That sound you hear is the bottom of the Fiction Writers Think Tank being scraped for the last residue of an original idea. An author who came up short when he did the scraping was Portuguese author Luis Miguel Rocha, who had to rely instead on the old, discredited canard that Pope John Paul I was murdered before he could shovel out the stables of the Vatican Bank.
"Portuguese author and scriptwriter Luis Miguel Rocha said he based The Last Pope on documents he obtained through an undisclosed Vatican source, which he will make public when the novel is published in April.
"The novel puts the theory that John Paul I had become a threat because he was aware of money-laundering involving the Vatican Bank and also because of his plans to liberalise aspects of centuries-old church doctrine.
"’He wanted to be the last wealthy pope. John Paul I wanted to redistribute the riches of the church, open the church to women and authorise the use of contraceptives,’ said Rocha, 29, in a weekend interview.
"The novel depicts the assassination of John Paul I as the result of a conspiracy involving top financial officials, several European governments and a Mafia group that counted top officials of the Roman Curia, including the pontiff’s personal secretary, among its members."
GET THE REAL STORY ON JPI’S DEATH.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen once told the story of being approached by a young priest who demanded to know why the Church was so rich. Archbishop Sheen gave him the standard answer to this common question but the priest wasn’t satisfied. He kept pounding on the question until finally Sheen took him aside and asked him bluntly, "Father, how much have you stolen from the collection plate?" Sheen’s guess was on-target: The young priest was skimming from the parish funds and rationalizing his behavior by convincing himself that the Church was too rich anyway.
I’m no Archbishop Sheen, but my guess is that we can trace Luis Miguel Rocha’s dissatisfaction with the Church not to the alleged "murder" of Pope John Paul I, who Rocha claims would have liquidated the Church’s material assets, but instead to Rocha’s desire for women priests and contraceptives.