To Kill the Pope (12 page)

Tim Savage stared at length at Morgan, knelt in front of him, and crossed himself For the next half-hour, remembrances, words, and tears poured out in a stream of consciousness. The beatings. The tortures. The executions. The image of the dead old woman with the crucifix.

Morgan was silent. Minutes elapsed. The fire began to die down.

“Tim,” Father Morgan finally said. “God forgives you. I absolve you. But you have to start a new life. Perhaps you wish to do something for God. But what you need now, I think, is to occupy your mind, to be busy, make a transition to a normal life. I may have an idea for you.”

*  *  *

The idea that Morgan refined in the days that followed was for Tim to return once more to Georgetown, this time to teach. As it happened, there was an open instructor's slot during the forthcoming semester at Morgan's Center of Islamic Studies, and
Tim—with his Ph.D. and his Cairo experience—qualified easily. Starting in January of the new year, Tim marched to Georgetown from his new quarters five days a week to explain the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics and the legal mysteries of
Shariah,
the canon law of Islam, to a dozen graduate students. He had told his stepfather and his mother that the CIA had assigned him to run an emergency course for its officers, and, of course, no questions were asked.

The semester at Georgetown was Tim's most peaceful and reflective period since he had reached adulthood. He had rented a small efficiency apartment off Wisconsin Avenue, a few minutes away from the university, looked up old friends, and created something of a social life for himself. He went to the movies and had occasional platonic dates; he eschewed romantic involvements to avoid distractions and commitments. But, most important, Tim had the leisure to think, meditate, and analyze. He also saw Father Morgan every week or so for long conversations—a form of therapy.

Having studied the Koran as a student of Islam, Tim now reread the Scriptures with deep personal attention, aware of the reverse order in which he, as a Christian, had delved into sacred religious texts. He was familiar with the
history
of the Church, but not with Christian faith; he knew about
Ius Bellum,
but not about the Gospels, having long forgotten what he had been taught at the parochial school and Gonzaga. He now read an account of St. Paul's conversion that Morgan had dropped off at his apartment one evening—without further comment.

Tim's bitter resentment, as an American and a Catholic, of the Phoenix enterprise in Vietnam gradually led him to meditation about what values were meaningful in his world. In one of his chats with Father Morgan, he asked, “How do I transfer my sense of idealism, the idealism I felt when I joined the CIA and I guess I still feel, to something else in life, such as, hypothetically speaking, the Church? Is it possible?”

“Well, everything is possible,” the Jesuit replied. “In this case, have you considered setting aside your political ideas and ideals, and, instead, working to advance the cause of the Kingdom of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ? I don't mean to sound like a
catechism teacher, Tim, but there's an awful lot you can achieve applying your idealism and your talents to the glory of God, which, at least to me, means working for the good of people who need all kinds of help.”

“Are you suggesting that I become a missionary?” Tim asked, half seriously. “I have no idea what God wants from me, but you say that God still loves me despite all the horrors of which I am guilty. Maybe what I need is some sort of illumination.”

“Perhaps you do,” Morgan said. “You could do much worse than being a missionary in Rwanda or in Paraguay. Albert Schweitzer was in fact a missionary, even if he wasn't formally a man of religion.”

On his way home from Morgan's house, Tim always walked past the Holy Trinity Church on tree-lined Thirty-sixth Street, his family church. He never stopped there, but on that particular drizzly spring Sunday afternoon, with flowers blooming proudly everywhere, Tim slowed down, stared at the façade of the church as if he had never seen it before and, guided by an inner force, went up the broad white steps. The door had been left ajar. The big church he knew so well from childhood was empty at that hour, but Tim could smell incense from the noontime Mass lingering in the air. He advanced toward the simple, rectangular altar. He knelt, crossing himself, whispering long-forgotten words of prayer. He looked at the crucified Christ high up and crossed himself again. Images of remembered thoughts flashed through his mind: the “ecstatic agony” of the soul of St. John of the Cross in search of faith and its mystical experience of the night, St. Paul's instant of conversion, and the words from the Scriptures: “Come, Follow Me.”

