Bevilacqua's Death Found to Have Been through Natural Causes

By Regina Medina
Philadelphia Daily News
March 9, 2012

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/20120309_Bevilacqua_s_death_found_to_have_been_through_natural_causes.html


IN THE END, Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua's death can't invoke nefarious comparisons to that not-quite-a-classic movie "The Godfather Part III."

Nor the real-life death of Pope John Paul I, who died 33 days into his papacy in 1978.

In the 1990 flick, a newly elected pope is the victim of foul play - something Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman has wanted to rule out in the Bevilacqua case since the 88-year-old cardinal died Jan. 31 in Wynnewood.

The late cardinal died of natural causes - heart disease, with prostate cancer as a contributing factor, coroner Walter I. Hofman announced at a news conference yesterday.

Ferman had asked Hofman the day after Bevilacqua died to examine the body because she found the timing "peculiar." His death occurred about 36 hours after Common Pleas Judge M. Teresa Sarmina ruled that he was competent to testify in the ongoing Church child-abuse trial.

"There is no relationship between the judge's competency ruling and his eminence's subsequent sudden death," Hofman said.

"Elderly people with pre-existing natural disease often die quite suddenly," he added.

Archdiocese spokesman Kenneth Gavin said the coroner's finding "confirms what we both believed and knew in our hearts to be the case all along: that Cardinal Bevilacqua was an ailing 88-year-old man who died naturally.

"With today's news, we hope that the speculation surrounding the cardinal's death will be laid to rest."

Bevilacqua died at 9:35 p.m. in bed, holding hands with a nurse, in St. Charles Borromeo Seminary.

He "must have been aware that something was not working," Hofman said. The cardinal spoke his last words to the nurse, but Hofman would not reveal them, saying only that "they were not of a religious nature."

There were no injuries to Bevilacqua's body, "including no evidence of choking, suffocation or strangulation," he said. There was "significant pre-existence of natural disease."

The cardinal's body already had been embalmed by the Donohue Funeral Home of Upper Darby when it arrived at the coroner's office, Hofman said.

But with "sophisticated forensic toxicology, we can do almost everything within reason," he said. The physician-prescribed medications in Bevilacqua's system were within generally accepted therapeutic levels "with the understanding that some are a bit higher and others a bit lower due to the influence of embalming fluid."