People were genuinely moved by the gentle simplicity of the new Pope when it was learned that in his book Illustrissimi he had written a series of letters to famous people, including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and even Pinocchio. In short, while he was soon said to have many critics and even enemies within the Vatican itself—one senior official was reported to have said contemptuously, “We’ve elected Peter Sellers to the Chair of Peter”—people were quickly growing to love him. Mother Teresa called him “the greatest gift of God, a sunray of God’s love shining in the darkness of the world.”
Because of the incident with my arm, the foreign editor sent a message to my hotel telling me to take myself out of the coverage in Rome and return to Toronto as soon as possible; the wire services were always available, and the major news was now over in any case. Things returned to normal as I resumed the religion page responsibilities and made several appearances on CBC and CTV television with commentary on the new leadership in the Roman Catholic Church. And then the wholly unexpected happened. At 1:30 on September 28, I was awakened out of a deep sleep by the telephone. I answered and heard a familiar voice saying, “It’s the night editor at the Star . . . The Pope is dead!” Annoyed, I said, “That’s not very funny,” and was just about to hang up when he insisted I should hear him out. As everyone was soon to discover, Luciani had passed away—apparently while sitting up in bed reading—and the Catholic Church had once again been “orphaned,” as one Italian paper described it. He had been in office only thirty-three days, one of the shortest pontificates in the Church’s history.
My immediate task was to contact Cardinal Roy, the Archbishop of Quebec, who was the senior Canadian Roman Catholic prelate at that time, to get his reaction to the tragic news. My call to his residence got him out of bed, and I leave it to the reader to imagine how completely stunned and upset he was as he struggled to come to grips with what had happened. I made several other calls to some key contacts, both Catholic and non-Catholic, and then took a cab downtown to the Star newsroom. We watched TV and wire services from Rome for a while and then I sat down to write the story for the earliest edition. Meanwhile, arrangements were already under way for a flight to Rome that evening. The cycle was to begin again: funeral, a two-week break, another conclave, another papal election, and an enthronement or investiture. I was back and forth so many times that, taken with all that had gone on in the previous months, including the Lambeth Conference in England, the job of religion editor seemed more like that of chief foreign correspondent.
One of the problems with covering stories in Rome, I found, was that one arrived for work after a long, tiring overnight flight during which it was seldom possible to get comfortable enough to catch even an hour or two of sleep. When the story was hot, as tired as one might be, you then had to hit the ground running. First there was the long cab ride to the hotel, getting settled, then racing to the Vatican press office to find out the latest. Confusion seemed the order of the day on September 29. At the first briefing, reporters were told that Papa Luciani had possibly suffered a heart attack but it was too soon for a full verdict. At the same time, it was made clear that there would be no autopsy. There never was, although at one point a couple of days later the Spanish Conference of Bishops sent a message to the Vatican expressly urging that an autopsy be held. Apparently the late Pope had had a history of low blood pressure, but as skeptical journalists told the reporting press officer, that didn’t usually result in a myocardial infarct. There was confusion also over who had first discovered that the pontiff had died, and when. In the first account we were told that a nun, Sister Vincenza, had found Luciani sitting up against a pillow with a book propped against his knees. Then, realizing that the notion of a nun having access to the papal sleeping quarters was open to considerable misunderstanding, the story changed. At a hastily called subsequent briefing, it was announced that a male papal secretary had made the find. Unfortunately, when the press asked to have either the sister or the secretary appear and be questioned, we were told that neither person was available. It seems they both (separately) had had urgent reasons for leaving the city. In any case, no more was heard about either, with reference to the Pope’s demise.
For these and a host of other reasons, all of which are fully discussed in journalist David Yallop’s book In God’s Name, where he puts forward the view that Luciani was murdered, Rome was understandably full of rumours. (Several books on this theme besides Yallop’s have since been written.) On my first day there, coming down the Spanish Steps, a headline on a satirical journal pinned up at the news kiosk caught my eye. The cover had a full cartoon-style picture of the small figure of Luciani propped up in bed reading while a cassocked man looks back over his shoulder at him. He is in the act of pouring a vial of what is obviously poison into a mug with the symbol of the papal keys on it. In case anyone should miss the point, the caption below asked bluntly: “Who killed the Pope?”
The newspapers in Rome were filled with speculative stories and commentaries. The Vatican kept making the situation worse by repeating answers that were either evasive or wholly contradictory. A further example of this was the simple matter of what it was that the Pope was reading when he met his demise. The first response seemed to say (piously) that it was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. That soon changed to a report on some scandalous state of affairs in a large, prestigious American diocese (unnamed). One account I heard being set forth as gospel truth by a well-known religion journalist said that Luciani had been reading an insider’s analysis of the conduct of Archbishop Marcinkus, head of the Vatican’s banking institution. (Marcinkus was soon to be under investigation by the Italian police and would have to remain under virtual house arrest inside the Vatican’s walls to avoid going to jail.)
There was so much more, but with so very little light shining on any part of it, it still remains muddy and unclear and to many, myself included, all very sad. Oddly enough, it rained without let-up day after day all through the lying in state, the funeral and its aftermath. Rome gets rain in the autumn, but even the native Romans were saying that it seemed as though nature itself had been saddened by the passing of Il Sorrismo. I wrote a letter to him in the style of his own letters to the famous cited earlier, and the Star ran it front-page on the day of the funeral itself. I have to admit that, standing as I was on the steps of St. Peter’s when Luciani was carried out on a bier for the service and seeing up close the bright red papal slippers, still so new and shiny, I felt quite moved. Because of the resemblance between them, I was reminded very powerfully of my father and of his sudden passing exactly ten years earlier.
The second conclave of 1978 opened on the morning of October 14 with a High Mass for the participating cardinals in St. Peter’s Basilica. The buzz among the international press corps as it gathered once more was that there was again a liberal–conservative split in the college, with two strong leaders emerging. Both were Italian. There was Giuseppe Cardinal Sin, the Archbishop of Genoa, on the conservative side, and Giovanni Cardinal Benelli, the Archbishop of Florence, on the other. Later speculation in the Italian press had it that the conclave was very quickly deadlocked between the two opposing forces and that the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow—who had received a few votes in the preceding election of John Paul I—was put forward as a compromise candidate on the second day. In any case, late on the afternoon of October 16, just as dusk was descending on the city, the white smoke could be seen twisting up in the glare of the searchlights now flooding the facade of St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel roof. A thunderous roar went up from the crowd already swiftly gathering below when the announcement came ringing out once more into the piazza, “Habemus Papam.”
Knowing from experience that it would be some time, perhaps thirty minutes or more, before the official proclamation of the identity of the new pontiff was