While last week’s article dealt in great part with the intrigue surrounding Pope John Paul I, we are now free to watch Yallop introduce us to the boy, the young student, priest, bishop and pope, who would confound the mighty and inspire the wise of his flock.

In doing so, the author lays a solid foundation for understanding the holiness, the brilliance, the tenacity, the charity and devotion to people within the heart of the man who ascended the throne of Peter. His detractors would dismiss him as a simple cleric, whose papacy was an embarrassment to the Church, and the questions surrounding his death unworthy of investigation.

The author begins by telling us that the Luciani family lived in a converted barn in a small mountain village of Canale d’Agordo, over three thousand feet above sea level and approximately seven-five miles north of Venice.

By the time Albino was born on October 17, 1912, his parents, Giovanni and Bortola, were already caring for two daughters from the father’s first marriage. Ironically, Bortola had considered entering a convent, and there she was, the mother of three. After Albino, Bortola gave birth to a boy, Edoardo, and then to a girl, Antonia. The mother contributed to the family income by writing letters for the illiterate and working as a scullery maid.

Despite the fact that the first fourteen years of this century were considered by many Europeans to have been a golden age, with its widespread increase in culture, the spiritual life of the people, and the reduction of social inequalities, there was also appalling poverty, mass unemployment, social inequality, hunger, illness and early deaths.

Thousands of people of Naples sought to emigrate to England or the United States, anywhere to escape the hardships at home. In Rome, thousands lived in huts of straw and brushwood, and moved to the hills in the summer. Some worked all day in the vineyards for pennies. Others worked on farms with no pay except for rotten maize, which gave many a skin disease called pellagra. From standing waist-deep in the rice fields, countless workers contracted malaria from the mosquitoes. Illiteracy was over 50 percent. Amid such hardships, it is not surprising that Albino acquired a heightened compassion for the poor that stayed with him until his death.

In the family’s village, there were mostly old men and women, younger women and children. Nearly all the men would go to other countries to find work. Giovanni Luciani traveled to Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and France to seek employment as a bricklayer, electrician, engineer, and mechanic in the spring, and return home in the autumn.

By the time Albino was seven years old, under the guidance of his mother, he was reading books far beyond his age: the works of Dickens, Jules Verne, and Mark Twain.

Possibly, it was the heart-wrenching poverty and illness the boy saw and remembered for his entire life, or the prayerfulness of his mother, or the industriousness of a father who turned to Socialism to right the wrongs he saw everywhere, that turned the boy’s thoughts to Christ and following his way in the priesthood. to help bring the Gospel message to others.

Before Albino’s eleventh birthday, the boy wrote a letter to his father, asking permission to begin his studies at the minor seminary, who answered with, “Well, we must make the sacrifice.” And a great sacrifice it must have been to lose someone who could work on the farm, besides find the money for the youngster’s seminary expenses.

Albino went off to the seminary where he found his love of reading curtailed by the banned books, including Rosmini’s The Five Wounds of the Church. The author was both a theologian and a priest, and had written in 1848 that the Church faced five evils:

• Social remoteness of the clergy from the people;
• The low standard of education of the priests;
• Disunity and acrimony among the bishops;
• The dependence of lay appointments on secular authority;
• Church ownership of property and enslavement to wealth.

Rosmini had hoped that his writing would lead to Church reform. Instead, his book was condemned, and the cardinal’s hat he had been offered by Pope Pius IX was withdrawn. The pope also condemned freedom of the press, speech, conscience and religion. The boat of Peter was sailing in rough waters.

It was in 1870 that the pope convened Vatican Council I , with papal infallibility at the head of the agenda, his infallibility, which was at first defeated by a vote of 451 from the possible 1,000 cardinals. For some strange reason, however, a goodly number were persuaded to leave the council early and, eventually, on July 18, 1870, with only two dissenting votes, 533 declared the pope infallible in matters of faith and morals.

Under Pius X, seminaries were closed, and those left open were carefully watched. Many priests found their careers destroyed, even though they were faithful to the Church according to their consciences.

At the seminary, Luciani could not read newspapers. No student could question what was taught, which must have been painful for someone as thirsty for knowledge as the boy. Yet, he read every book he could get a hold of, and had a prodigious memory for retaining what he had read. From the minor seminary, he entered the major seminary at Belluno. A contemporary described the student to Yallop:

We were woken up at 5:30 A.M. No heating: Indeed, the water would often be solid ice. I used to lose my vocation every morning for five minutes. We had thirty minutes to wash and make our beds I met Luciani there in 1929. He was then sixteen. He was always amiable, quiet, serene – unless you stated something that was inaccurate – then he was like a spring. I learned that in front of him you had to speak carefully. Any muddled thinking and you were in danger with him. Another student had this to say: He read Goldoni’s dramas. He read French novelists of the nineteenth century. He bought a collection of the writings of the seventeenth century French Jesuit Couwase and read them from cover to cover.

(One wonders how he managed to get hold of the books in such a restricted setting.)

Luciani was so influenced by Couwase that he asked the rector for permission to enter the Jesuits, but the request was denied He was ordained a priest at the age of 23, July 7, 1935, in San Pietro, Belluno, and was appointed curate in his home town. By that time, his father had a steady job as a glass- blower on the island of Morano, near Venice.

Two years later, the young curate was appointed rector of his old seminary. After four years, his hunger for God led him to ask permission to study for a doctorate in theology, and he entered the Gregorian University in Rome.

This lover of the truth, devoted man of God, was no reed shaking in the wind when he went off to Rome. He knew about poverty and had seen what affluence had wreaked in the Church he loved. He pursued learning with a passion in the midst of a curtailment of books that would have discouraged a less gifted mind. He sought God when, to the sophisticated, such seeking might have appeared naive at best, rank superstition, at worst For his thesis, he chose, The Origin of the Human SoulAccording to Antonio Rosmini.

