To Kill the Pope (15 page)

Pope Clement XIV, Tim read with awe, was said to have been poisoned by the Jesuits with a “dish of chocolate” on Holy Thursday of 1773. Clement had suppressed the Jesuits earlier that year, and this may have been their attempt at vengeance. The Jesuits, world travelers since the sixteenth century, had discovered
cacao
in the Brazilian Amazon and perfected the art of preparing hot chocolate. In the event, the pope did not die until the following year, presumably immune to poisoned chocolate—if, indeed, the Jesuits had tried to do away with him in such an elegant fashion.

There was no record of assassination attempts against popes in the ensuing two centuries, Tim saw with relief, but mysteries seemed to reappear in the second half of the twentieth century. John Paul I died after thirty-three
days
as pope in 1978, and the circumstances of his demise were never fully clarified. And now, Tim Savage told himself, he had to cope with the case of Gregory XVII, particularly disturbing because it now appeared that this plot or attempt to kill a pope, successful or not, had come from
outside
the Vatican and Rome—and not from
within
—or so it seemed.

And when it came to Gregory XVII, what did Tim Savage know about his past, his connections, his commitments?

The fact was that he knew almost nothing about the French pope, now in his eighth year in power, beyond what was in official biographies, shallow newspaper and magazine articles—and usually unreliable Vatican gossip. Without deeper knowledge of Gregory XVII, Tim realized he would be incapable of effectively pursuing his investigation. He had to search for what this pope may have done or said—or stood for—publicly and privately to provoke an assassination attempt, even if the act itself stemmed from irrationality on the part of one or more actors in the drama.

Things never happen in a vacuum, and Tim increasingly doubted that the shooting in St. Peter's Square five years ago was simply the idea of a mentally deranged individual. Police and tribunal trial records made that quite clear. The guiding principle in the craft of intelligence, as he well knew, was to look for significant clues, no matter how seemingly small or irrelevant, before centering on trails to follow in order to arrive at the ultimate solution. Thus far, Tim had found none.

The official Vatican biographical sketch on a bookshelf at Villa Malta told him what he already knew: that Gregory XVII, now nearly sixty-seven, was the two-hundred-sixty-fourth Roman Catholic pope, that he was the tenth French pontiff in the history of the Church, that he was elected in 1978, and so forth. But Tim's pursuit turned more and more interesting as he worked his way through further material, as he began to develop something of a perspective on the pope's life.

*  *  *

Gregory XVII was born Roland de Millefeuille, the only son of parents descended from a long line of Provençal nobility, on November 11, 1918, the day of the signing of the Armistice ending World War One. As a child, he lived in great comfort at his parents' family mansion on the left bank of the Rhône, not far from Avignon, where seven French popes reigned for seventy-three years in the fourteenth century. It was near the Philippe-le-Bel Tower, a magnificent thirteenth-century structure. The mansion was his birthplace.

From a thick new biography of Gregory XVII, published in Rome the week Tim had met with Sainte-Ange, he learned that Roland was a most precocious youngster and student, amazing his teachers with his acuity. The boy, it seemed, was endowed not only with extraordinary intelligence, but was kind and friendly, pious and impressively mystical even at a very young age. His parents believed that his mysticism was atavistic, flowing from ancient Provençal traditions of religion and faith—and kept alive as a mystery by the disquieting mistral winds of the south, the mystical poetry of Frédéric Mistral, the great bard who composed in beautiful, romantic Provençal language, and the ancient ballads of the troubadours of the land. There was a hint that this mysticism also had roots in the thirteenth-century crusades against Cathar heretics in Languedoc, just north of the Pyrénées and between Toulouse and the Mediterranean, when uncounted thousands of God-fearing but independent-minded Cathars were massacred or burned at the stake by French armies on the orders of the pope in Rome.

