Illustrissimi: Letters from Pope John Paul I

The son of a socialist glassworker and a scullery maid, Albino Luciani was born on October 17, 1912, in the town of Forno di Canale in the Dolomite Alps of northeastern Italy. He attended seminary in the town of Feltre and graduated in philosophy and theology at the seminary of Belluno, the hometown of nineteenth-century Pope Gregory XVI. He then graduated in dogmatics at the Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained a priest in 1935. He returned to his home region to work as a parish assistant, a religion teacher in a mining technicians' school, and a teacher of a dogmatic and moral theology at the Gregorian Seminary in Belluno, a city in the Dolomite foothills. In 1948, he was named by the Bishop of Belluno to oversee catechetics - the teaching of faith - in the provincial diocese. He later recounted his thoughts and experiences in a book, Catechism in Crumbs. In 1958 Pope John XXIII appointed Luciani Bishop of Vittorio Veneto, a local diocese at the foot of the Alps subject to Venice. Pope Paul VI promoted him Patriarch of Venice in 1969 and named him a cardinal in 1973. He was elected the 263rd Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church on August 26, 1978, in one of the shortest conclaves in Church history. The sixty-five-year-old Luciani adopted the name John Paul I. Thirty-three days later, he died unexpectedly in his sleep, He once said of himself: "I am only a poor man, accustomed to small things and silence."