Tim shivered, his eyes shut tight. Is God talking to me? he wondered. This is absurd! It is theatrical! I'm engaging in cheap dramatics!

He was seized with terrible fear, then felt a sudden sense of peace and serenity he had never experienced before descending upon him. Now everything was crystal clear in his heart and mind. The answers were there. Had he just been blessed in that elusive moment of revelation? Something surely had happened. Tim wiped his tears off and laughed happily. His step was light and quick as he retraced his way to Hugh Morgan's house.

“You asked me once, a long time ago, if I wanted to take vows, become a Jesuit,” he announced as Morgan opened the door for him. “Well, today I have an answer for you. Yes, I do!”

The priest embraced him. “Let us pray together,” he said. They knelt and prayed in the living room under the sad, watchful eyes of an emaciated El Greco Christ on the wall.

A
S PRIESTHOOD WENT
, Tim Savage's was a late vocation. He knew, for example, that Hugh Morgan's vocation dated back to the second grade, to his childhood. But late vocations were not all that unusual. The Jesuits welcomed them as their own numbers tumbled down along with other religious orders and diocesan clergy around the world. In fact, late vocations were on the rise in recent years, often because many men underwent something of a midlife crisis with deep spiritual overtones.

Father Morgan gave Tim a magazine article about the type of men who left their secular workplace for the Church and their ages: a sixty-five-year-old former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, a forty-six-year-old gastroenterologist who had “traded a physician's white coat for a Roman collar”; a thirty-three-year-old advertising agency executive who had a chic condominium, a sports car, and a corner office in a New York skyscraper, but decided “there was something missing from my life”; lawyers, psychologists, and social workers; and, finally, the Spanish highways engineer who became a bishop and head of the immensely powerful and controversial
Opus Dei
society of priests and laymen (which the Jesuits cordially detested for its conservatism).

“So why not a former spook ?” Morgan asked rhetorically.

Tim's choice of the Society of Jesus as his future life path was natural—apart from Morgan's personal influence. He was a product of Georgetown and its ancient Jesuit traditions. His educational achievements turned him logically toward the Jesuits, a teaching order with a touch of intellectual, humanitarian, and scientific elitism—for which the Jesuits were resented by many others in the Church. But if Tim was to enter priesthood, that was where he belonged, he thought.

Now Tim embarked on the lengthy and tough admission process. Morgan had volunteered to be his spiritual director—it was a requirement that candidates be guided spiritually—and he began to teach Tim how to pray and read the Scriptures as they should be read: in depth. The next step for Tim was to report to the vocations' director for the Jesuits' Maryland Province, which included Washington. One late June morning, he drove to the provincial headquarters on Rolland Avenue in northern Baltimore, an unpretentious building not far from the Jesuits' Loyola College. The meeting was brief, but encouraging, with Tim gaining the impression that there was serious interest in him. He also realized that the Jesuits—like the CIA—knew absolutely everything about him.

Much of the initial burden of preparing Tim for priesthood was on Father Morgan as spiritual director. He had to help Tim decide whether he really did have a vocation to be a Jesuit, making him better understand the Society of Jesus so that he could reach an intelligent, informed conclusion before he actually entered the order. Morgan supplied him with materials about the history and the activities of the Jesuits, urged him to pray daily and go to Mass regularly.

Tim spent the summer concentrating on religious studies at home, learning the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century, perfecting his praying habits, and preparing himself for the road ahead in the admission process. In the autumn, he returned to Georgetown to teach one more semester on Islam as he awaited acceptance as a Jesuit novice, another preliminary step.

Little had changed in Tim's day-to-day life, but he now felt he was a truly changed man. He was at peace with himself He no longer had nightmares about the old village woman with the shattered face and the crucifix around her neck. The guilt of Vietnam no longer hung over him like a black shadow. That Christmas, B-52 Superfortresses bombed North Vietnam into accepting the American peace—and the American departure. The peace treaty was signed in Paris a month later. Tim watched the ceremony on television in his apartment. It all seemed unspeakably remote. But, he thought, that was the end of Phoenix, too.

