“Cardinal Jean Villot, the Vatican secretary of state, was also still at his desk that evening studying the changes the pope had given him an hour before. Villot had pleaded and argued…, but the pope was adamant. The changes would stand.”
In Buenos Aires, banker Roberto Calvi and a pair of associates, Licio Gelli and Umberto Ortolani, knew that “the Bank of Italy had been secretly investigating Calvi’s Milan bank since April, prompted by a public campaign against Calvi, begun in 1977, giving details of criminal activities…
“In New York, Sicilian banker Michele Sindona had been fighting the Italian government’s effort to extradite him to Milan to face charges involving a fraudulent diversion of $225 million. A federal judge had ruled in May that the extradition should be granted. While free on a 3 million dollar bail, Sindona had demanded that the United States government prove that there was well-founded evidence to justify the extradition. The hearing was scheduled for November.”
In Chicago, Cardinal John Cody, “head of an archdiocese of “21/2 million, with nearly 3,000 priests, 450 parishes, and an annual income he refused to” disclose knew that numerous organizations had petitioned Rome to remove him.
The pope went to bed. Nighttime quiet enveloped the Vatican.
In the predawn hours of September 29, 1978, the Pope’s housekeeper knocked at his bedroom door, as she always did, promptly at 4:30 A.M. Hearing no response, she left. “She returned fifteen minutes later to find him still not stirring.” When she entered his bedroom, “she found him propped up in bed, still holding his papers from the night before.” Dead.
“On the night table beside him lay an opened bottle of Effortil, a medication for his low blood pressure.” The shaken and tearful housekeeper immediately informed the papal chamberlain, Cardinal Villot. Villot arrived in the Pope’s room at 5:00 A.M. and gathered the crucial papers, the Effortil bottle, and several personal items that were soiled with vomit. None of these items were seen again.
“The Vatican claimed that its house physician had determined myocardial infarction as the cause of death. Although Italian law required a waiting period of at least 24 hours before a body may be embalmed, Cardinal Villot had the body of Albino Luciani prepared for burial 12 hours after his death. Although the Vatican refused to permit an autopsy on the basis of…canon law, the Italian press verified that an autopsy had been” done on Pope Pius VIII in 1830.
The initial report to the public was that “the Holy Father was found dead by Sister Vincenzia and not by his secretary… One report had him dead in his bathroom, another by his desk in his bedroom.” There were also discrepancies about the time of death, though the official estimate was that he died at 11 P.M. on September 28.
“Another report stated John Paul had complained during the day of feeling sick but wouldn’t call a doctor. It said he had suffered a pain and a violent cough during that afternoon.” It was reported that “after dinner he rushed down the hallway to get a telephone call around 9:15 pm.”
Did this trigger a fatal heart attack? Or had he been poisoned?
Some who believed he was murdered stated that the motive was fear that the spiritual leader of Roman Catholics was embarking on a revolution. He wanted to set the Church in a new direction that was considered undesirable and dangerous by many of the high-ranking Church officials.
In a 1984 book titled In God’s Name: An Investigation into the Murder of John Paul I, British author David Yallop contended that the pontiff was ordered killed by one or more of six suspects, all of whom “had a great deal to fear if the papacy of John Paul I continued.” Among those in the Vatican with a reason to worry were numerous members of a clandestine Italian Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due [doo-ay], or P2. Founded in 1877, in Turin, as “Propaganda Massonica,” it had as members politicians and government officials from across Italy. “The name was changed to ‘Propaganda Due’ following World War II when the Grand Orient numbered its lodges.” Although the Church banned Catholics from joining the Freemasons, P2 extended its reach into the Holy See in the form of “The Great Vatican Lodge.” In September 1978, members included cardinals, bishops, many high-ranking prelates, and laymen.
The Grand Master was Licio Gelli. A financier, he had been a Mussolini fascist, “liaison officer” for the Nazis, organizer of a “rat line” to assist Nazis in avoiding arrest as war criminals by fleeing to Argentina, ally of Argentine dictator Juan Peron, post-World War II informant for both U.S. Intelligence and Italian Communists, and agitator for the establishment of a right-wing government in Italy.
According to Yallop, the murder of John Paul was triggered by his decision to purge the troubled Vatican Bank and cleanse the Church of ties to P2.
“The man who had quickly been labeled ‘The Smiling Pope,’” wrote Yallop, “intended to remove the smiles from a number of faces the following day.”
Yallop cited Villot, who had learned he would be replaced as the Vatican’s Secretary of State and who was dismayed that John Paul was thinking of loosening the church’s prohibition on artificial birth control; Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, who was said to have been scheduled for immediate removal; Roberto Calvi, president of Banco Ambrosiano, who faced ruin if his trickery with Vatican funds were discovered; Sindona, who knew about the Vatican Bank’s alleged laundering of Mafia money; Gelli; and John Cardinal Cody of Chicago, who was said to have been tipped off that he would be asked to resign.
Yallop speculated that the Pope was poisoned, possibly by someone tampering with a bottle of low blood pressure medicine called Effortil that John Paul was said to have kept at his bedside. Yallop wrote that these inconsistencies in the Vatican ’s account of the papal death and the absence of an autopsy pointed to a cover-up.
“It was abundantly clear,” he wrote, “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.”
Conspiracy theorists were quick to find a prediction of John Paul’s murder in the writings of the ancient prophet Nostradamus:
The one elected Pope will be mocked by his electors,
This enterprising and prudent person will suddenly be reduced in silence,
They cause him to die because of his too great goodness and mildness.
Stricken by fear, they will lead him to his death in the night.
All that could be said with certainty was that John Paul had been Pope for thirty-three days
EVENTS AFTER JOHN PAUL’S DEATH:
October 1978: Election of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyła to the papacy. He takes the name John Paul II in honor of the dead Pope. None of John Paul I’s instructions or edicts are carried out.
January 21, 1979: Judge Emillio Alessandrini, a magistrate investigating the Banco Ambrosiano activities is murdered.
March 20, 1979: Nino Pecorelli, an investigative journalist, exposing membership and dealings of the Freemason’s P-2 group, is murdered.
July 11, 1979: Giorgio Ambrosioli, following his testimony concerning Sindona and Calvi in Vatican business circles, is murdered.
July 13, 1978: Lt. Col. Antonio Varisco, head of Rome ’s security service, is murdered. Varisco was also investigating the activities of the P-2 group; he was seen speaking with Giorgio Ambrosioli two days before Ambrosioli’s death.
February 2, 1980: The Vatican withdraws an agreement to provide videotaped depositions of Sindona in his trial in the U.S. on charges of fraud, conspiracy and misappropriation of funds in connection with the collapse of Franklin National Bank.