Letter #43, 2023 Monday, February 13: 30 Years: The Untold Stories
Tomorrow we continue our online discussion of the 33-day pontificate of Albino Luciani, who took the name Pope John Paul I (August 26 to September 28, 1978, link).
It will be live, and you are invited to join and send questions (link below).
John Paul I was the “smiling Pope,” elected at age 67 from Venice, Italy, whose brief reign contained much promise, but ended almost before it began.
The cause of death remains somewhat mysterious, as no autopsy was ever performed.
My guest will be Fr. Charles Murr, 72, a friend and confidant of the late Cardinal Edouard Gagnon, who died in 2007.
Murr has just written Murder in the 33rd Degree: The Gagnon Investigation into Vatican Freemasonry (link).
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski reviewed the book, saying this: “Fr. Murr does not peddle conspiracy theories; he tells the riveting story as he lived through it and recorded it in his notes and diaries — what he saw and heard, what his friends learned and suffered. Most of all, we discover how a divinely-given opportunity for serious reform was tragically refused. Murder in the Thirty-Third Degree is the most impressive eyewitness account of postconciliar Vatican politics to appear in decades.”
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An embolism or a stroke?
There is another book that recently came out (November 21, 2021) by Italian journalist and researcher Stefania Falasca, a colleague of mine at 30 Days magazine in the late 1980s, called The September Pope: The Final Days of John Paul I (1st Italian edition Piemme, 2017; 2nd edition, the Vatican Press, 2020; published in English by Our Sunday Visitor, 2021, link)
The book includes a “witness report” from a relative of the late Pope, his niece, daughter of his sister, Dr. Lina Petri (a medical doctor). She was testifying before the Church tribunal investigating the Pope’s life in relation to his cause of canonization, which opened on November 23, 2003, 25 years after his death in 1978. (Falasca has been permitted to use material from that process in her detailed, valuable book.)
Dr. Petri testified: “My uncle did not show any clear or evident, significant pathologies that would indicate he was a seriously ill patient.”
So he seemed to be in good health, with no problems, at age 67.
At the same time, members of the family testified (see footnote 341) that Lucian had in 1975 a “circulatory disturbance affecting the ocular retina” — the retina of his eye — for which he was hospitalized from December 2 to 12, 1975. (Falasca, Appendix 3, p. 155)
On January 6, 1976, in answer to a question from his sister, Antonia, Luciani told her: “Dear Nina, the doctor told me that if this thing I had in my eye had ever reached my heart, I could have died.”
And his other niece, Pia Luciani, testified: “I immediately thought of embolism as the cause of death. There was, in fact, a precedent. When he returned from Brazil, back in 1975, my uncle told me that there had been pressurization problems on the plane and a red dot appeared in his eye. Father Mario had him examined by a well-known ophthalmologist from Venice, Professor Rama, who told him it was an embolus and that if it had lodged somewhere else, he would probably have died without even noticing. Even my cousin Lina, the daughter of my Aunt Antonia, who is a doctor, and was able to see our uncle while he was still in his room that morning, told me that our uncle had a serene and relaxed face, and she too thought he had died of an embolism.” (Positio II, Depositiones testium, T. XXVI, Par. 494, p. 435), p. 225, note 341 in Falasca’s book).
And yet… even in Falasca’s detailed and helpful book, there is still no final, definitive conclusion on what caused the death of Pope John Paul I, due to the fact that no autopsy was done of the late Pope’s body.
We will have another live video tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. on the east coast, which will be at 5 p.m. Rome time.
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