the late Pope

The late Pope’s papacy joined visible simplicity to an increasingly private struggle over the Church’s governance. He refused the grand residence and regalia associated with office, pressed the Roman Curia for financial transparency, and became isolated as resistance and scandal mounted. After his death, an investigation by Jacopo Baldassare Lomeli uncovered documents suggesting that the Pope had been examining concealed financial irregularities; the same discovery also sharpened questions about his secrecy and state of mind in his final weeks.

Identity and Rule

Before his election, the late Pope had stayed at Casa Santa Marta as a cardinal. Once elected, he continued living there instead of moving into the apartment prepared for him in the Apostolic Palace, which included a library and private chapel. His rooms remained spare: about fifty square metres, with pale lemon-coloured walls and curtains, a parquet floor, standard furniture, and a prie-dieu like those in the rest of the residence. He chose to keep that setting even though it contrasted sharply with the larger official apartments occupied by senior Church officials.

The refusal was not merely private austerity. On his first day, when Curia leaders questioned whether such a residence suited the dignity of the papacy, he answered by recalling Christ’s instruction to the disciples to travel without provisions or a second tunic. The decision became a rebuke by example: officials who returned to their grand apartments could feel the contrast, and, as the narrative observes, human resentment followed. His way of living therefore made an institutional argument before he had won institutional consent.

Reform and Resistance

The late Pope’s pontificate became a sustained conflict over how the Curia managed money and authority. According to Cardinal Bellini’s later account, the Pope demanded full financial transparency at an introductory meeting with the prefects of the congregations: proper books, disclosure of accounts, outside tenders for even small building works, and receipts. Bellini recalled that the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See had not even been accustomed to issuing receipts. The Pope then brought in accountants and management consultants to examine the files and gave them offices on the first floor of Casa Santa Marta.

That audit effort met resistance and did not remain a matter of administrative procedure. Bellini said leaks began, followed by reports of people close to the Pope, including Tutino, skimming money intended for the poor to renovate apartments or travel first class. Meanwhile Goffredo Tedesco and his allies attacked the Pope’s comments on gay people, divorced couples, and the promotion of women, at times treating common-sense remarks as heretical. The sequence left the Pope caught between financial scrutiny, internal opposition, and public embarrassment: the more he demanded accountability, the more damaging material surfaced around the institution he led.

Bellini described the result as a cruel paradox. The Pope was loved by the outside world while becoming more isolated inside the Holy See. By the end, Bellini was unsure whether the Pope trusted even him, and Lomeli acknowledged that he too might have fallen outside that trust. The reformer’s insistence on scrutiny thus carried a personal cost: the work meant to make the institution answerable also exposed its resistance and narrowed the circle in which the Pope seemed willing to confide.

Death and the Official Account

The Pope’s death was followed by an urgent effort to establish an orderly account of his final hours. Joseph Tremblay warned Lomeli that mistakes made amid the initial shock could give rise to malicious rumours, invoking the unresolved public suspicion surrounding the death of Pope John Paul I. He handed Lomeli a prepared timeline, printed under the heading “Timeline,” that specified the evening’s events: the Pope ate with Janusz Woźniak at 7:30 p.m., read and meditated on a passage from The Imitation of Christ at 8:30, and went to bed at 9:30. Woźniak checked on him at 11:30 and found no vital signs; Dr Giulio Baldinotti began emergency treatment at 11:34, and the Pope was pronounced dead at 12:12 a.m.

The precision of the timeline stood beside an account of confusion over who had learned what and when. Woźniak later told Lomeli that, at their last official meeting on the day he died, at four o’clock, the Pope had dismissed Tremblay from all his Church offices. Woźniak said he found the Pope dead, summoned the doctor, and that the doctor summoned Tremblay, who then took control of the situation as the rules required. In the shock of the night, Woźniak did not disclose the meeting’s substance; he said that, about an hour later, Tremblay asked whether the Pope had had anything particular on his mind at supper, and that he answered only that the Pope seemed agitated. Woźniak also recalled seeing Tremblay whispering with Hector Morales, the Pope’s private secretary, and suspected that Tremblay persuaded him to remain silent. These were Woźniak’s reported recollections, not an independently confirmed explanation of the silence.

