John Paul I

John Paul I: Thirty-Three Days and a Smile

He refused the coronation. When Albino Luciani was elected pope on 26 August 1978, he declined the tiara, declined the *sedia gestatoria* on which popes had been carried above the crowd for centuries, and had himself simply inaugurated instead. He took a double name — John Paul, the first pope ever to use one — to signal that he intended to carry on the work of both John XXIII and Paul VI. Thirty-three days later he was dead, and almost everything the world thinks it knows about him is either a conspiracy theory or a photograph of him laughing.

The Bricklayer's Son

He was born on 17 October 1912 in Canale d'Agordo, in the mountains of the Veneto, to Giovanni Luciani, a bricklayer and migrant worker, and Bortola Tancon. The family was poor. At ten, after hearing a Capuchin friar preach the Lenten sermons, Albino decided to become a priest. His father — a working man with socialist sympathies — gave him a blessing that reads, in retrospect, like a programme: "I hope that when you become a priest you will be on the side of the workers."

He was educated at the seminaries of Feltre and Belluno and ordained in 1935, aged twenty-two. He took a doctorate at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome with a 1947 dissertation on the theological anthropology of Antonio Rosmini. He then taught dogmatic theology, moral theology and canon law at Belluno while serving as vice-rector, and spent a decade as a seminary rector. He read widely and in several languages — English, French, German and Russian — with a particular fondness for Anglo-American writers, Chesterton and Dickens among them.

Vittorio Veneto and Venice

John XXIII made him Bishop of Vittorio Veneto in 1958. He chose *Humilitas* — humility — as his episcopal motto and kept it. He attended every session of the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965, and remained, in the phrase used of him afterwards, a son of the Council.

Paul VI named him Patriarch of Venice in 1969 and made him a cardinal in 1973. In Venice he sold treasures belonging to the patriarchate — including a gold cross given to him by John XXIII — and used the proceeds to help disabled children. On doctrine he was not a liberal: he had initially thought the Church's teaching on contraception should be reconsidered, but he defended *Humanae Vitae* when it came, and on women's ordination he held that "Christ bestowed the pastoral ministry on men alone, on his apostles."

What made him unusual was not his positions but his register. He published *Illustrissimi* — "To the Illustrious Ones" — a collection of open letters addressed to historical and fictional figures ranging from Jesus to Pinocchio. Years earlier he had written *Catechesis in Crumbs* (1949), on teaching the essentials of the faith in the simplest possible terms. The consistent project across both was the same: explaining complicated Church concepts so that anybody could follow them.

The Shortest Modern Papacy

As pope he gave four general audiences, on poverty, faith, hope and charity, and spoke largely off the cuff, sometimes calling children up to talk to him about what they believed. He emphasised mercy, spiritual poverty, ecumenism and collegiality. He is remembered for putting it that God is our father, and even more, our mother — a formulation Pope Francis has quoted repeatedly since.

On the evening of 27 September 1978 he felt severe chest pain while praying Vespers and declined medical assistance. He was found dead the next morning, aged sixty-five, of a heart attack. The Vatican's initial accounts of who found the body and in what circumstances were inconsistent, and the inconsistencies fed decades of conspiracy theory. The Italian journalist Stefania Falasca's documentary research, published in 2017 as part of his canonisation cause, went through the evidence in detail and found nothing to support them.

Why Albino Is Called a Genius

The word does not fit him in its usual sense, and he would have disliked it. He produced no major theological work; his doctorate was a careful study of another man's thought; his papacy was too short to leave a single encyclical. Any claim on his behalf has to rest on something else, and it does: an extremely rare gift for compression.

The gift is visible in *Illustrissimi*, where doctrine is delivered through letters to Pinocchio and Dickens characters, and in *Catechesis in Crumbs*, whose title is the whole thesis. Making difficult things simple without making them false is harder than making them complicated, and most theologians cannot do it. Contemporaries regarded him as an unusually well-read man — multilingual, steeped in literature as well as scholastic theology — who chose to spend that learning on ordinary parishioners rather than on academic reputation. His four general audiences, delivered largely without a text, are still cited as models of catechesis. Benedict XVI recalled his warmth and his ability to teach; Francis quotes him more than he quotes most of his predecessors.

The counter-case is straightforward and worth stating. Thirty-three days is not a body of work. He governed nothing, reformed nothing, and had no time to be tested by the office. His reputation rests substantially on the shock and affection generated by his death, and on the "smiling pope" image, which is a personality, not an achievement. On the substantive questions of his era — contraception, the ordination of women — he was conventional. What is genuinely his is a manner: the decision to refuse the tiara and the carrying-chair, and the choice to explain rather than pronounce. Those turned out to be more influential than they looked, and the popes who followed have not gone back.

Legacy

He was the last in the long line of Italian-born popes that had run unbroken since Clement VII in 1523. His successor took the name John Paul II in his honour and reigned for twenty-six years. The cause for Luciani's canonisation advanced on the recognition of a miracle attributed to his intercession — the unexplained recovery of an eleven-year-old with inflammatory encephalopathy in Buenos Aires — and Pope Francis beatified him in St Peter's Square on 4 September 2022, forty-four years after his death. What survives of him is not a doctrine but a template: a pope who did not want to be carried.

Achievements

• Educated at Pontifical Gregorian University
• Worked as Latin Catholic priest, writer and transitional deacon