Did his struggle for equal rights for women, the remarried, homosexuals and the poor cost him his life?
Here is the record of the only pope to have been born into poverty, of his struggles as an impoverished child, as a rebellious teenager, and as a defiant seminarian. It is the record of a rampaging locomotive running about the Vatican, courts and Parliament of Italy demanding equal rights for all. It is the record of his philosophies, and of his hopes, and of his dreams, for mankind.
Scores of press accounts and photos trace his life from an article he wrote as a teenager that reached all of Europe,
“I call upon the nations of the world to place a warning on the Old Testament, ‘This is a work of fiction. Keep away from children,’ as people are using it to guide their lives and this is costing others their lives,”
through his papal acceptance speech,
“ . . . The ban on the pill is resulting in starvation in third world countries and abortions in first world countries. . . It is wrong to stand in the way of loving relationships between any of Christ’s children, whether it be race, creed, marriage or homosexuality . . . It is wrong to stand in the way of women’s right to minister Christ’s will . . . Mother Church will cease to be the cause of the world’s problems, and instead begin to be the answer to them . . . Together we will muster the courage to set aside the convictions of our Christian forefathers and we will lift restraints that have been unfairly placed upon the everyday lives of many innocent people by doctrine . . . for God-given human life is infinitely more precious than is man-made doctrine”
On the afternoon of March 13, 1978, fourteen men sat around a table in a sidewalk café in a mountain village in northern Italy. In casual clothes, they went unnoticed, though one was the reigning Pontiff, another was his Secretary of State, a third was the Patriarch of Venice, a fourth was the Metropolitan of Leningrad and a fifth was the Archbishop of Gniezno. Also there were the ranking cardinals of world pockets of poverty including China, India, Eastern Asia and the South Pacific. The African Nuncio, Pericle Felici, chatted at one end of the table with the Latin American renegade, Oscar Romero. There were others, Cardinal Benelli and Aldo Moro who picked up the check and my friend Jack Champney.
Together they comprised the leadership of the Marxist movement in the Western world. It was the composition of these men that was the great enemy of Opus Dei, the clandestine cult which sought to control the papacy and the moral pulse of nations. More so, it was the great enemy of the capitalistic world led by the United States and Great Britain. They left at four o’clock and Aldo reserved the table “for this time next year.”
On March 13, 1979, Benelli awoke. He had decided not to travel to Vittorio Veneto that day. After all, all the others were dead. He, too, unaware of his impending doom, was, too, as good as dead.
Note: all of the above died of outright murder or mysterious circumstances. Their average age was 56. Three other cardinals with an average age of 81 died in 1978-79. To the best of what the author has been able to determine, they died of natural causes.
Preface and sample chapters click: www.JohnPaul1.org includes film clip of John Paul attacking the basic tenets upon which the United States was founded.
