Poison Gossip

Charges of murder most foul On the evening of Sept. 28, 1978, Pope John Paul I said prayers in his private chapel in the Apostolic Palace, then retired to his bedroom a few yards away. It would be his last night alive: next morning, the Pontiff was found dead in his bed. The official cause of death was a heart attack. What made John Paul's demise especially poignant was that he had been elected Pope only 33 days earlier.

A book to be published in the U.S. this week offers a shocking judgment: that John Paul I was murdered. In his work, titled In God's Name: An Investigation into the Murder of John Paul I (Bantam; $16.95), British Author David Yallop contends 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."

According to Yallop, the murder was triggered by the Pope's decision to purge the troubled Vatican Bank and cleanse the church of alleged ties with a clandestine Italian Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due, or P2. In breathless prose, the author surveys his lineup of suspects and their supposed motives. There was the late Jean Cardinal Villot, the Vatican Secretary of State, who Yallop claims had learned he would be replaced and who was upset that John Paul was allegedly considering loosening the church's prohibition on artificial birth control; Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, who is said to have been scheduled for immediate removal; Roberto Calvi, president of Banco Ambrosiano, who faced ruin if his trickery with Vatican funds was discovered; Michele Sindona, the Sicilian banker who knew about the Vatican Bank's alleged laundering of Mafia money; Licio Gelli, grand master of P2, which is supposed to have boasted some 100 Vatican members; and last but not least, the late John Cardinal Cody of Chicago, who had been tipped off that he would be asked to resign.

Having set up characters and motives so diverse, Yallop then fails to finger any one suspect. Instead, he devotes four pages, complete with reconstructed dialogue, to Cardinal Villot's last meeting with John Paul I, on Sept. 28, in which the Pontiff outlines his proposed personnel changes. Villot, according to Yallop, "advised, argued and remonstrated, but to no avail." Yallop speculates that the Pope was poisoned, perhaps by someone tampering with a bottle of low-blood-pressure medicine called Effortil that the author says John Paul I kept at his bedside. Yallop insists that inconsistencies in the Vatican's account of the papal death and the absence of an autopsy point to a coverup.

Yallop, 47, who has written several investigative books, including a biography of Fatty Arbuckle, in which he exonerates the comedian of involvement in a starlet's death, spent three years researching In God's Name. Still, the theory is hardly fresh. An even more astounding tale swirled about the Vatican immediately after John Paul I died: that the first attempt to slip the Pope a poisoned cup of tea had gone awry and killed a guest instead. Moreover, there was nothing unusual about the lack of an autopsy after John Paul I's death: autopsies are never performed on Popes.

Yallop offers no hard evidence to prove his poison plot. The motives ascribed to some of Yallop's "suspects" seem illogical, if not incredible. After his election, John Paul I reconfirmed all Vatican officials for five years, including Villot and Marcinkus. Sindona, who is serving a 25-year jail term in a New York prison for fraud, and Calvi, who was found hanging from a London bridge in 1982, had dire financial problems, but none that a papal murder would alleviate. News about Gelli's P-2 lodge did help topple the Italian government of Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani in 1981, but only because so many government officials belonged to the illegal organization; no Vatican prelate was ever proved to be a member.

Though the poisoning of a Pope may seem farfetched today, legend has it that at least one Pope--Alexander VI--died of poisoning, from a fatal potion that was intended for some Cardinals. That was in 1503, and the rumors have not let up yet. Veteran Vatican observers recall the stories of how Pope Pius X died of poisoning in 1914. Then there were the whispers about how poison killed Leo XIII in 1903, Pius VIII in 1830, and... qed