{"id":116,"date":"2008-10-15T11:37:14","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T11:37:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/remembering-the-other-john-pau.html"},"modified":"2008-10-15T11:37:14","modified_gmt":"2008-10-15T11:37:14","slug":"remembering-the-other-john-pau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/remembering-the-other-john-pau.html","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the “other” John Paul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"John<\/span>John Paul I, born Albino Luciani, has unfortunately become something of a forgotten figure. He himself, in typically self-effacing fashion, too the combined name of his two predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI, and his successor–elected after John Paul I’s 34-day reign–Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, took Luciani’s name but made it his own.
\nThe 30th anniversary of Luciani’s own passing slipped by–it was Sept. 28–and tomorrow (Oct. 16) is the 30th anniversary of Wojtyla’s election, which will likely push thoughts of John Paul I further into the background. In the famous “Year of Three Popes” (Paul VI, John Paul I, and then John Paul II), Luciani is often remembered for now-debunked rumors that he was killed. (John Cornwell’s “Thief in the Night” remains the best treatment of that.)
\nBut there are many other wonderful and moving stories of the “Smiling Pope” Luciani. AP teletype.bmp<\/a><\/span>
\nBefore his passing slips by again, I wanted to highlight this entry from CNS’ chief Vatican correspondent, John Thavis<\/a>, who was just starting his career in Rome in 1978. Thavis recalls how he got word of Luciani’s death, and how rumors of foul play began immediately:<\/p>\n

VATICAN CITY — Thirty years ago today I walked into the office of the Rome Daily American at 6:45 in the morning and began ripping the AP and Reuters newswires for a 7 o’clock radio news show. When I saw the teletype machines, I froze. At the top of each were two bulletins announcing the death of Pope John Paul I after only 34 days in office.
\nA few minutes later I found myself announcing on Radio Daily American that the “smiling pope” had died in his sleep the night before, at the age of 65. The news show was not much more than a headline service, but I promised details to come, and then ducked out of the building for a quick espresso.
\nWhen I walked into the corner bar, the first words I heard were: “L’hanno ammazzato.” “They killed him.” I can’t remember whether the phrase was pronounced by Sergio, the barista, or one of his customers, but it seemed to be the general consensus of the Roman street that day. The pope was known as a good and decent man, and the popular imagination was already conjuring up a plot to explain his untimely demise.
\nAnd in Rome, the popular imagination tends toward poison. Hadn’t a Russian Orthodox Church leader, Metropolitan Nikodim, dropped dead a couple weeks earlier during a meeting with the pontiff after drinking a cup of coffee? Perhaps the coffee had been meant for the pope. Or so went the thinking in Sergio’s bar.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is a beautiful slice-of-history, not least for the image of the teletype copy that John included–he found the bulletins by chance in a book of poetry–which brought back memories of my own early days amid clattering news wire printers, a few years after John. It wans’t that long ago. Yet it all seems so distant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Paul I, born Albino Luciani, has unfortunately become something of a forgotten figure. He himself, in typically self-effacing fashion, too the combined name of his two predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI, and his successor–elected after John Paul I’s 34-day reign–Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, took Luciani’s name but made it his own. The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,3,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nRemembering the "other" John Paul - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/10\/remembering-the-other-john-pau.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Remembering the "other" John Paul - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Paul I, born Albino Luciani, has unfortunately become something of a forgotten figure. He himself, in typically self-effacing fashion, too the combined name of his two predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI, and his successor–elected after John Paul I’s 34-day reign–Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, took Luciani’s name but made it his own. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}