To Kill the Pope (13 page)

Recounting his Washington discoveries upon his return to Warnersville, he remarked to the Director of Novices that he thought the Jesuits should be more engaged in the realm of social assistance.

“Why, yes,” the Father told him, “that is exactly what we are doing, especially since Vatican Council Two. ‘Faith and Justice' are our new marching orders, not that we weren't working with the poor before the Council. The problem in the Church is that not everybody sees it quite that way. We, the Jesuits, are being resented by an awful lot of people who should know better. You'll find out the hard way, Tim, when you are out there, fighting all kinds of enemies of the Church, inside and outside.”

Perhaps the crucial moment of the novitiate for most Jesuit candidates is the “Long Retreat,” a thirty-day period of intensive meditation in total silence, except for three “break days,” halfway through the first year when the men must take the final decision about their future and the Church. To Tim, the meditations at the retreat, which forced him to rethink and relive his past life, were the greatest spiritual experience ever: the deep prayer, the acceptance of God's love and mercy in ways he had never felt or contemplated.

“I think I have found faith!” Tim exclaimed to himself as he prayed alone one winter night. It was not pathos: it was real, he believed. His second thought was that he must apply his faith in a very constructive fashion. That was what Hugh Morgan had been telling him all along, remarking on one occasion, ‘You're not the kind of guy who's going to be a nine-to-five priest; you'll want to do more, you'll find a challenge, and your unusual background will come in handy! You'll see! . . .”

*  *  *

Tim's background included, of course, the Middle East—both as a scholar and CIA officer. This past invaded his consciousness when, during his novitiate, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish Yom Kippur holy day—the Day of Atonement—in the fourth great successive war in the region since the Israeli independence a quarter of a century earlier. He remembered that his
ambition during his Egyptian assignment, perhaps a bit exaggerated in his youthful exuberance, was to be able to project Arab strategic thinking so that he could predict with some accuracy what Arab leaders might do next in this never-ending conflict. Now the thought had come back, recalling what he had learned.

“Actually, it is quite simple,” a Cairo University professor he had befriended had told Tim over Scotch and sodas in the magnificent lounge of the Mensa Hotel at the foot of the great Pyramids. Tim had asked him to explain the workings of Arab political minds.

Stirring his drink with his right forefinger, the professor continued: “Always watch for signs of resentment or bitterness among our leaders toward non-Arab foreigners, real or imagined resentments, because it doesn't truly matter what they are. Then you will witness an irredentist surge of nationalism and, finally, foolhardy decisions designed to demonstrate their valor—and clout—to
other
Arab leaders. As you know, they all compete for supreme Arab leadership, like Sultan Saladin in the twelfth century. History does repeat itself. And if there are serious domestic problems in a leader's country—perhaps too much political opposition and too much poverty—then grand gestures serve to establish him as a great patriot and a fearsome nationalist.

“That's what Nasser did when he nationalized the Suez Canal, capitalizing on the fact that it should have been given up by the British a long time ago,” the professor said. “Obviously, there are deranged acts performed by deranged individuals, and we have our quota of them. But you cannot predict such acts, although an explosive political climate may produce deranged behavior. This includes political assassinations, like the assassination of King Abdullah of Jordan in Jerusalem way back . . .”

Watching at the Warnersville novitiate television reports and reading newspaper accounts of the fighting, Tim was seized with the notion that perhaps he could best serve God and the Church in the Middle East, as a Jesuit missionary—or something.

*  *  *

The two years of novitiate flew for Tim. In his second year, he was one of the four remaining aspiring Jesuits. The others had dropped out along the way upon discovering that, in the end, they were not prepared to abandon the secular world. The four men
had formed a close friendship even though Tim was the oldest in the group at thirty-three; his friends were in their early twenties. But his intelligence, warmth, and permanent good disposition made him most popular and well liked in Warnersville.

