FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Will the Pope be murdered?

Rant Number 536      30 April 2013

Good Pope Francis assassinated!? Mad but...A pious Italian lady expressed such fear to me. ‘Why do you think that?’ I asked. ‘He criticised the IOR, Istituto per Opere Religiose...You’ll see! They will kill him, as they killed John Paul I! May God protect our Francesco!’

Best response to paranoia is clarity. The IOR – in English: Institute for Works of Religion – is a bank, situated inside the Vatican State. A successful outfit, with billions dollars investments around the world. Note: its declared aim is not profit but works of charity.

What’s the problem then? Well, Pope Francis mentioned the IOR innocuously de passage in a homily during his morning Mass, a week ago. Ostensibly, he was having a go at church bureaucracy. ‘The Church is not an NGO’ he said. ‘It is a love story...Those fellows in the IOR...Sorry, they are necessary but...’

Harmless stuff? The Church a love story? Charming but my Catholic lady thought it announced a murder story. A bit odd perhaps that theOsservatore Romano, the official Vatican paper, printed the Pope’s sermon but it left out the IOR reference. Not very clever. Because it suggests that some found the trifling hint worrying enough to censure the preacher – the Pope himself. What in Heaven is going on?

First, John Paul I. Albino Luciani, the short-lived Pontiff who reigned only a month before found dead in his bed in 1978, aged 65. Lurid speculations about his demise spread like wildfire. The lady obviously believed them. ‘He was good...He wanted to change the Church...they got rid of him’. Perhaps, but the real reason the Pope died was a heart attack. Brought on not by poison but more likely by his painful awareness that he was the wrong man for the job. Not that the Curia treated him unkindly, it is just that he could not bear the strain. His heart gave in. That was that. The rest is conspiratology: trash.

Second, the IOR. The priest knows about its workings as much as anyone who would Google the name. It is fun, I tell you. You meet the notoriousBanco Ambrosiano scandal; the perhaps less than holy IOR’s boss, Archbishop Marcinkus; the Mafia; God’s banker Calvi, he who ended up hanged under London’s Blackfriars Bridge; Michele Sindona, another banker extradited from the US only to be poisoned in a Milan jail; the Machiavellian, quasi-Masonic P2 lodge and its head, the immensely astute Licio Gelli (Aaargh! No relation, I swear!)...enough. Too rich a salad. As the French say: C’est pictoresque mais c’est ne pas l’histoire.

Of course, the IOR is what its name says it is: an institute for charitable works. The Pope was not charging it with being Satanic, only with being too bureaucratic. Francis is correct, the Christian Church is no NGO. The Holy Spirit, the holy fire from on high animates her, not the spirit of Mammon or even that of shallow humanitarianism. Structures and institutions are fine but, yes, the love affair, the marvellous passion of God in love with wayward humanity is the point, not the CEOs and the bank balance sheets.

Third, narratives underlying fears of a papal assassination are infused with naivety. Running back to the case of St Celestine V, the medieval Pope who resigned the papacy in 1294. A hermit, he has been romanticised as a spiritual figure, almost Christ-like, intending to reform the Church. Actually, Celestine was a disastrous Pontiff. Ignorant and simple-minded, he was easily manipulated by the powerful. Quite unfit for the task. Comparisons with Christ miss the point. God’ only Son knew what he was doing and he did it. Celestine could not cope – that is not being Christ-like.

The priest’s favourite example of a phoney reforming Pope is fictional. F.R. Rolfe’s Hadrian VII describes such a fantasy. Out of the blue an eccentric Englishman is elected Pope. His behaviour riles and annoys the Curia and the stuffy ecclesiastical milieu but it is not the Vatican who will kill him – instead he falls under the gun of an Ulster Protestant. Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo, was a weird but amusing homosexual writer, not devoid of what we Italians call geniaccio. Anyhow, to his credit he never makes his Pope Hadrian bless homo-marriage. Guess Corvo knew even absurdity has limits.

Third, Pope Francis is a Jesuit. That means that he has been trained in one of the most exacting schools of spirituality Catholicism can boast. He may have taken his name after the much loved Poor Man of Assisi but as a Jesuit he knows the vital role of organisation and hierarchy. St Ignatius of Loyola indeed modelled the Jesuit Order he founded after the example of a military unit. Hence naive this Pope is not. Jolly well he knows that some bureaucracy is necessary, even good – although, I confess, I wish it wasn’t.

Pious paranoia about this Pope’s assassination seems groundless, yet it is interesting for what it tells about ordinary people’s psyche. My nameless lady’s fear is borne out of love for a Holy Father who rejects pomp and ceremony, while embracing simplicity and humility. A good man who stands with the poor, the humble and the downtrodden, ‘the bungled and the botched’ despised by our secularist and basically atheistic supermen. Surely such a holy man invites the hatred, the wrath of the munafiqun, the hypocrites and the impious? There is something to be said for that.

Conspiracies are out, I hope but...Wait a minute...Blackfriars Bridge? Did not the priest once teach at the City of London school, near the bridge? Worse, did he not once work for an oil company, whose chairman was villain Sindona? And P2? Licio Gelli? Gelli, do you hear me!? And why did the Pope really drop that hint? Conspiracy ahoy, I smell it!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli