The Last Pope (36 page)

 

ALDO MORO
. Italian statesman, born September 23, 1916, in Maglie, in Lecce province. He was prime minister of Italy five times, as well as one of the two most distinguished leaders of the Christian Democracy. Kidnapped by the Red Brigades in the center of Rome, on March 16, 1978, he was held captive until his death, on May 9 of the same year. Disregarding the requests for help that Moro wrote to his party and to his family, the government adopted a tough stance and refused to negotiate with the terrorists. Moro even appealed to Pope Paul VI, a personal friend of his, but to no avail. Officially, Aldo Moro was shot to death by the Red Brigades and placed in the trunk of a car because of the Giulio Andreotti administration’s intransigence, its unwillingness to negotiate. But this is only the official story.

 

LICIO GELLI
. “Venerable Master” of the P2 Masonic Lodge. Born in Pistoia on April 21, 1919, he was involved in practically all the great Italian scandals of the past thirty-five years. He fought on Franco’s side, among the forces sent to Spain by Mussolini, and he was an informant for the Gestapo during the Second World War, even maintaining direct contact with Hermann Göring. Once the war was over, he joined the CIA, and together with NATO, he provided cover for Operation Gladio, which amounted to the creation of a kind of secret rapid-response force, established in Italy and other European countries, including Portugal, with the objective of eliminating Communist threats. He was responsible for innumerable terrorist acts. The murder of John Paul I was one of many that he ordered. His involvement in the deaths of Aldo Moro, Carmine “Mino” Pecorelli, Roberto Calvi, the Portuguese prime minister Francisco Sá Carneiro, and others is well known. His illicit alliance with Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, Roberto Calvi, and Michele Sindona was responsible for the embezzlement of $1.4 billion in the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR). He currently lives in house detention in his villa in Tuscany.

 

PAUL MARCINKUS
. American archbishop. He was born in the outskirts of Chicago, January 15, 1922. From 1971 to 1990, he served as director of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, better known as the Vatican Bank. He was directly involved in countless financial scandals with Licio Gelli of the P2 and Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano (whose primary share-holder was the Vatican Bank), and Michele Sindona, Italian banker and mafioso, named papal financial adviser by Paul VI. Together they laundered illicit money and hid the profits made by the bank controlled by Marcinkus, supposedly to be invested in charitable works. His name was involved in many little-known stories, particularly the disappearance in 1983 of Emanuela Orlandi, a fifteen-year-old girl, in an attempt by Mehmet Ali A
ca to hold her for ransom. Marcinkus always enjoyed the trust of Pope Paul VI. Later, John Paul II had no other recourse but to keep him in his post, allowing him to become the third most powerful man in the Vatican. What John Paul I intended to do with Marcinkus is well known. He was one of the main suspects in the death of Albino Luciani. In 1990, Marcinkus returned to Chicago, after leaving the directorship of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, and later withdrew to a parish in Arizona. He was found dead in his home on February 20, 2006.

 

ROBERTO CALVI
. Milanese banker, born April 13, 1920, known in the press as “God’s banker” for his connections to the Vatican and to Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. As president of the Banco Ambrosiano, he was threatened and manipulated by Gelli and Marcinkus, which resulted in a tremendous financial fraud. He had been opposed to the elimination of John Paul I, and that death did not benefit him much. Calvi fled to London with a fake passport, and a few days later, on June 17, 1982, his body was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge. The British police treated the case as a suicide, despite all the indications to the contrary. His pants pockets were full of stones, along with $15,000. The case has been reopened recently in Italy and in the United Kingdom, but it is highly unlikely that the true culprit will ever be found.

 

JEAN-MARIE VILLOT
. French cardinal, born October 11, 1905. Named secretary of state of the Vatican in 1969, during the papacy of Paul VI, a post he kept until the death of that pope and the start of the very brief papacy of John Paul I. He was to be replaced on September 29, 1978. The death of the pontiff allowed him to keep his post during the first year of the papacy of John Paul II, until his own death on March 9, 1979. He was a member of Licio Gelli’s P2, and is considered by some investigators one of the suspects in the murder of Albino Luciani.

LUCÍA DE JESÚS DOS SANTOS
. Born March 22, 1907, in Aljustrel, Portugal. She was one of the seers of Fátima, the one who announced the three secrets that the Blessed Virgin Mary revealed to the world and that the Church has controlled with an iron fist, spreading falsehoods in their place. She met with Albino Luciani on July 11, 1977, in the Convent of Santa Teresa, in Coimbra. Their conversation lasted more than two hours, during which she fell into a trance and alerted the future pope as to what was in store for him. She died on February 13, 2005.

 

MARIO MORETTI
. Founder of the Second Red Brigades. He kidnapped Aldo Moro and was the only one in contact with Moro throughout his captivity. He was also the sole killer of the statesman. The circumstances of the case were never determined. However, it is known that the P2 participated very actively in that case, in addition to an organization from another continent. He was condemned to six consecutive life sentences but surprisingly was freed in 1994.

 

J.C.
Born . . . in . . . He was the actual instigator and perpetrator of countless macabre actions. He joined the P2 in . . . Now retired from politics and financial affairs, he still maintains great influence in the world of crime. He lives in . . . He killed John Paul I on the night of September 29, 1978.

 

 

THE REMAINING CHARACTERS presented in this book belong to the world of fiction.

 

NOTE 1
. Assumptions will be replaced by confirmed facts in a future edition.