On September 15, 1975, Tim Savage took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience before the Master of Novices in the chapel of the novitiate. These were perpetual “first vows,” making him a Jesuit, but not yet a priest. He was formally designated as “Scholastic” and still being addressed as “Mr. Savage” or just plain Tim. Normally, the next step for a “Scholastic” is to spend two years studying philosophy to be followed by three years of theology before being ordained as priest. Tim, however, was placed on what Hugh Morgan was pleased to call the “fast track” in his career. The Jesuit hierarchy from the Maryland Province to the Society's seat in Rome, the latter always most watchful, was highly impressed by him and his progress, and anxious to put him to work.

Considering that Tim already held a doctorate and taking into account his teaching experience at Georgetown and his overseas exposure, it was decided by the hierarchy that he—already marked as the future Jesuit “superstar”—needed only one year studying philosophy. The Jesuits knew how to be flexible. Consequently, Tim spent a full academic year at Fordham, the Jesuit university in the Bronx in New York City, receiving his certificate in philosophy at the end of June, 1976. He never left the university during that year, never setting foot in Manhattan or visiting his family in Washington. It was an around-the-clock academic marathon, Tim being determined to complete his Fordham studies in record time.

For Rome and ordination beckoned beyond.

1986

W
HEN
T
IM
S
AVAGE WAS
selected, out of the clear blue Roman sky, to investigate the assassination attempt against Pope Gregory XVII, he had been a priest for eight years. He had been ordained in Rome at the Gesú, the Jesuits' principal church where St. Ignatius is buried, on Via del Corso, across the street from Italian Communist party headquarters, after three years of studying theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Jesuit institution known to Anglo-Saxons as “The Greg.” As an ordained Jesuit priest, Tim next had to take the “Final Vows,” the fourth being the vow to go wherever the Holy Father might wish to send him. Now, as he began to work to shape his investigation, Tim was struck—and amused—by the realization of how literally the fourth vow applied to his mission. Only God, certainly neither the pope nor Monsignor Sainte-Ange, knew at that point where he might wind up in pursuit of the truth.

There was a touch of predestination in the choice of Tim to conduct this secret investigation. As a practical matter, he was picked because he happened to live in Rome when the pope and his private secretary had decided to open their own inquiry into the shooting of Gregory XVII by Circlic, a young Turk of bizarre origins—and because he was recommended to them as an outstanding and brilliant specialist on Islamic and Arab affairs. Agca Circlic, of course, was a Muslim, apparently connected in some fashion to murky Islamic politics. This convergence made it simpler for Gregory XVII and Sainte-Ange to find the man for the task.

Tim lived in Rome because his Jesuit superiors, seeing in him a future “superstar,” had sent him there after his year of philosophy at Fordham for advanced studies in theology at the Gregorian
rather than, like most American “scholastics,” to the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, California, or the Weston School of Theology at Cambridge, Massachusetts. And Tim had become an admirer of the Jesuits' intellect and thrust. Their missionaries, for example, had reached Japan and China in the sixteenth century as teachers; that century's greatest mathematician, Christopher Clavius, was the inventor of the Gregorian Calendar. And that was only the beginning. The Jesuits had always been in the vanguard of thought, science, and theological adventure.

The three years Tim had spent at the imposing Gregorian edifice on Piazza della Pilotta in midtown Rome were heavy with courses on systematic theology (once known as “dogmatic”), Scripture, moral theology, and practical instructions on how to celebrate Mass in the vernacular—in English for him—since the demise of the Latin Mass, administer the Sacraments, and hear confessions. The latter included role playing by the scholastics, who invented “confessions” to be heard by colleagues pretending to be priests in the confessional. Tim, naturally, was extremely careful in his mock confessions. As Father Morgan, visiting Rome during that time, remarked to him, “You cannot very well say, ‘Bless me Father—I was an assassin in Vietnam or an accomplice of assassins.' ”

