories—far-fetched, sensational, fantastic—all serve a purpose: they deflect attention from the most obvious and shameful fact of all: that John Paul I died scorned and neglected by the institution that existed to sustain him.”
In 2017 the publication of a book by Stefania Falasca finally refuted the murder conspiracy fantasies with comprehensive medical evidence. Falasca, a prolific journalist who serves as vice postulator of the pope’s cause for canonization as well as vice president of the John Paul I Vatican Foundation, was in a position to know the relevant facts. Her book provides a detailed record of the pope’s medical history going back to his childhood and includes a fully documented account of the state of his health as pope which confirms a death by natural causes. In addition, it reproduces medical documents written and signed by physicians.
Following Luciani’s trip to Brazil in 1975, he was hospitalized in Mestre for a retinal thrombosis, a blood clot in the eye that affected his vision and indicated circulation and coagulation issues. The incident likely resulted from his flight, when he was confined to his seat for nearly the entire duration of the fifteen-hour trip. Luciani recovered, but he was cognizant of the gravity of his affliction. In a letter he sent to his sister Nina, he wrote that “the doctor told me that if this thing I had in my eye had ever reached my heart, I could have died.” He suffered from extreme swelling of his legs and feet, making it painful to wear shoes. “This is a sign of venous stasis, that the blood isn’t circulating in the veins, and it’s probable that clots have formed in the arteries,” explained Lina Petri, the pope’s niece, herself a doctor. Petri also said that her uncle had been treated with anticoagulant medication. She added that he also ingested “mild cardiotonics and multivitamins.” (Cardiotonics lead to improved blood flow through an improvement of the heart muscle’s contractions.)
Giovanni Rama, the doctor who had treated the pope’s retinal thrombosis, corroborated the official assessment that the pope died of a massive heart attack. Additional validation was provided by an interview with the pope’s brother Berto, who said that in a two-year period, five cousins had died of the same cause. “For me all these rumors are false,” he said, dismissing the possibility of foul play. “It is the journalists who are trying to make themselves interesting, creating a controversy.” The illness from which his brother had died “runs in the family.” Other members of the Luciani family—without exception—did not dispute the official cause of death and gave no credence to the possibility of murder.
Only an autopsy could have identified the cause of death with virtual certainty. But even to a layman, the medical evidence, in condensed form, is corroboration that natural causes claimed the pope’s life. The preponderance of medical evidence supports the conclusion that John Paul I died of either a heart attack or an embolism. But reason does not always prevail. Pope John Paul I has long been laid to rest, but the falsehoods about his death live on. The tragedy is that for far too many they have eclipsed the legacy of his life.
—Mo Guernon, adapted from Love Is a Journey: The Inspiring Life and Legacy of Pope John Paul I (Bloomsbury)
✥ It is usually impossible to assign credit or blame for a political revolution to any single person. Not so in the case of the revolutions which take place with equal (and usually less unhappy) regularity in the writing of history. J. J. Scarisbrick, M.B.E., the eminent historian who died recently at the glorious age of ninety seven, changed the way that every person in the English-speaking world thinks about the religious atmosphere of the sixteenth century. Like Dom David Knowles before him, he stopped up his ears against “the siren voice of romanticism”; he accepted without difficulty the truth that the Church is “always corrupt, always failing, because it is made up of human beings.” Three generations of historians owe him a great debt. Every bit as important as Scarisbrick’s contribution to history was his defense of the unborn, for whom he campaigned tirelessly with his wife, Nuala. This issue is dedicated to his memory.