Roland himself wrote his first poem—in French—when he still attended the parochial Catholic grade school. It was an ode to Our Lady of Lourdes, composed after visiting with his parents the Marian Shrine at the Massabielle Grotto, where great miracles were said to be performed in healing the sick through the intercession of Mary, who had appeared eighteen times in 1858 to a fourteen-year-old local girl. Roland's piety grew during his years at the
lycée
—he went to church every morning to pray on his way to high school—but he also excelled in Latin, French literature, and history, and was considered to be the best center forward on his Avignon school soccer team.

Tall, athletic, hawk-faced, with a darkish Mediterranean complexion, and known for his Provençal courtliness, Roland was highly popular at school and among his teachers and other adults. Reading the pope's biography, Tim continuously came across quotations from those who had known Roland in his youth, describing his “phenomenal willpower,” his “determination always to be best at everything,” and his “charm and charisma.” None of these traits seemed to have changed over the years. Even his appearance at the age of sixty-eight did not betray too much the passage of time: he still stood tall and erect, the hawkishness of his strong face giving him a commanding presence.

Tim suspected that there was a touch of hagiography in Roland's depiction, and was therefore intrigued and surprised by the words of a classmate, quoted in the book, that “Roland de Millefeuille does not tolerate disagreements with his views and opinions.” Actually, Tim had heard rumors and comments that Gregory XVII had placed the Jesuits on a short leash, theologically and politically, believing them to be too assertive, but there was no noticeable evidence of it. The General Superior naturally would not discuss the subject with subordinates like Tim, and the rumors continued to float around the Jesuit community in Rome. But, as he thought about it, Tim began to wonder whether Gregory XVII's frequent and stubborn rejection of views of others—if it was really the case—might have been a motive for someone to plan his assassination. He stored this idea away in the back of his mind.

After completing the
lycée,
Roland had opted for priesthood and entered a seminary. He was ordained in the spring of 1940, just weeks before France surrendered to Nazi Germany and nine months after the eruption of World War Two. Not quite twenty-two, and one of the youngest priests ever ordained in the French Church, Roland was assigned by the archbishop of Avignon to a small parish down on the Rhône, an impoverished hilly village of elderly peasant families.

Father Roland spent nearly five years at his parish, until the end of the war, looking after his flock as best he could and hungrily devouring volumes on theology, philosophy, and ethics borrowed from the Avignon archdiocesal library. But he also led something of a double life as an organizer of the
maquis,
the French anti-Nazi
resistance, in his area. The priestly cassock was an excellent cover, and the Germans never suspected the pious young
abbé
and the old people of the somnolent village, to whom Roland was so devoted, of secret contacts with the Free French. He was subsequently credited with assuring safe passage for scores of Allied officers and men who had escaped from German prisoner-of-war camps and sought to make their way to Spain and on to England. Roland was very heroic and after the war he was awarded the Medal of Liberation.

However, he had also realized, with considerable shock, that quite a few priests in his region had turned over escaped Allied prisoners—and Jews hiding across Provence—to the Nazis. Roland discovered when records were opened by postwar French governments that about 75,000 Jews, including 12,000 children, were deported from France to Nazi death camps between 1941 and 1944 and that only 2,500 survived. He shuddered at the thought that some of the Jews—even a single one—might have been sent to slaughter by his fellow priests.

Roland was deeply disturbed to find out at the same time that after liberation many of these priests often provided safe haven to French war criminals, police officers, and other
collaborateurs
with the occupiers, tarnishing the Church in France with the brush of extreme rightist coloration. When his own pro-Allied activities during the occupation became known in the aftermath of the war, Roland's ultraconservative priestly colleagues launched a whispering campaign, accusing him of communist tendencies. Tim read about it with amazement in a magazine article Sister Angela had sent him from the Apostolic Palace in one of her frequent packets of materials. Could this charge loom behind the conspiracy against Gregory XVII after so many years, Tim asked himself, but rejected the notion as wholly implausible. The French Church could not be so deeply divided, its past notwithstanding, he thought. But it was the pope himself who, as a young priest, had delivered a devastating critique of his fellow Frenchmen, charging in a sarcastic sermon that “under the banner of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,” they had transformed the monarchy into an evil empire. Roland was alluding to the prewar Third Republic with its corruption and immorality. That, too, could go for the French Church.