Tim lived sparsely but comfortably at the Jesuits' Bellarmino Residence, within walking distance of the Gregorian, and, as before, he had time for little other than studies. He managed to squeeze Italian language lessons in between theology courses, learning it quickly with the help of his Warnersville background in Latin, taken as an elective. Very occasionally, when he could not resist particularly beautiful weather, Tim allowed himself a stroll around Rome, to the Colosseum, the Aventine Hill, the Villa Borghese or, across the Tiber, to Trastevere and, of course, St. Peter's Square. On such occasions, he was sometimes gone all day. Once a year, Tim drove in a rented car to the Monte Cassino Monastery, where his father's bones lay scattered under wartime ruins.

Tim's ordination finally came on a June day after he had earned his Master in Divinity degree at the Gregorian. He chose to be ordained in Rome, rather than Washington, and his mother, stepfather, brother, and sister attended the ordination Mass at the
Gesú. He was ordained by an American bishop attached to a Curia congregation whom he liked and respected. The Mass, along with six of his Gregorian colleagues being ordained the same day, was profoundly moving.

Wearing a white alb over a clerical shirt and black trousers, Tim lay prostrate as Mass began. After the Liturgy of the Word and the preaching of the homily by the bishop, ordination began. The men rose. The bishop wordlessly placed his hands on top of Tim's head: when he removed them, Tim had become a priest. Then his hands were anointed with oil, and other priests at the Gesú, including Father Morgan, who had also come for the ceremony, imposed their hands on the heads of the men just ordained. It was Tim's first Mass as a priest, and he concelebrated it with the bishop and his own colleagues. It was the end of a long and arduous road that had begun in that Vietnamese hamlet—and the start of a new one.

This new road led to the resumption of his work on Islam, now expanded to the complexities of Christian-Muslim relations. On the advice of the Gregorian's Rector, a Dutchman who had spent long years in Lebanon, Tim joined the University's Pontifical Oriental Institute and its Faculty of Ecclesiastic Oriental Sciences, where he could best improve his specialty. The Rector had made a point of telling Tim that Gregory XVII had himself a particular interest in bettering communications between Christianity and Islam.

Working out of his office on Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore, near one of Rome's great basilicas, Tim was soon involved not only in theological aspects of the Holy See's relations with Islam, such as meetings with scholars from Al-Azhar University in Cairo and impressively learned Saudi mullahs, but in the Vatican's Muslim politics as well. Increasingly, he was assigned purely foreign policy tasks by the Secretariat of State, ranging from analyses of fundamentalist Islamic pressures in Egypt or Turkey, two very different propositions, to reports on the situation of persecuted Christians under radical Muslim rule in the Sudan.

Within a year, Tim was engaged as a part-time consultant to the Commission on Religious Relations with Muslims, established in the mid-Seventies by Pope Paul VI as part of the Pontifical Council
for Inter-Religious Dialogue. He was there, chatting with the retired archbishop from West Africa, when Gregory XVII was shot on St. Peter's Square. Three years later, the cardinal heading the Council requested the Gregorian's Rector to release Tim so that he could join the Commission as a full-time staff member. Having consulted with the General Superior of the Jesuits, the Rector, of course, agreed. They all kept an eye on the future of their “superstar.”

*  *  *

Tim felt very much at home in Rome. His Italian was now fluent, without distorting his command of French acquired at Georgetown, and he liked Italians, their music, their cheerful disposition, and their food. He was cozily comfortable in his room at the Villa Malta on Via di Porta Ponciana downtown with a superb view of the Quirinale and the Pantheon. Though he was consumed by his daily work, Tim made friends easily with fellow Jesuits in Rome and became acquainted with quite a few Italian families. He maintained pleasant contacts with a number of Americans, including several journalists and diplomats attached to the U.S. Embassy on the Via Veneto—inside of which the CIA Station was tucked away—just minutes away from Villa Malta. He also cultivated relationships with diplomats from Muslim countries and with Islam specialists at the Gregorian University and other institutions.