Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...death. As is the case when any world figure dies unexpectedly, rumors of foul play inevitably circulated and were not easily stilled, especially after Milan's respected Corriere della Sera called for an autopsy. The situation did not improve when it was learned that, contrary to the Vatican's first description of John Paul's last moments, what the Pope may have been reading when he died of a heart attack was not Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ but a document written by Pope Paul...
...Vatican sources later let it be known that the document was a gloomy report on the state-of-the-church in a certain nation that could only have shocked John Paul. Besides, earlier on the day of his death, a Cardinal living in Rome had apparently rebuffed John Paul by refusing to accept appointment as the new Pope's successor as Patriarch of Venice. Such reports suggested that John Paul may quite literally have been shocked to death. Other Vatican sources say that John Paul was overwhelmed by the complexity of the Vatican Curia and that the resulting strain...
SALVATORE PAPPALARDO, Archbishop of Palermo, 60. Regional jealousies are strong in Italy, even among Christian bishops. There has not been a Sicilian Pope in twelve centuries. But Salvatore Pappalardo could surmount that prejudice. A keen-minded Vatican diplomat who entered the Secretariat of State along with Giovanni Benelli, Pappalardo served early on as a secretary to Monsignor Montini, later Pope Paul VI. Eventually he became Paul's pronuncio to Indonesia, where the tropical climate sapped his health. Forced to return to Italy, he headed the school that trains Vatican diplomats. (His health is now fine.) In 1970 Paul named...
GIOVANNI BENELLI, Archbishop of Florence, 57. As the Vatican's Substitute Secretary of State under Jean Cardinal Villot, Benelli was for a decade a power to be reckoned with by churchmen who wanted to see the Pope. Though he has befriended and backed pastoral Cardinals like Luciani and Pappalardo, Benelli had never held a pastoral post until Paul VI named him to the See of Florence in 1977. A brusque Tuscan with a deceptively cherubic face, Benelli has earned good marks during his 16 months in Communist-governed Florence. Even during his years as Pope Paul's front-office strong...
...late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Borgia family brought the papacy to its nadir. After the death of the notorious Alexander VI in 1503, Cardinal Sforza succeeded in frustrating Borgia ambitions by having decrepit Cardinal Piccolomini elected Pius III. Rapacious Vatican bureaucrats, accustomed to plundering the apartments of every new Pope on the assumption that the Holy Father would need no further worldly goods, so stripped Pius' cell that he even had to buy back the bed in which he died of gout just 25 days later...