Studying papal materials twelve or more hours a day in his Villa Malta room, pausing only to sleep, eat, and run occasional personal errands, Tim saw Roland's ecclesiastic career unfold before his eyes. Thus, within a year of the war, the
abbé
was assigned to Marseille to minister to the faithful and their families in the tough, impoverished port district, the famous Canebière. The Archbishop of Marseille had been searching for an “inspired” priest, and his Avignon colleague, who owed him favors, instantly recommended Father Roland.

Roland spent a year in Marseille, discovering the despair of the urban poor and joining the new movement of worker-priests. In slacks, blouse, and jaunty black beret, Roland labored on the docks alongside the stevedores, helped to run soup kitchens, and at night taught adults literacy. Naturally, he performed his priestly duties as well: from hearing confessions to dispensing advice on family matters, and officiating at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. He also began to write articles about Christian ethics of social justice for progressive Catholic publications. The lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who helped to redefine and modernize social thought in the Church, became his intellectual and spiritual hero. And Roland formed friendships with destitute Muslims from North Africa who, in quest of work, were settling in southern France by the tens of thousands—and creating one more social problem. Marseille was Roland's first contact with Muslims and Islam, and the beginning of his interest in the religion of Muhammad and His followers. Was this a first clue to what would happen so many years later, with a Muslim Turk firing his pistol at the Roman Catholic pope on St. Peter's Square? And if so, what did it mean?

There were so many dots to connect in the puzzle. What, for example, was the nature of the connection between Father Roland and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who, according to a one-sentence mention in the new biography, was “well acquainted with Father Millefeuille whom he saw often in Marseille”? Then there was a similarly passing remark suggesting that when the rebellion erupted in Algeria in the late 1950s, Roland, then studying in Rome, openly supported the National Liberation Front's demand for independence from France. This was not unusual
among progressive priests in the French Church, but it left Tim with the impression that the young Father was sympathetic to Islam-linked causes, which, in turn, made it rather unlikely that a Muslim would try to kill him some twenty years later—when Roland already was Gregory XVII. On the other hand, however, Tim was aware that none of it led to logical conclusions, one way or another. He knew precious little at this juncture.

Another potential clue came Tim's way as he read Roland's articles on Mission de France, the worker-priest movement with which he had been associated in Marseille. He was struck by Roland's comments on the struggle between Roman Catholic and communist and socialist unions for the control of the Marseille docks—and his firm identification with the Catholic unions. Tim thought this was interesting enough to warrant further research, and he spent several days at Rome's National Library going through books on postwar labor problems and rivalries in Western Europe. He found no mention of Father Millefeuille's name, but what jumped out at him was the story of how the CIA and the American Federation of Labor secretly provided funds to Catholic trade unionists in Marseille—and their silent gangster-longshoremen allies—to fight and defeat the communists. It was, to be sure, ancient history by now, yet it coincided with Roland's presence in Marseille and his worker-priest involvements. The more Tim worked on his life story, the more of Roland's footprints materialized in seemingly unrelated and even contradictory contexts. He certainly was an activist in and out of the Church, and activists do tempt fate, even lethal fate.

*  *  *

Gradually, Roland's reputation spread throughout the Church hierarchy. One day, he was summoned by the Avignon bishop, still his ecclesiastic superior, to be “informed”—actually it was an order—that he would be attending the Sorbonne in Paris to earn his doctorate in philosophy; he already had the equivalent of a lower university degree through his
baccalauréat
from the
lycée
and his seminary studies.

“You are the hope of our Church,” the old archbishop told him. “You have the mind and you have the heart . . . Today, our Church lacks both . . .”