Luciani - Luciano. Albino - and I am a paleface indeed! Not much more was required here for me to honor the memory of the Pope Who Barely Was...

AUGUST 26TH, 1978, Cardinal Albino Luciani was elected the 263rd pope and chose the name John Paul I. His papacy was to last only 33 days.
Thirty-three... the Age of Christ.

On a personal note, of course, as referenced on The Luminous Blog, as it should be, September 28th 2006 marked six months to the day that my own "saintly papa" passed on - a saintly man I will always regard as far saintlier than any pope, than any man of the cloth, than anyone... With obvious exceptions (Jesus, several saints and martyrs, John The Baptist and the like...) - that may or may not include the saintly man in the spotlight today...

Born Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I was the first pope to choose a double name; he did so to honor his two immediate predecessors, Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI. Refusing to have the millennium-old traditional Papal Coronation, he instead opted for a simplified ceremony. His 33-day papacy was one of the shortest reigns in papal history, resulting in the "Year of Three Popes."

His death, on this day, was most suspect and several conspiracy theories arose about it - most notably these: the Pope's body was embalmed within one day of his death. Wild rumours spread. One rumour claimed that a visiting prelate had recently died from drinking "poisoned coffee" prepared for the pope. A visiting prelate actually had died some days earlier, but there was no evidence of poison. Another unsubstantiated rumour described the Pope's plans to dismiss senior Vatican officials over allegations of corruption. The suddenness of his embalming raised suspicions that it had been done to prevent a post-mortem examination. However the Vatican insisted that a papal post-mortem was prohibited under Vatican law. However a source (Augostino Chigi in his diary) reports a post-mortem was carried out on the remains of Pope Pius VIII in 1830.

David Yallop's controversial book In God's Name proposed the theory that the pope was in "potential danger" because of alleged corruption in the Istituto per le Opere Religiose (IOR, Institute of Religious Works, the Vatican's most powerful financial institution, commonly known as the Vatican Bank), which owned many shares in Banco Ambrosiano. This corruption supposedly involved the bank's head, Paul Marcinkus, along with Roberto Calvi of the Banco Ambrosiano (who would be later murdered) as well as P2, an Italian freemasonry lodge, and the mafia. This would be known as one of the most important scandal in Italy in the 1980s. Yallop also offers as suspects Archbishop John Patrick Cody of Chicago, whom he believes Luciani was about to force into retirement, and Cardinal Villot, because of his theological differences with the new pope.

Yallop's book exposed many of the "inaccurate" statements issued by the Vatican in the days after John Paul's death and received international attention, including demands from some senior churchmen for an inquiry into the death itself. Its theories, however, have not been widely accepted and were severely undermined in the eyes of some by John Cornwell's subsequent book (see below), which proposes a 'benign' conspiracy to account for the discrepancies in the official version of the Pope's death. After decades of ongoing controversy, it has recently been reported that the investigation about the death of John Paul I would be reopened.

Following on from Yallop's book, Robert Hutchison's Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei appeared in 1997. Hutchison believes that several individuals within the church who were opposed to Opus Dei who ostensibly died from heart attacks may in fact have been poisoned, and, drawing on Yallop's thesis, he suggests that this fate may also have befallen John Paul I.

More on this: here or go directly to Sandra Miesel's article: here
Who needs Dan Brown, eh?