The Last Confession – Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick within the realms of believability. Such is the case of Pope John Paul I, the kind-faced man named Albino Luciani who was pope of the Roman Catholic Church for a mere 33 days. The circumstances of the death of one of the shortest reigning popes is cloaked behind the mute and imposing walls of St Peter’s Basilica. But whispers of foul play murmur down to this day. Why are there inconsistencies about who and when his death was discovered and what documents were in his hands when he died? Far from being a heart attack, which was the Vatican line, was John Paul I, Christ’s representative on earth, perhaps murdered for his progressive views and quiet determination to follow the liberal line of Vatican II? Or was he gotten out of the way after discovering illegal dealings of the Vatican Bank which eventually lost the Vatican a quarter of a billion and may have involved the mafia and a clandestine Masonic lodge called Propaganda Due? The shrouded questions have all the makings of a great conspiracy.

The Last Confession is a play by Roger Crane that dramatizes this tumultuous period of church history. The play, part mystery, part political commentary and part spiritual disputation, centres around the ascension and demise of ‘Il Papa del Sorriso’ – the smiling pope, and subsequent political vacuum and mayhem. It also scrutinizes on the inner turmoils, doubts and ideological shift of the protagonist, Cardinal Benelli, played by David Suchet, the man whose artifice and suasion put Luciani, a dear friend, reluctantly on the throne and whose subsequent death forced him, a politically shrewd, ironic and purposeful man of the world, to question the fundamental roots of his belief.

The international cast assembled is an impressive one – David Suchet, most famous for playing the Belgian detective Poirot for over 20 years, was able to unrein his sonorous baritone. I always have found Suchet’s Poirot too mincing and earnest and his slightly falsetto voice a bit too concocted. I prefer Albert Finney’s portrayal of Poirot in the Orient Express. However, nearing 70, Suchet’s stage presence was energetic and assured. His portrayal of Benelli required him to express varyingly a man who is self-confident, wily and astute, pious and proper, friendly and warm, sarcastic and barbed, and, perhaps most difficult, uncertain and vulnerable. Benelli’s wrestling with the Curia – the Vatican government, which at the time was led by right-wing reactionaries, and his intimate immersion with the quotidian, iniquitous and Machiavellian church politics behind the edifice of sanctity and purity, has diluted his faith, to a point where he found himself, a candidate to the papacy, an agnostic. This reminds one of the case of Mother Teresa, whose letters expressing grave doubts about god manifested years after her death. It makes one think whether her fanatical devotion and ultra-conservative views were all overcompensation for the void in herself when she prays for god. And how many bishops, curates, vicars and cardinals are also on that same boat of self-deception.

Being fully aware of his own lust for power and his alarmingly shrinking faith, Benelli used his influences to push for his friend, the innocent, pious, and righteous Luciani, to become pope, his idea being that he, with his administrative prowess and sullied, duplicitous political mind, would be the secretary of state, second most powerful figure in the Holy See, protecting the ingenuous Luciani from the wolves who loathed their liberal bend. However, as the best laid plans of mice and men, Benelli’s gambit went slightly awry, betrayed by his own weakness like a Euripidean tragedy. While Luciani was successfully voted pope – many electors wished for a more progressive and intimate pope, one who could draw affection from the people, Benelli’s pride stopped him from putting himself forward as a new secretary of state – he wanted the satisfaction of having Luciani beg him to be the pope’s right hand. Luciani, on the other hand, who was blissfully unaware of the many undercurrents and cold war going on within differing sects of the Curia, retained the old secretary for purposes of stability and continuity, little knowing by this he was incubating in his bosoms those whose political and religious ideologies were very much against his own. Benelli subsequently returned to his seat in Florence, leaving his friend, as he knew full well, defenceless, thinking soon enough he would get that supplicating phone call begging for help. The death of Luciani barely a month later would therefore overflow Benelli with guilt and self-loathing for his infantile pride.

Luciani was played admirably by Richard O’Callaghan, who gave him just the right mixture of innocence, humour, affability, moral fortitude and inner strength and seriousness to justify Benelli’s high esteem. As the Curia tried to bury the new pope in mountains of paperwork to distract him from altering church policies, the frustration and gentle self-mocking of the humble pope was very endearing. The foreboding of something terrible was weaved by some half veiled threats and not-too-subtle hints. Laying the ground for a more enthralling second act, the first act dragged on slightly too long.

Without giving too much away, the second half of the play focuses on Benelli’s battles. He battles first with the authorities to investigate the suspicious circumstances surrounding the pope’s death. He then battles the right-wing on the election of the next pontiff. He also battles within himself over his guilt, his negligence, his loss of faith and, perhaps perplexing to some, his innate sense of morality, justice and hopes for a better futurity. All these are told as a flashback as an ageing and ill Benelli recounts these inner struggles in what would be his final confession.

What the play portrays most effectively of all is the insidiousness which is the total sum of political power and religion. The castigations of the conscience silenced by the urge to power, the ‘necessity’ of keeping up appearances and traditions and the reckless desperation to above all, at any cost, keep any hint of disunity, discomposure and disrepute away from the sacrosanct reputation of the church, even if this has to be achieved by lying, treachery, obfuscation and backstabbing. This double-faced method highlighted by the recent accumulation and explication of countless child abuse cases in the church which the Vatican, led from the seat of Peter, has covered up and is still not facing up to with the seriousness and contrition in any adult sense. The most aggravating and injurious fact is the incessant, unjust and wicked way that church administrators, instead of turning the perpetrators of these most horrendous crimes to the judiciary, cover up the dirty laundry, sometimes with money and threats of excommunication in exchange for silence, and furthermore abet the rapists and molesters by moving them from parish to parish where they are free to victimise more innocent children. Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who actively covered up child sex-abuses, escaped to the Vatican in 2002, escaping by hours the police with subpoenas seeking his testimony. Shielded by the Vatican’s laws as a sovereign state (which absurdly is a continuation of the Lateran Treaty, the Vatican’s pact with Mussolini), Law participated in the 2005 papal election.

The necessary and inevitable mixture of faith and realpolitik is reflected well in the play, which feed on the drama and mystery of the sensational episode to highlight the ugliness of the mixture of great power and the self-serving, heavenly license to use it that corrupt the basic human integrity. Hence Lucretius, who stated in his De Rerum Natura, 'Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (To such heights of evil are men driven by religion).