Still Running Off at the Keyboard

AND THE POINT IS...?

Following a very brief report about John Paul II's last hours, which essentially says nothing, there is the following statement offered in this UPI story:

George Weigel, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and a papal biographer, said the Vatican's report on John Paul II should be construed as an effort to clarify the sequence of events.

"It is important to have that on the record before the mythmakers take over," he told the New York Times.

Seems to boil down to nothing more than a covert and snide denial of Yallop's book, IN GOD'S NAME. There is no similarity between the death of John Paul I and John Paul II.

John Paul II had been in failing health for years. The decline of the last few months of his life was obvious to everyone. Additionally, the reports to the press in the days leading up to his death made it clear to the world that he was dying. In contrast, John Paul I had been proclaimed to be in excellent health by his medical doctor who had just done a physical.

There is no evidence that John Paul II had planned to make any major changes during the last days of his life. In contrast the word had gotten out that John Paul I intended to make sweeping changes in the Curia on the following day as a result of what he had learned about the Vatican Bank Scandal. Those changes never took place because he died suddenly.

There were people with John Paul II when he died. John Paul I died alone.

There was an immediate embalming of John Paul I, done prior to the possibility of an autopsy, in spite of the fact that the cause of death is unknown and purely speculative on the part of everyone including his doctor. In contrast, John Paul II was not embalmed.

George Weigel's statement does nothing more than to once again bring our attention to the controversy surrounding the death of John Paul I, and cast a vague hint of doubt over the statements surrounding the death of John Paul II that can be read between the lines.