How might John Paul I have shaped the church?

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column

Michael Commane

Albino Luciani was the pope of one month. He was elected pope on August 28, 1978 and was found dead in his bed on September 28. He took the name John Paul I. At the time of his death it was reported that Irish priest, later Bishop of Cloyne, John Magee, who was Pope John Paul I’s private secretary, was the first to find the body. 

That is not true. The person who discovered the dead pope was Sister Vincenza, who regularly brought him his morning coffee. Over the years there has been much discussion as to whether or not the good man was murdered. But it seems not.

 

On being elected pope he stopped taking medication for his heart problem and died from a heart attack.

 

Last Sunday week, September 4 Pope Francis beatified John Paul I, the last step before someone is made a saint.

 

There was something endearing about Albino Luciani. He was not called the smiling pope for nothing. He had a lovely easy and gentle touch about him.

Over the years I have often thought that Albino Luciani was the Catholic Church’s version of Mikhail Gorbachev.

In his short month as pope he attempted to break the practice of the pope being carried about on an ornate ceremonial throne. He failed to convince the Vatican civil service but he was the last pope to use it. 

He referred to himself as ‘I’ rather than using the royal ‘we'. He refused to be crowned, instead he received the papal pallium as the symbol of his position as Bishop of Rome. Luciani had mixed feelings regarding the church’s traditional stance on contraception. When Humani Vitae was published Luciani defended the encyclical but seemed to contradict that defence in a letter he wrote to his diocese just some days after the encyclical’s release.

At a meeting of bishops in Rome in 1971 he suggested that dioceses in developed countries should give one per cent of their income to the developing world, not as charity but as something owed. 

He had been Patriarch of Venice on being elected pope. And while he was in Venice he wrote a monthly column for a magazine. It took the form of letters addressed to real or fictional characters of the past. They included Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Christopher Marlowe and many famous Italians. 

In a letter to Charles Dickens he wrote: ‘I am a bishop who has been given the odd task of writing a letter to some eminent person every month for the Messaggero di S Antonio. 

I was pushed for time, around Christmas, and didn’t know whom to choose. And then I saw an advertisement in a newspaper to your famous books and thought to myself, ‘I’ll write to him. I read his books as a boy, and really loved them; they were filled with love of the poor and a sense of the need for social reform, they were warm and imaginative and human’. So here I am, bothering you.’

Had Pope John Paul 1 not died that night in his bed is it possible we would have a different style of bishop around the world today? And of course those bishops would agree with their pope. Isn’t that how politics works.