Pope John Paul I was murdered after 33 days to stop him cleaning up the Vatican Bank

The case for suspicion

Steelman it fairly, because the raw material is not invented. A vigorous new pope was dead in about a month, and the institution charged with explaining it promptly told the world things that were untrue. When an authority lies about small, checkable facts surrounding a death, the reasonable instinct is to ask what else it is willing to lie about.

The financial backdrop gave that instinct a target. The Vatican's own bank, the Institute for the Works of Religion, was deeply entangled with Banco Ambrosiano, an Italian bank run by Roberto Calvi, nicknamed “God's Banker” for his Vatican ties. Behind them stood the financier Michele Sindona and the shadow of Propaganda Due (P2), an illegal Masonic lodge whose exposure in 1981 revealed hundreds of members across Italian public life. If a pope had meant to take a broom to that network, the theory runs, he had made powerful enemies fast.

Then came the deaths that seemed to confirm the pattern. In 1982, Calvi was found hanged beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, bricks stuffed into his clothes, as Banco Ambrosiano collapsed with more than a billion dollars unaccounted for. In 1986, Sindona died in an Italian prison after drinking coffee laced with cyanide, two days into a life sentence. Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who ran the Vatican Bank, was later named in an Italian arrest order as an accessory in the Ambrosiano collapse; the Vatican, an independent state, declined to hand him over, and he was never tried.

A banker hanged under a bridge, a financier poisoned in his cell, a bank collapsing with a fortune missing. In that company, a fourth suspicious death was easy to imagine.

None of this is a murder confession, and it is worth being clear that these events came years afterthe Pope died. But they explain why the theory took hold and would not let go. This looked, from the outside, like a world in which inconvenient men did not always die of natural causes, and the Vatican's own fumbling had already forfeited the benefit of the doubt.

What the investigations actually found

The murder case was pressed hardest by David Yallop's 1984 best-seller In God's Name, which argued the Pope had been poisoned and named a cast of churchmen and financiers as the beneficiaries. The book sold enormously and fixed the theory in the public mind. It did not, however, produce the thing the charge required: evidence that a murder had taken place. It reasoned from motive and atmosphere to a conclusion, and reviewers and the Church rejected the central claim as unsubstantiated.

The most serious response came from the Vatican itself, which invited the British journalist John Cornwell to investigate with access to the household and the physicians. Cornwell was no apologist; his 1989 book A Thief in the Night was blistering about Vatican secrecy and about the poor medical care given to a frail pope. But on the core question he was clear: he found no evidence of murder. He concluded the death was natural, most plausibly the result of a cardiac or circulatory failure, made worse by overwork and by a Curia that had neglected the health of the man in its charge. Negligence, in his telling, not poison.

Decades later, Stefania Falasca, the deputy postulator of Luciani's sainthood cause, went back through the records and testimony with official access. Her research documented that Luciani had complained of chest pain the evening before he died, discomfort he seems to have mistaken for something minor, and it set out a medical and timeline account consistent with a natural death. She presented the work explicitly as a way to end the poisoning rumors rather than to feed them.

The recurring pillars of the murder theory each soften on inspection. The missing autopsy looks less sinister once you know that popes were not autopsied; the last known case was Pius VII in 1830, so its absence in 1978 followed custom. The changed story about who found the body traces to prudery and panic over a nun in the papal bedroom, not to a homicide. And the lurid later deaths of Calvi and Sindona, however dark, happened four to eight years afterward and cannot reach back to prove anything about September 1978.

The autopsy that was never done is the real gap. It is also the reason the case can be called unresolved without being called murder.

What remains genuinely open is narrow but honest: because no autopsy was performed, the precise cause of death was never confirmed by pathology, and the natural-death finding rests on strong circumstantial and medical evidence rather than a definitive forensic record. That is a reason to hold the verdict short of certainty. It is not a reason to assert a crime.

Why the suspicion endures

The theory survives because it grows from something true and answers a question people badly want answered: how could a healthy, beloved pope be gone in a month? “He was murdered” is, in an odd way, a more bearable answer than “a 65-year-old man with a weak heart died in his sleep,” because it supplies intention where there was only chance, and a villain where there was only loss.

The Vatican handed the theory its best evidence. An institution that issues false statements about a death, then quietly corrects them, teaches the public to disbelieve its official account, and no later clarification fully undoes that first impression. The secrecy that surrounded the body, the embalming, and the household all read, to a suspicious eye, like the mechanics of concealment rather than the reflexes of an old and defensive Curia.

And the surrounding scandal was real, which is what separates this case from pure invention. The Vatican Bank truly was mired in the Banco Ambrosiano affair; men connected to it truly did die violently; a secret Masonic lodge truly had burrowed into Italian institutions. When so much of the frame is documented, the untested picture in the center, the poisoned pope, borrows a credibility the evidence for it has never earned.

It is worth holding two things at once here, out of respect for the man and for the facts. The financial corruption of that era deserves the scrutiny it has received; it was a genuine scandal with genuine victims. Albino Luciani's own death is a different matter, and the people who knew the case best, including an investigator the Vatican could not control and a postulator with every record in front of her, landed on the same undramatic conclusion.