In Peter Hebblethwaite’s Paul VI: The First Modern Pope we find a different take on the proceedings. In the morning of his last day, the Pope is sleeping. He awakes and asks the time and is told it’s 11 a.m. “Paul opens his eyes and looks at his Polish alarm clock: it shows 10:45. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘my little old clock is as tired as me.’ Macchi tries to wind it up but confuses the alarm with the winder.” By this version, the alarm went off at the moment the Pope died because Monsignor Macchi had accidentally set it for that moment.
I am inclined to side with Hebblethwaite, because (a) his book is studiously footnoted and (b) Hebblethwaite doesn’t gild his renderings of papal life. For instance, we have the scene in the final chapter wherein Pope Paul VI is lying in bed watching TV. Not only is the earth’s highest-ranking Catholic, the Holy of Holies, watching a B-grade western, he is having trouble following it. Hebblethwaite quotes Father Magee, who was there at the time: “Paul VI did not understand anything about the plot, and he asked me every so often, ‘Who is the good guy? Who is the bad guy?’ He became enthusiastic only when there were scenes of horses.” Hebblethwaite tells it like it is.
Just to be certain, I decided to track down the man who either did or didn’t mess with the winder: Pasquale Macchi. I called up the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the American mouthpiece of the Catholic Church, and was put through to the organization’s then librarian, Anne LeVeque. Anne is an accommodating wellspring of Catholic-related trivia, including the stupendously odd fact that freshly dead popes are struck thrice on the forehead with a special silver hammer. LeVeque knew someone in the organization who had spoken with a group of priests who had met with Macchi shortly after Paul VI’s death, and she gave me his number. He agreed to tell me the story, but he would not reveal his name. “I’m better as your Deep Throat,” he said, forever linking in my head the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops with porn movies, a link they really and truly don’t need.
Deep Throat confirmed the basic story. “It was described to me as not instantaneous, but more of a five, four, three, two, one… and the alarm went off.” He was told that despite what others had said, the clock had not been set for the time at which Paul died. “The feeling,” he said, “was that what it suggested was the departure of Paul VI’s soul from his body.” Then he looked up Macchi’s address for me, in what he called the Pontifical Phone Book. I wanted to ask if it included a Pontifical Yellow Pages, with pontifical upholstery cleaners and pontifical escort services, but managed not to.
Macchi is a retired archbishop now. With the help of a friend’s friend from Italy, I drafted a note asking about the alarm clock incident. Archbishop Macchi wrote back promptly and courteously, addressing me as “Gentle Scholar,” despite my having addressed him as Your Eminence (suggesting mere cardinalhood) when in fact he is either a Your Excellency or a Your Grace, depending on whose etiquette book you consult. (Your Holiness, reserved for the Pope himself, trumps all, except possibly, in my hometown anyway, Your San Francisco Giants.) Macchi included a copy of his own biography of Paul VI, with a bookmark at page 363. “In the morning of that day,” he wrote, “having noticed that the clock was stopped, I wanted to wind it up and inadvertently I had moved the alarm hand setting to 9:40 p.m.” Deep Throat’s deep throats, it seems, had led him astray.
Annoyingly, I came across yet a third version of the alarm clock incident, this one by a priest with a grudge against Paul VI. This man held that the clock story had been fabricated by the Vatican as evidence for a false time of death, part of an effort to cover up some breach of papal duty that would have made the Pope seem impious.
The moral of the story is that proof is an elusive quarry, and all the more so when you are trying to prove an intangible. Even had I managed to establish that the alarm clock had indeed gone off for no obvious mechanical reason at the moment the pontiff died, it wouldn’t have proved that his departing soul had triggered it. But I couldn’t even get the clock to stand and deliver.
The deeper you investigate a topic like this, the harder it becomes to stand on unshifting ground. In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.
And also, I hold, the more interesting. Will I find the evidence I’m looking for? We’ll just see. But I promise you a diverting journey, wherever it is we end up.
1. YOU AGAIN
A Visit to the Reincarnation Nation
I DON’T RECALL my mood the morning I was born, but I imagine I felt a bit out of sorts. Nothing I looked at was familiar. People were staring at me and making odd sounds and wearing incomprehensible items. Everything seemed too loud, and nothing made the slightest amount of sense.
This is more or less how I feel right now. My life as a comfortable, middle-class American ended two nights ago at Indira Gandhi International Airport. Today I am reborn: the clueless, flailing thing who cannot navigate a meal or figure out the bathrooms.
I am in India spending a week in the field with Kirti S. Rawat, director of the International Centre for Survival (as in survival of the soul) and Reincarnation Researches. Dr. Rawat is a retired philosophy professor from the University of Rajasthan, and one of a handful of academics who think of reincarnation as something beyond the realm of metaphor and religious precept. These six or seven researchers take seriously the claims of small children who talk about people and events from a previous life. They travel to the child’s home—both in this life and, when possible, the alleged past life—interview family members and witnesses, catalogue the evidence and the discrepancies, and generally try to get a grip on the phenomenon. For their trouble, they are at best ignored by the scientific community and, at worst, pilloried.
I would have been inclined more toward the latter, had my introduction to the field not been in the form of a journal article by an American M.D. named Ian Stevenson. Stevenson has investigated some eight hundred cases over the past thirty years, during which time he served as a tenured professor at the University of Virginia and a contributor to peer-reviewed publications such as JAMA and Psychological Reports. The University of Virginia Press has published four volumes of Stevenson’s reincarnation case studies and the academic publisher Praeger recently put out Stevenson’s two-thousand-word opus Biology and Reincarnation. I was seduced both by the man’s credentials and by the magnitude of his output. If Ian Stevenson thinks the transmigration of the soul is worth investigating, I thought, then perhaps there’s something afoot.
Stevenson is in his eighties and rarely does fieldwork now. When I contacted him, he referred me to a colleague in Bangalore, India, but warned me that she would not agree to anything without meeting me in person first—presumably in Bangalore, which is a hell of a long way to go for a get-acquainted chat. A series of unreturned e-mails seemed to confirm this fact. At around the same time, I had e-mailed Kirti Rawat, whom Stevenson worked with on many of his Indian cases in the 1970s. Dr. Rawat happened to be in California, an hour’s drive from me, visiting his son and daughter-in-law. I drove down and had coffee with the family. We had a lovely time, and Dr. Rawat and I agreed to get together in India for a week or two while he investigated whatever case next presented itself.