Absolute Monarchs (63 page)

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 consequent 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.
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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.
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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 two 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.
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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.”

In the late afternoon of May 13, 1981, while the pope was being driven around St. Peter’s Square in his Popemobile during a general audience, a Turkish gunman named Ali Agca fired three shots at him at almost point-blank range. He was rushed to the Gemelli Hospital. Agca was immediately arrested, later telling the examining magistrate that he was a “nationalist atheist” who hated both the Catholic Church and American and Russian imperialism. He added that he had hoped to kill the pope during his visit to Turkey in November 1979 but that his intended victim had then been too well protected. In Rome he was an open target. Agca’s paymasters, if any, were never revealed, though the Bulgarian government came under heavy suspicion. On his recovery John Paul announced that he had forgiven his would-be assassin; in 1983 he visited him in prison, and something approaching friendship developed between them. In later years the pope also received Agca’s mother and brother in audience.

After five hours of surgery and the loss of three-quarters of his blood, his convalescence was long: it was not till October that he was completely restored to health. But by 1982, having by now become something of a media superstar, he was able to resume his harrowing travel schedule, making four or five major journeys a year around the world. By the end of his twenty-six-year pontificate he had chalked up a total of 104 foreign journeys to 129 countries. In May–June 1982—despite the Falklands War, which very nearly caused a cancellation—he went on a six-day visit to Britain, the first ever by a reigning pope, during which he preached in Canterbury Cathedral. In March 2000 he was in Israel—what, one wonders, would Pius XII have thought?
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In 2001, in Damascus, he became the first pope ever to pray in an Islamic mosque. His one regret was that he never managed to get to Russia.