Word: villot
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...Pope's decision to purge the troubled Vatican Bank and cleanse the church of alleged ties with a clandestine Italian Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due, or P2. In breathless prose, the author surveys his lineup of suspects and their supposed motives. There was the late Jean Cardinal Villot, the Vatican Secretary of State, who Yallop claims had learned he would be replaced and who was upset that John Paul was allegedly considering loosening the church's prohibition on artificial birth control; Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank, who is said to have been scheduled for immediate...
Having set up characters and motives so diverse, Yallop then fails to finger any one suspect. Instead, he devotes four pages, complete with reconstructed dialogue, to Cardinal Villot's last meeting with John Paul I, on Sept. 28, in which the Pontiff outlines his proposed personnel changes. Villot, according to Yallop, "advised, argued and remonstrated, but to no avail." Yallop speculates that the Pope was poisoned, perhaps by someone tampering with a bottle of low-blood-pressure medicine called Effortil that the author says John Paul I kept at his bedside. Yallop insists that inconsistencies in the Vatican...
Yallop offers no hard evidence to prove his poison plot. The motives ascribed to some of Yallop's "suspects" seem illogical, if not incredible. After his election, John Paul I reconfirmed all Vatican officials for five years, including Villot and Marcinkus. Sindona, who is serving a 25-year jail term in a New York prison for fraud, and Calvi, who was found hanging from a London bridge in 1982, had dire financial problems, but none that a papal murder would alleviate. News about Gelli's P-2 lodge did help topple the Italian government of Prime Minister Arnaldo...
...church in America. The old-fashioned autocratic Cardinals whose pride was in building new parishes and schools gradually gave way to men with a more pastoral, people-oriented outlook. Pope Paul is given much credit for orchestrating the change. He once remarked to his Secretary of State, Jean Cardinal Villot, "Don't American Catholics understand what vast power they have, and what a responsibility?" Increasingly that power devolved on bishops who rejected a monarchical style of ruling, were open to ecumenical contacts with Protestants and more readily accepted the advice of new priests' senates and lay parish councils...
John Paul mulled over the choice for nearly two months following the death of Secretary of State Jean Villot. It was a foregone conclusion that a Polish Pope with no Vatican experience would have to choose an Italian to help him deal with the predominantly Italian Secretariat of State. John Paul reportedly considered giving the job to Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, 72, the hard-line conservative Archbishop of Genoa, but they could...