Back at the seminary, during the war, Luciani heard the confessions of the German soldiers. He was aware that helping the resistance resulted in destroyed homes and capturing men to hand them on the trees. Nevertheless, the seminary became a haven for members of the resistance. Neither they nor the members of the seminary were ever betrayed to the Nazis.

By 1958, Luciani’s parents had died and and the priest looked to his brother, Edoardo, now married, and living in the family home, and to his sister, Antonio, also married and living in Trento, for companionship. For exercise, he liked to cycle around his diocese or climb the nearby mountains.

In the Vatican, Pope John XXIII, was looking for a bishop to fill the vacancy of Vittorio Veneto, and chose Luciani for the post. He was consecrated bishop by the pope on December 27, 1958 in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The new bishop’s first words to his congregation went like this:

With me the Lord uses yet again his old system. He takes the small ones from the mud of the streets. He takes the people of the fields. He takes others away from their nets in the sea or the lake, and he makes them Apostles. It’s his old system.  

When his four-hundred priests had gathered to welcome him with gifts and food and money, he declined them with these words: “I come without five lire. I want to leave without five lire.”

My dear priests. My dear faithful. I would be a very unfortunate bishop if I didn’t love you. I assure you that I do, and that I want to be at your service and put at your disposal all of my poor energies, the little that I have and the little that I am.  

The bishop fit in with his flock. He dressed as a simple priest, and practiced a form of democracy that was rare among bishops. He didn’t make appointments to the presbyterial council, which was elected by the priests without nominations from the bishop.

One time, Luciani made the decision to keep a small, minor seminary open, against the wishes of the council. Consequently, he went around and interviewed his parish priests, with the result that he changed his mind and closed the seminary, then stated publicly that he had been wrong, his priests correct.

Luciani’s table usually had two or three priests at it. He never stopped giving of himself, and the hospital officials didn’t know when he would turn up on his bike or in his old car to visit the sick. The bishop was hard put to find any opportunity to visit the sick alone. Apparently, the officials felt they owed him an escort of two or three or ten when going from one ward to the next.

It was on October 11, 1962, that Luciani was present at the opening of the Second Vatican Council, and was delighted to hear the debates on the need for the Church to be a poor Church. His father’s leaving the family to seek work in other countries, the hunger, the cold, the wooden clogs with the extra nails banged into the wood so that they would not wear out, the long spells in the seminary without seeing his mother who could not afford to visit, gave him a deep compassion for the poor.

He and his people adopted a small township in Burundi, formerly part of German East Africa, where he found the churches full, but bellies empty. Nearly 70 percent of the 31/4 million people were Roman Catholics. Luciani and his diocese had enough love to try to serve as many as possible.

After the death of Pope John XXIII, his successor, Pope Paul VI, took up the church’s position on artificial birth control. The commission on the subject issued its report, with the majority of its members (64 to 4), as well as theologians, legal experts, historians, sociologists, doctors, obstetricians and married couples, voting for a change in the Church’s stand against the use of the pill.

The minority, primarily members of the Curia, waited until the commission had been disbanded, then issued its own report, declaring that the Church could not, must not change what had been tradition. The most powerful man in the Church, next to Pope Paul VI, Cardinal Ottaviani, who had never been assigned any position outside Rome in his entire career, finally persuaded enough dissenters to his side. Thus did Humanae Vitae become the force that would cut the veil of unity of the Church in two. Rather than strengthen the respect for the papacy, it destroyed it in the hearts of many. The sin of using contraceptives often ended in another sin – divorce.

The irony throughout the pious words against using contraceptives was that companies owned by the Vatican, Istituto Farmacologico Sereno, profited by the sale of its most popular product, an oral contraceptive called Luteolas.

Luciani would have favored the use of contraceptives for those whose consciences left them free to use them. As it was, he was sensitive to the pain of married couples, and, following the Vatican’s request, helped to draft this response to Humanae Vitae:

In it priests were advised to show “evangelical kindness” toward all married couples, but especially, as Luciani pointed out, toward those ‘whose failings derive...from the sometimes very serious difficulties in which they find themselves. In that case, the behavior of the spouses, although not in conformity with Christian norms, is certainly not to be judged with the same gravity as when it derives from motives corrupted by selfishly and hedonism.” 

Luciani also admonished his troubled people not to feel “an anguished disturbing guilt complex.” What a masterpiece of compassionate shepherding we see in these words. How blessed we are to have had him even for so short a time on the throne of Peter.

On September 17, 1969, Cardinal Urbani, patriarch of Venice, died, and Luciani was tapped to succeed him. Before leaving for his new post, the priests presented him with a gift of one million lire ($16,000 then). In his customary fashion, he declined, asking that the money be returned to the people to use for their favorite charities. He would leave for Venice with some linens, a few sticks of furniture, and his books.

In that glorious city, he cancelled an expensive welcome celebration of parades and bands and processions of gaily bedecked gondolas, and substituted them with a talk reminding the people that Venice was made up of both great, historic areas with monuments and wealth, and the industrial areas, such as Mestre and Marghera.

“This was the other Venice,” Luciani observed, “with few monuments but so many factories, houses, spiritual problems, souls. And it is to this many-faceted city that Providence now sends me. Signor Mayor, the first Venetian coins, minted as long ago as A.D. 850, had the motto ‘Christ, save Venice.’ I make this my own with all my heart and turn it into a prayer, ‘Christ, bless Venice.’”

(To be concluded)

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