Q: Does the P2 Lodge truly exist? And if so, what facts do we know about it, and what did you create as a novelist for the sake of this story?
A: P2 existed and still exists. All details in the novel before and through 1978 are true, including the names of the members and leaders of the lodge. Everything that happens with Sarah Monteiro and Rafael, as well as the idea of JC’s being part of P2 in the current day, is fictional.
Q: Several nonfiction books have addressed the matter of whether Pope John Paul I was murdered. Do you believe they raise valid questions? Did you draw on conspiracy theories just to create a good thriller, or do you indeed believe there was a plot to murder the pope in 1978?
A: John Paul I was killed on September 29, 1978, at 1:00 a.m. Not at 11:00 or 11:30 p.m. on September 28, as officially stated. I’m sure of it.
There’s a very good piece (published and sold together with this novel in Spain) by a Spanish journalist, a correspondent in Rome, that recounts everything that happened that night. It was because of this journalist that the story became cloudy. He managed to speak with Sister Vincenza, the nun who said she was the one who found John Paul I’s body, but the official Vatican version was that Father John Magee, the pope’s assistant, found him. And that version lasted through the 1980s, when the Vatican confirmed that it wasn’t Magee who had discovered the body. The Vatican ordered everyone involved to a vow of silence. Why would they do that if there was nothing to hide? Because it was all a setup. John Paul I was in fact killed. How do I know? The person who killed him told me, and proved it to me.
The character JC in the book is based on a real figure, John Paul I’s assassin, whom I knew as an Italian ministerial assistant. In truth, apparently, he wasn’t. He told me specifically that I should write a novel about the affair, because we live in a fictional reality and we don’t know anything, even the things we think we know. The Last Pope is that book.
Q: You were a child when Pope John Paul I died, so it’s presumably not an experience you remember from direct media reports at the time. Was there anything in particular about John Paul I’s life and death that inspired the novel?
A: I knew about John Paul II and a little Vatican history-not much, I must confess-but I didn’t know anything about John Paul I until April 2005. It was then that an acquaintance of mine, an Italian, told me how everything had happened. Who Albino Luciani was, what he did that would lead someone to kill him, why, when, how. Later I saw documents proving what this acquaintance had told me (among these documents were the papers that John Paul I had had with him on the night of his death, which disappeared that same night). Sister Vincenza saw them, as did John Paul’s close collaborator Don Diego Lorenzi, but they were never found. Now, knowing a little more about Albino Luciani and other facts of Vatican history, I’m glad I got in touch with that world.
Q: An especially haunting character in the novel is the mystic Sister Lucia de Jesus, one of the three children said to have encountered the Virgin Mary at Fátima. She was Portuguese, as you are, so was it a risk for you to write about someone who is so revered in your culture? Do you think that the secrets of Fátima are somehow linked to current events and disasters, as the novel suggests?
A: There was more a sense of curiosity here. A certain ambivalence surrounds the events of Fátima. We believe in them, but we also know that Sister Lucia was totally controlled by the Church. So some things are true and others aren’t. Take, for example, the secrets. Some people believe that the secrets were all invented by the Church to control the population. And the revelation of the third secret by John Paul II in 2000 left many disappointed. Most people don’t know that the secrets were really written in 1941. I know for a fact that Sister Lucia was a psychic and saw the Virgin many more times than people think. It wasn’t just from May 13 until October 1917. The Virgin appeared regularly throughout Sister Lucia’s life. What secrets did she tell her? Only Sister Lucia and the Church, and a few others, know. Perhaps I’ll write a book about this.
Q: The CIA and the Italian Mafia both play roles in the intrigue around your protagonists, Rafael and Sarah. Are these entities as central to Vatican politics today as this novel suggests they were in 1978?
A: No. Now it’s completely different. You need a unique confluence of factors for a nonreligious entity to control the Holy See. That happened from 1971 until 1981, more or less. And only in the financial department, not the religious. Today it wouldn’t be possible. However, nowadays in the Vatican there are religious organizations with more power than the P2 had.
Q: What has been the reaction to this novel since its publication? Do people accept your narrative as fact-as some have done with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code-or do they recognize it mainly as a work of fiction?
A: I receive e-mail from all over the world. I have yet to get a bad review from a reader. Readers love the story, the characters; they ask if the book will be made into a movie, and they think it would make a great one. They want to know more about the case, especially Italian readers. For the most part readers accept everything as fact, even the adventure of Sarah and Rafael. That’s a little odd.
I had a curious request last year for two copies of the book in Portuguese, from a journalist who works in the Vatican. It seems the copies were for someone important who sees the pope every day. That person confided to the journalist, off the record, that everything in the book is true. It’s good to know. Though I do have my suspicions, I can’t say who this person was-perhaps a cardinal or a bishop. There aren’t a lot of Portuguese people in the Vatican. But it’s overwhelming to know that they respect the work, and that’s the main reason the Church hasn’t reacted or reacts with silence.