To Kill the Pope (22 page)

Needing even a momentary distraction from analyzing and
reanalyzing theories, Tim poured himself a glass of red wine and reached for
Panorama,
the Italian weekly newsmagazine. But as luck would have it, and Tim had to laugh when he opened the publication, the lead article dealt with the approaching trial of suspects in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, the very controversial but also very popular Italian prime minister, and his five bodyguards. Though the authorities had concluded that the deed had been perpetrated by Red Brigades terrorists, it remained a mystery who and why had ordered the murder. Given their obsessions with conspiracies, going back to the Borgias and before, most Italians were convinced that Moro had been the victim of a plot hatched very high in national power circles. The magazine reported that Moro had been killed because “powerful men had reasons not to keep him alive.” There were charges of a cover-up, and a Red Brigades veteran had told
Panorama:
“I don't know whose hands were behind the scenes, but I know we were part of a much larger game.”

The Aldo Moro story was no encouragement to Tim. It was another unsolved political assassination, another mystery. Moro was a Christian Democrat, close to the Holy See, but who were the “powerful men” who “had reasons not to keep alive” the French pontiff? And what chances did Tim, an obscure American Jesuit working virtually on his own, have to discover what had motivated the assault on St. Peter's Square? He felt a touch of helplessness and depression, but a touch of growing frustration and curiosity as well.

*  *  *

Two days after returning from Istambul, Tim called on Sister Angela at her Apostolic Palace office to present an oral report on his Istambul expedition. Angela took his words down in shorthand to pass on to Sainte-Ange, who, presumably, would inform Gregory XVII. The monsignor had insisted that there be no written reports; there should be no paper trail of any kind, he had said.

“Tell him,” Tim instructed Angela, having decided to share with Sainte-Ange
almost
everything he had discovered in Turkey, “that now we have an enigma wrapped inside a mystery. It seems that the Gray Wolves, that Turkish terrorist group, had indeed supplied the shooter as a courtesy—if that's the word—to some
French Muslims for reasons they themselves do not know and, of course, would never inquire. I met with them in Istambul, and that's the way those things work. It's like the ‘need to know' rule in intelligence communities. So now I have to track down those Muslim “French Brethren,” and I'm not quite sure where to start. Why don't you ask the Monsignor if he has any ideas? He's bound to have some contacts with French intelligence people . . .”

“I'll see if he can receive me this afternoon,” Angela told him. “Your work is top priority for him. Then I'll get back to you as soon as possible—if I have anything useful to pass on . . . By the way, how did you like Istambul? I was there once a long time ago, before I took the vows.”

“Oh, I loved it,” Tim replied enthusiastically. “It's extraordinary: the architecture, the colors, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn . . . I wish I had more time to look around. But I did see the
seraglio
from a distance. It made me think of you. I don't know why . . .”

“I beg your pardon?” Angela asked, her cheeks suddenly gaining color.

“Well, it was some kind of a strange association of ideas,” Tim said, his turn to be embarrassed by the conversation. “I can't really explain it.”

He thought she looked especially attractive today, feeling like an adolescent. Impure thoughts again. Why does the Church make such a big deal of celibacy? Priests, after all, were free to marry in the opening centuries of Christendom, and they still were in many Catholic faiths in communion with Rome.

*  *  *

Just before St. Peter's bells tolled the Angelus, Monsignor de Sainte-Ange knocked lightly on the door of the pope's study before entering. Gregory XVII, writing at his long, narrow desk, looked up with a tired smile. Chopin's Scherzo No. 3 in C sharp minor, his favorite, played softly in the background.

“I had hoped to complete the draft of this speech for Paris before dinner, but I guess I was too optimistic,” he remarked. “It has to be a perfect text, and one cannot hurry it. So let's take the dinner break now, and then I'll continue. Anything interesting?

“Well,” the secretary said, “the American is back from Istambul
with some startling news that I'm not certain he himself fully understands.”

“Such as?”

