New book studies the intricacies of the Vatican power-play

Press, 19 July 1983, Page 21

New book studies the intricacies of the Vatican power-play

From SELWYN PARKER in Dublin

Pope John Paul II is a good man at a party who “expertly uncorks magnums of champagne.” He has a more than healthy appetite which devours special Polish food flown in weekly by the airline of his native country, LOT, including buckwheat pancakes served with sour cream, Polish beer, and wholebread.

He jogs most mornings around the Apostolic palace dressed only in a tracksuit, and is occasionally accompanied by Bishop Marcinkus, dubbed the “Vatican’s banker”. He loves to swim, and he ends his early-morning shower with a blast of ice-cold water.

He works like a steam-engine, rising at 5 a.m. most mornings and maintaining an 18-hour day. He sees scores of people, pores over documents, prays, takes decisions, and reads.

He also has quite a temper. When the renegade Archbishop Le-

fevre, who refused to observe the new English mass and started what amounted to a splinter movement within the Church, was summoned to Rome for his first meeting with the new Pope, he got comprehensively chewed out. Lefevre was told he could be excommunicated; he was not to make any more public appearances; and he had to stick to Church discipline. Effectively, it was the end of the Lefevre movement.

“In little more than a whisper Marcel Lefevre capitulated. He would remain secluded and silent in his lonely Swiss seminary. John Paul took him by the arm and gently ushered him to the door.” This quote and the above revela-

tions all come from a landmark, 499-page tome about John Paul and his immediate predecessors, the mentally tortured Paul VI, the chirpy but short-lived John Paul I, and about life inside the Vatican.

The book is called “Pontiff,” and it is an extraordinarily intimate insight into the power-play among the conniving, suspicious, deeply traditional Curia, into the conclaves which elect the Pope, and into the role of the nuns. Beyond the Vatican, the book explores in extremely digestible chunks the essentially conservative theology of the present Pope and how he is struggling to reconcile the divisions that threaten to rip apart the American and Latin American

branches of the Church. In a remarkable recreation, based on interviews with the secret police of several countries, “Pontiff’ produces a chilling analysis of Mehmet Ali Agca, the mentally sick young Turk who tried to assassinate John Paul 11, and of his assassination plan. According to the co-authors Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts, Agca was “run” by the Soviet Union K.G.B. He emerges as a hate-filled pawn in an anti-Catholic international power play: a fanatic who indulged in sexual fantasies, who regularly recited a “hate list” on which the Pope was top, a member of the Turkish Grey Wolves "assassination squad”.

Thomas, an Ireland-based former “Daily Express” news editor, and Witts, a former 8.8. C. executive producer, talked privately with the Turk in his Rome jaU, with his mother, and even with

Agca’s psychologists. “Pontiff” paints a largely warm but ruthlessly accurate picture of the Vatican: its battle to ease its burden of debt — and the scandals Marcinkus got into in the process; its miles upon miles of archives that contain a treasurehouse of medieval history running back to Joan of Arc and beyond; and its essential chauvinism.

After the shock death of John Paul I — and the writers clearly regard him as a promisingly fresh mind with a predisposition towards

reform — the faithful nun who had attended the Pope for years is promptly banished from public contact for the rest of her life. The other household nuns are to go with her.

Cardinal Viliot, who virtually runs the Pope’s household, then issues a statement about John Paul I’s death that differs substantially from the truth. One of the book’s most fascinating revelations emerges from the chapters on the conclaves. According to the authors, John Paul I’s

first stunning words after receiving the necessary votes for his election as Supreme Pontiff were: “May God forgive you for what you have done in my regard.”

Even the tough John Paul 11, overwhelmed by the burden, nearly lost his composure after a see-saw voting battle with Cardinal Benelli, a vote heavily influenced by politicking and persuasion. “Wojtyla sat head in his hands, tears running between his broad fingers, a suddenly lonely and isolated figure.” He quickly cheered up, though,

for a lively post-election party, an unheard-of occurrence that quite shocked the Italians. The new Pope and his fellow Poles sang songs, poured champagne for the nuns, slapped each other on the back. Watching all this, “Pontiff’ writes, the Italians “exchange wan smiles.”

They were watching, to be precise, the end of a 450-year era of Italian Popes.

Footnote: “Pontiff” will be published in New Zealand on September 15.