*  *  *

The admission process went on slowly, carefully, relentlessly. The Jesuits wanted only the brightest and the brainiest in their midst, and they took their time in deciding whom to welcome to the Company of Jesus. At that point, there were only eight candidates for the novitiate in the Maryland Province, but, as Hugh Morgan told Tim, “we are not so anxious that we would cut corners in the selection.”

On a cold winter morning, Tim was interviewed—separately—by three Jesuit “judges” who went meticulously over his past life, childhood, adolescence, university, the CIA, Vietnam, and everything else to satisfy themselves that he was making a positive choice in wishing to embrace priesthood and not merely running from the world. Much of it seemed to be designed to confirm what they already knew about Tim—and hear it from his lips. The vocation, he was told, must be a constructive, unselfish undertaking that would contribute to the work of the Jesuits as educators, scholars, and intelligent messengers of God. And, above all, one of the judges informed him, Tim had to know and fully comprehend what he was leaving behind in terms of personal secular life—from complete independence to sex—by entering priesthood.

Next, it was the turn of professional psychologists, one a Jesuit and the other a lay Georgetown consultant. Running a series of tests on Tim, from inkblots to the MMPI—Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory—method to determine whether he had hidden emotional or psychological problems. The Jesuit helpfully advised Tim that “for example, if you say that you see your mother with a knife on an inkblot, then we'll know you
have
a problem.”

At long last, Tim was admitted to Jesuit novitiate. He took the train from Washington's Union Station to Hershey, Pennsylvania, then a bus to Warnersville, a small town where the Jesuit Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues was located. Jogues was one of the first Jesuit martyrs in North America, killed by Iroquois Indians who first cut off his fingers. The novitiate was a large H-shaped structure, rich in marble, built to serve Jesuit novices by a Mrs. Brady, an American Papal Duchess from New York who had been personally acquainted with Pope Pius XII. A chapel was in the center of the compound.

The Jesuit novitiate that Tim Savage entered was a two-year program. When he arrived at Jogues, there were ten novices in the second year of the study and Tim was one of six in the first year. Life there was less strict than it had been in the past, but the novices had to remain on the premises most of the time. Tim had, of course, informed his family early in the year about his intention of becoming a Jesuit, and they took it rather well, after the initial surprise, though General Stella would have preferred his stepson remain in government service, military or not. As good Catholics, they could not object to Tim's desire to serve God. The family threw a magnificent farewell reception for him, complete with champagne, and he was embraced tenderly as he left in a taxi for Union Station. His sister Julia telephoned from her ambassadorial post in Brasilia to wish him well in his new life.

The novitiate, as Hugh Morgan had explained to Tim, was intended to confirm—again—a man's priestly vocation and to give the Jesuits an in-depth opportunity to get to know the candidate. With the Director of Novices, a serious middle-aged priest with a gift of communicating smoothly and easily with his charges, while supervising them, the novices studied the history of the Society of Jesus, read the biographies of St. Ignatius and other great Jesuits, like Jogues, absorbed the Society's constitution and the great decisions of past Jesuit congregations, and attended theology classes. There was one hour of mandatory prayer, work around the house, and visits to Jesuit communities in Pennsylvania.

Novices are usually directed to spend six months or so teaching at Jesuit schools, often abroad, to acquire experience with poor people at home and the Third World, but given Tim's Middle East and Vietnam background, this was not judged necessary. Instead, he spent several months in Washington's turbulent, crime-ridden inner city, working with the homeless and drug addicts—and dining on Sundays with his family. As is frequently the case with affluent white Washingtonians, Tim had never been exposed to the sprawling black districts of the capital—these are two worlds apart—and his service at a halfway house in Anacostia jolted him into the surprising realization that American inner cities can be as degrading to their inhabitants as the slums of Cairo or Saigon. The vacant eyes of sickly Anacostia children and
needle marks on the arms and legs of teenagers were Tim's post-Vietnam culture shock.