“He has reported to me through Sister Angela that the Gray Wolves, the Turkish terrorists, had provided Circlic at the request of what he calls ‘French Brethren,' meaning, I imagine, French Muslims,” the monsignor told the pope. “He has no idea who the ‘French Brethren' are, but he is, of course, determined to find out. After all, this is the mission we gave him. So now he's getting ready to go to Paris. And God only knows what he'll come up with. It makes me a bit uncomfortable. We always knew it had to do with Muslims in some way, but not with
French
Muslims . . . Maybe a Turk was used to confuse us.”

Gregory XVII nodded thoughtfully, toying with his soup spoon.

“Do you think this was what de Marenches tried to tell us with his warnings? Was he referring to French Muslims?” he asked.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” the monsignor answered. “And perhaps we should have listened, tightened security, gone public or something, rather than worry about political relations with Islam and even with France. It could have cost your life, Holiness . . . It was my fault. I should have thought more clearly.”

“We were both at fault,” Gregory XVII told him. “But now I can only pray that nothing of this comes out before we go to Paris. Things with France are already so complicated. Clovis and St. Bartholomew's Day and the mad archbishop. All I need now is a Muslim problem! . . . God, I hope the American is discreet . . .”

The pope's trip to France was scheduled for the following month—his third home since his election—and he was, as usual, prepared for unpleasantness there from all sides. Each time he was chastised and criticized for paying solemn homage to King Clovis I of Salian Franks who had accepted baptism in 496, turning France into a Christian nation. The criticism came mainly from masses of French atheists whose denunciations of the Church and its ties to Rome dated back to the 1789 Revolution—still a matter of angry debate by stubborn intellectuals nearly two centuries later—and still feared any threat to the separation of state and Church. Liberal Catholics were against Clovis' and
France's formal identification with the Holy See under Gregory XVII because they opposed what they regarded as Rome's conservative attitudes and policies in violation of the Second Vatican Council's modernization of the institution.

Still on the Catholic side, the pope faced a virtual rebellion by extreme right-wing priests and believers who considered that the Church had gone too far “to the left” at the Council, notably by sanctioning the vernacular Mass instead of the Latin one, and that Gregory XVII was guilty of abetting this “betrayal.” Heading this increasingly vocal movement—the Fraternity of St. Pius V—was the aged priest from West Africa the pope had called the “mad archbishop,” who had already defied the Holy See by ordaining four priests on his own—for which he had been suspended by Rome—and, now in effect, was inviting punishment in the form of excommunication.

The Pius V Fraternity was the rebirth, three centuries later, of the Secret Society of Pius V, a powerful organization of theological paranoia and terror. Pius V was the sixteenth-century pope who had enforced the Latin Mass as decreed by the 1545 Council of Trent's decision on the “Uniformity of Liturgy.” His spirit was revived by Pius X whose reign between 1903 and 1914 had ushered in the Church's latest “Age of Intransigency,” in the words of a famous historian. This pope had written that “the Church . . . comprises two categories of persons, the pastors and the flocks. The hierarchy alone moves and controls. The duty of the multitude is to suffer itself to be governed and to carry out in a submissive spirit the orders of those in control.” The memory of Pius V and Pius X was still very much alive in France, with the fanatic archbishop leading the Fraternity. Pope Paul VI had already condemned the archbishop's attitude and his Fraternity in 1976, and Gregory XVII had made up his mind to excommunicate him—excluding him from the communion of the faithful until he repented—but Sainte-Ange had prevailed with the argument that this act should be postponed until the return from the French visit to avoid public protests there and further division of the French Church.

But resentments against the pope and his planned trip also came from French Protestants who had not forgiven the Church
and Rome for butchering ten thousand or more Huguenots under the Catholic queen, Catherine de Médicis, during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in August 1572. The massacre was carried out to prevent the accession to the throne of the Huguenot Henri of Navarre as Henri IV of France, resulting in the post-Reformation French Wars of Religion. Protestants remembered to this day that Pope Gregory XIII, an Italian, had celebrated the massacre with a majestic “Te Deum” Mass of gratitude; it was the year of his accession to the pontificate.