 

NOTE 2
. The P2 still exists, more secretive than ever.

Q:
Does the P2 Lodge truly exist? And if so, what facts do we know about it, and what did you create as a novelist for the sake of this story?

 

A:
P2 existed and still exists. All details in the novel before and through 1978 are true, including the names of the members and leaders of the lodge. Everything that happens with Sarah Monteiro and Rafael, as well as the idea of JC’s being part of P2 in the current day, is fictional.

 

Q:
Several nonfiction books have addressed the matter of whether Pope John Paul I was murdered. Do you believe they raise valid questions? Did you draw on conspiracy theories just to create a good thriller, or do you indeed believe there was a plot to murder the pope in 1978?

 

A:
John Paul I was killed on September 29, 1978, at 1:00 a.m. Not at 11:00 or 11:30 p.m. on September 28, as officially stated. I’m sure of it.

 

There’s a very good piece (published and sold together with this novel in Spain) by a Spanish journalist, a correspondent in Rome, that recounts everything that happened that night. It was because of this journalist that the story became cloudy. He managed to speak with Sister Vincenza, the nun who said she was the one who found John Paul I’s body, but the official Vatican version was that Father John Magee, the pope’s assistant, found him. And that version lasted through the 1980s, when the Vatican confirmed that it wasn’t Magee who had discovered the body. The Vatican ordered everyone involved to a vow of silence. Why would they do that if there was nothing to hide? Because it was all a setup. John Paul I was in fact killed. How do I know? The person who killed him told me, and proved it to me.

 

The character JC in the book is based on a real figure, John Paul I’s assassin, whom I knew as an Italian ministerial assistant. In truth, apparently, he wasn’t. He told me specifically that I should write a novel about the affair, because we live in a fictional reality and we don’t know anything, even the things we think we know.
The Last Pope
is that book.

 

Q:
You were a child when Pope John Paul I died, so it’s presumably not an experience you remember from direct media reports at the time. Was there anything in particular about John Paul I’s life and death that inspired the novel?

 

A:
I knew about John Paul II and a little Vatican history—not much, I must confess—but I didn’t know anything about John Paul I until April 2005. It was then that an acquaintance of mine, an Italian, told me how everything had happened. Who Albino Luciani was, what he did that would lead someone to kill him, why, when, how. Later I saw documents proving what this acquaintance had told me (among these documents were the papers that John Paul I had had with him on the night of his death, which disappeared that same night). Sister Vincenza saw them, as did John Paul’s close collaborator Don Diego Lorenzi, but they were never found. Now, knowing a little more about Albino Luciani and other facts of Vatican history, I’m glad I got in touch with that world.

 

Q:
An especially haunting character in the novel is the mystic Sister Lucia de Jesus, one of the three children said to have encountered the Virgin Mary at Fátima. She was Portuguese, as you are, so was it a risk for you to write about someone who is so revered in your culture? Do you think that the secrets of Fátima are somehow linked to current events and disasters, as the novel suggests?

 

A:
There was more a sense of curiosity here. A certain ambivalence surrounds the events of Fátima. We believe in them, but we also know that Sister Lucia was totally controlled by the Church. So some things are true and others aren’t. Take, for example, the secrets. Some people believe that the secrets were all invented by the Church to control the population. And the revelation of the third secret by John Paul II in 2000 left many disappointed. Most people don’t know that the secrets were really written in 1941. I know for a fact that Sister Lucia was a psychic and saw the Virgin many more times than people think. It wasn’t just from May 13 until October 1917. The Virgin appeared regularly throughout Sister Lucia’s life. What secrets did she tell her? Only Sister Lucia and the Church, and a few others, know. Perhaps I’ll write a book about this.

 

Q:
The CIA and the Italian Mafia both play roles in the intrigue around your protagonists, Rafael and Sarah. Are these entities as central to Vatican politics today as this novel suggests they were in 1978?

 

A:
No. Now it’s completely different. You need a unique confluence of factors for a nonreligious entity to control the Holy See. That happened from 1971 until 1981, more or less. And only in the financial department, not the religious. Today it wouldn’t be possible. However, nowadays in the Vatican there are religious organizations with more power than the P2 had.

 

Q:
What has been the reaction to this novel since its publication? Do people accept your narrative as fact—as some have done with Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
—or do they recognize it mainly as a work of fiction?

 

A:
I receive e-mail from all over the world. I have yet to get a bad review from a reader. Readers love the story, the characters; they ask if the book will be made into a movie, and they think it would make a great one. They want to know more about the case, especially Italian readers. For the most part readers accept everything as fact, even the adventure of Sarah and Rafael. That’s a little odd.

 

I had a curious request last year for two copies of the book in Portuguese, from a journalist who works in the Vatican. It seems the copies were for someone important who sees the pope every day. That person confided to the journalist, off the record, that everything in the book is true. It’s good to know. Though I do have my suspicions, I can’t say who this person was—perhaps a cardinal or a bishop. There aren’t a lot of Portuguese people in the Vatican. But it’s overwhelming to know that they respect the work, and that’s the main reason the Church hasn’t reacted or reacts with silence.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

I wish to thank the author, Luís Miguel Rocha, for his gracious and quick answers to my questions, and to Lee Paradise, who always reads my works, for his wise comments and suggestions, which this time were so many that I should hereby give him credit as my co-translator.

 

—DOLORES M. KOCH