Secrecy in the Final Weeks

The Pope’s last weeks were difficult for those around him to interpret. Outside his sealed apartment, Bellini wondered what had been in the Pope’s mind during that period. He said he had not seen him for the final month and described him as strange, unreachable, and secretive. Bellini believed the Pope sensed that death was approaching and had become absorbed in unusual ideas, but his impression remained a personal interpretation rather than a settled account of the Pope’s condition.

Lomeli later told Raymond O’Malley, in confidence, that the late Pope might not have been entirely himself during the last weeks of his life. On Bellini’s account, Lomeli said, the Pope had become somewhat paranoid or, at least, highly secretive. The secret appointment of Vincent Benítez as a cardinal particularly troubled him: he respected Benítez as a man of God but questioned why the appointment had been made in secret and with such haste. The information available to Lomeli also showed why Benítez might have commanded the Pope’s confidence. The Pope had met him during an African tour in 2017, was impressed by his work, and made him a monsignor; when the Baghdad archdiocese became vacant, he rejected the three nominations proposed by the Congregation for Bishops and insisted on appointing Benítez. After Benítez sustained minor injuries in a car-bomb attack in January and offered to resign on medical grounds, he withdrew the offer following a private meeting with the Pope.

The record therefore holds two explanations in tension: the Pope’s secrecy may have been a response to what he was investigating and the opposition he faced, yet the people around him also found his late conduct unsettling. The text does not resolve whether the hidden appointment and the concealed papers reflected strategic caution, a change in his state of mind, or both. That uncertainty shapes how Lomeli receives the Pope’s legacy: as evidence to be investigated, not as a final, self-explanatory testament.

The Hidden Papers and Legacy

After the Pope’s death, Tremblay’s ribbons and seals closed the papal apartment, but Lomeli eventually entered it with a key. The apartment looked as it had on the night of the death: drawn lemon-coloured curtains, a blue sofa and armchairs, a coffee table, a prie-dieu, and the Pope’s battered black leather briefcase beside the desk. The briefcase contained an electric razor, peppermints, a breviary, and a paperback copy of The Imitation of Christ. According to the Vatican press office, that was the last book the Pope had read before his heart attack; a yellowing bus ticket from his home city, issued more than twenty years earlier, marked the passage “Of the dangers of intimacy.” The modest, personal objects sat amid the official room, while the marked text echoed the problem of trust that had grown around the Pope’s last days.

The most consequential evidence was concealed not in the briefcase but in the bed he had brought to Casa Santa Marta. The centuries-old bed, with large square posts and carved panels, was an ungainly exception to the fine furniture available to a pope. Lomeli prayed beside it, gripping its wooden frame, and afterward believed that the dead Pope had told him what to do. He could not say how long he had knelt, and he acknowledged that the experience might have been his imagination. Still, he rose from the prayer with a course of action in mind and began searching the bed.

After checking beneath the frame and mattress, Lomeli examined the bedposts. A carved disc on the right post’s domed oak top was loose; when he pulled the post for support, its top came away in his hand. Inside the hollow was a small wooden knob that released a fitted case about the size of a shoebox. It held documents: columns of figures, bank statements, money transfers, apartment addresses, and annotations in the Pope’s small, angular handwriting. Their concealment turned the bed from a sign of private simplicity into a hiding place for an investigation that could implicate the very administration he had challenged.

One document compared official apartments held by serving and retired Curia members. The names of cardinal-electors were underlined, including Aldo Bellini at 410 square metres, Joshua Adeyemi at 480, Tremblay at 510, and Lomeli himself at 445. At the foot, the Pope had entered his own accommodation as Casa Santa Marta, fifty square metres, making the disparity stark on the page as well as in the rooms. An attached report stated that the property administered by the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See amounted to 347,532 square metres, with a potential value exceeding €2.7 billion but a stated book value of €389.6 million. It estimated a paid occupancy rate of only 56 percent and concluded that much of the income might not be properly declared.

These papers gave concrete form to the reform campaign Bellini had described: the late Pope had not simply called for transparent books but had collected figures and followed the gap between property, stated value, and reported income. At the same time, the material was found among private documents he had hidden rather than submitted as an open institutional report. His legacy is therefore neither a completed reform nor a fully explained secret. He left Lomeli a record that made financial accountability harder to dismiss, while the unanswered questions about his final weeks ensured that the record itself would have to be weighed with care.