French Muslims, and particularly the new immigrants from North Africa, were basically indifferent to Gregory XVII and his impending visit. It had nothing to do with their lives and they held no animus against the Roman pope on religious grounds. The great Crusades were forgotten. If anything, Muslim leaders were grateful to the Catholic Church for standing up publicly in defense of the practice of their religion and culture in France and firmly opposing deportations of immigrants by Paris governments, which responded to pressures from jingoist rightist political parties and Catholic “Integrists.” In the church of St. Bernard de la Chapelle, for instance, 210 Muslims, including women and children, had sought refuge from deportation until riot police violated that Parisian sanctuary and dragged them out.

The last thing Gregory XVII desired therefore at this juncture was to see Muslims rising against him and the Church in France, perhaps no longer remembering his stand in protecting them during his Marseille days. This is why he was worried now by Tim Savage's discoveries in Istambul that Sainte-Ange had described to him. If publicized in some fashion, the supposed role of the “French Brethren” in the assassination attempt could have unpredictable consequences and ruin his hopes for a serious dialogue with Islam.

Rome and Islam, to be sure, were open rivals for the souls of tens of millions of essentially religiously uncommitted Africans—Animists or “pagans” or people who somehow blended their ancestral religious traditions with either Christianity or Islam. For Gregory XVII, Africa represented, as he put it, the “last frontier” in the world for his Church to conquer. He hoped to sway African Muslims away from their faith to his; Nigeria, where he had gone
twice, was a case in point as was the Sudan, with the populations divided between Islam and Catholicism. The pope also prayed to attract the “pagans” where neither organized religion prevailed. He had gone to the extreme of accepting “acculturation,” a mix of traditional rites and Christianity, and allowed tribal singing and dancing inside St. Peter's Basilica during a recent synod of African bishops. Islam and Catholicism had made an effort to keep their rivalry low profile and avoid public confrontations. Hence the pontiff's concerned that Tim's findings, if disclosed and misinterpreted, could destroy this fine balancing act. That same concern had guided his decision over de Marenches' warning.

The most pro-papal religious community in France, after the Catholics loyal to the Holy See, were the Jews—the smallest of all these groups—because of the Vatican's pro-Jewish policy since the Vatican Council and, presumably, because the cardinal archbishop of Paris was a converted Jew and Gregory XVII's close personal friend. The memories of the Dreyfus affair a century ago and the wartime behavior of “Integrist” priests toward the Jews were, however, just below the surface, and the pope was aware of an explosive potential involving Jewish communities and anti-Semites. He was looking forward to a long private session with the cardinal in Paris, but he was becoming concerned, as he listened to Sainte-Ange, that if the “French Brethren” Muslim connection in the assassination attempt were to surface, it could damage the Jewish relationship, too.

“God,” Gregory XVII sighed, “why can nothing be simple, just once, in my own homeland?”

“Amen!” Sainte-Ange exclaimed, a shade too piously.

*  *  *

Entering a restaurant he particularly liked just below the Angelicum, where Gregory XVII had once studied for his doctorate, Tim Savage crossed the main dining room, led by the owner, a good friend, to the small garden where he found Paul Martinius awaiting him for lunch at one of the four tables around a cool fountain. It was very private there in the shaded warmth of the early afternoon and under the protection of old Roman walls across the street.

“Sit down and taste my Gavi di Gavi wine, the pope's personal
favorite,” the CIA Station Chief urged Tim, pouring from the bottle he extracted from the ice cooler. “It's the best damned white wine in this country. Then tell me about Istambul.”

Tim did both, savoring the Gavi and giving Martinius a detailed account of his contacts with the Gray Wolves and their claim that they had made Circlic available to honor the request from “French Brethren.”

“What do you make of it?” he asked. “Do you believe it and what does it mean?”

“Yes, I do believe it, but I'm not quite sure at this point what to make of it,” the CIA officer answered. “But do you remember what I told you about de Marenches? I'm beginning to wonder what sort of a strange triangle are—or were—these Muslims, the lamentably late de Marenches and your papal secretary. I have that awful feeling I'm missing something here. I assume you're going to France now? . . . Oh, shit, I wish you had stayed with the Agency! Your talents are wasted here . . .”