On September 28, 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead in his bed in the papal apartment, seated with papers and reading glasses, by a nun who brought him his coffee. He was 65. He was pope 33 days. The Vatican announced that the cause was a heart attack, and the death certificate said acute myocardial infarction. There was no autopsy.
He had been elected on August 26, 1978, on the fourth ballot of a conclave of 111 cardinals, after the death of Paul VI on August 6. Albino Luciani was the Patriarch of Venice, a quiet man from the Veneto, the son of a bricklayer and a socialist sympathiser, who had not been among the candidates anyone expected and who took the double name of his two predecessors in a gesture he was not asked to make.
What he changed in a month was the tone. He refused the sedia gestatoria and the triple tiara, and asked to be installed rather than crowned. He spoke in the first person singular instead of the royal we. He told the cardinals that he had been elected with no expectation of it and that he would need help, and he gave an audience in which he said that God is a father, and more than that a mother.
The Vatican's finances were the subject he had been handed. The Holy See had lost large sums in 1973 and 1974 through the Banca Privata Italiana of Michele Sindona, and the Vatican bank, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, held shares in companies that had been used for it. Luciani had been briefed on it in the weeks before he died, and on September 28 he was said to have been holding a list of curial appointments.
The absence of an autopsy is what produced the theories. There was no medical examiner, the body was embalmed within hours for a funeral on October 4, and the Vatican's account of who discovered the body and when changed several times. David Yallop's book In God's Name, published in 1984, argued that the pope had been poisoned, and it sold widely and was never supported by evidence.
The Vatican has said repeatedly that the death was natural. Luciani had had a pulmonary embolism in 1975, had refused a medical examination before the conclave, and had complained of chest pain on the evening of September 27. The Holy See permitted a re-examination of the case in 2019 as part of a canonisation process.
The conclave that followed elected Karol Wojtyla of Krakow on October 16, 1978, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, who took the name John Paul II and reigned for 26 years. Luciani was beatified in 2022.