To Kill the Pope (31 page)

“But how could priests behave like this?” Tim asked. “I mean, they were betraying Christian teachings and all that . . .”

“Very easily,” the librarian told him, bitterly. “Being a priest doesn't make a man a real Christian or even a decent person. In France, it is often just a profession. And after the war, they behaved even worse, providing sanctuary for criminals like Paul Touvier, a top official in the Vichy militia, who lived in parish houses with priests and was kept in ample funds by the Chevaliers de Notre Dame, another fascist religious outfit. Then there were the famous René Bousquet, who was secretary-general for police in the Vichy government, and Maurice Papon, who was in charge in Bordeaux. They were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews. For years, they, too, were protected by our Catholic clergy. Brossard was paid by the Chevaliers de Sainte Marie, whoever they were. Yes, our Church is rich in criminals. And, of course, they all hate Gregory XVII.”

“But I must add,” he went on, “that a group of French bishops recently issued a declaration that the silence of the French Church leadership in the face of the wartime persecution of Jews was a ‘fault.' That was good. However, even Gregory XVII has refused to predict whether the Roman Catholic Church as a whole will offer a formal apology for this silence. The Holy See is still determined to protect the great silences of Pius XII. And here in France, the Fraternity and other integrists just love to keep it that way. They have a lot of power.”

“Tell me more about the St. Pius V Fraternity,” Tim asked the librarian. “Who runs it, or does anybody in particular?”

“Oh, yes,” the old Jesuit said. “It's run, with an iron hand, by its founder, Archbishop Julien Leduc. Haven't you heard about him?”

“Just vaguely. Who, exactly, is he?”

“Leduc is a retired archbishop who spent long years in West
Africa, then, after formal retirement, decided to invent his own church, which, as I said, is a schism. Actually, I think it is a modern heresy. He represents the hard core of integrism. Leduc's role models are Pius V, who began implementing the straitjacket decrees of the Council of Trent held in mid-sixteenth century and thus earned sainthood, and Pius X who reigned until the start of World War I in 1914. You will appreciate why Leduc named his Fraternity after Pius V and why he venerates Pius X, who was a reactionary paranoiac and thought all intellectuals were heretics. I might add that Pius X was canonized after the war, in 1954, by none other than Pope Pius XII. When Pius X was pope, the future Pius XII was his diplomatic assistant. Yeah, Archbishop Leduc is quite a figure. You should meet him one of these days . . . Actually, he is our neighbor in Languedoc. But that's another story . . . And I think you should take a good look at the saga of the Cathars. You may find it most interesting—and useful.”

“Is it hard to find the Archbishop?” Tim asked. “Does he see outsiders?”

“No, I don't think you will have any problems locating him,” the librarian replied. “He lives somewhere near Carcassonne, not hiding from anybody . . . But there's something else you ought to know about the Pius V Fraternity. Do you remember that demented Spanish priest who had lunged at the pope with a bayonet, while he prayed at the statue of Our Lady of Fátima on the first anniversary of the shooting at St. Peter's Square?

“Yes,” Tim said. “Of course, I remember. What about the Spanish priest?”

“He was a member of the Pius V Fraternity,” the librarian told him. “And when the pope was in France earlier this month, there was another strange incident that was kept out of the press at the request of the Holy See and the French authorities: A crude homemade bomb was found in a church near Paris where Gregory XVII was scheduled to concelebrate a Mass . . . and the bomb contained an inscription in Latin and French, reading, ‘In the name of the pope, BOOM!' ”

*  *  *

The following Sunday, Tim Savage happened to be watching television during a late breakfast in the refectory of the Toulouse Residence.
With scant interest, he saw and heard Languedoc politicians, leftists and rightists, propound their platforms for the approaching parliamentary elections, when, suddenly, his attention was caught by images of a huge mass of people advancing along an
autoroute
with banners and crosses. The sound was of religious chants and prayers rising to the heavens from thousands and thousands of throats. Now listening closely to the live broadcast, Tim learned that it was the final stage of a seventy-mile, three-day march, under alternating hot sun and violent downpours, by members and followers of the Pius V Fraternity from the ancient cathedral in Chartres to the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre church in Paris. The marchers had first attended a traditional Mass in Latin, according to the rite of Pope Pius V, at the Chartres Cathedral, then an identical Mass at the Montmartre church. A tall cross carried by the believers was dedicated, in big white letters, to St. Bernadette, a favorite of the traditionalists. Tim was surprised to hear that the Mass in Chartres had been celebrated by Cardinal Angelo Felici, once a papal nuncio to France and currently the president of the Pontifical Ecclesia Dei Commission, which looks after traditional Catholics. Indeed, Archbishop Leduc and his Fraternity had quite a following in France—and a strategic presence in Rome. It was Cardinal Felici who had announced to the world, from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, the election of Gregory XVII. But Leduc himself was not in the crowd.

Tim had heard the name of Archbishop Leduc and something about his controversial movement, but he was not a theologian and this whole subject was entirely outside his sphere of knowledge and interest. It would never have occurred to Tim to research Leduc and the Fraternity in the context of his investigation. The conventional wisdom, at least as relayed by Monsignor Sainte-Ange, was that there existed a “Muslim connection” in the assassination conspiracy, and that was in part the reason for recruiting Tim. The warning from de Marenches, about which he was apprised later, had not pointed, as far as he knew, in the French integrist direction. It was extraordinary, Tim thought, how powerful were the passions aroused within and around the Church over religious traditions, including the issue of the rite in which Mass in Latin or in vernacular should be celebrated, four centuries
after the Council of Trent—and toward the end of the twentieth century—to become a schism and a heresy.

*  *  *

Fascinating as fundamentalist battles appeared to be, they ceased, however, to be abstract and theoretical to Tim Savage from the moment Faisal, the Toulouse imam, had admitted Muslim participation, innocent or not, in the plot against Gregory XVII and the Jesuit priest-librarian had given him a primer on integrism and its ramifications in France. Now Tim had to turn into an expert on Archbishop Leduc, the Fraternity, and all its connections. And his instinct told him that he had precious little time to acquire this expertise—before he was equipped to act to defuse new tragedies.

Again, the library of the Jesuit Residence provided Tim with basic information, this time in written form. There were biographies of Archbishop Leduc, some hagiographies and some savage denunciations, a slim autobiography, Leduc's own broadside against the Vatican Council, and several reasonably levelheaded discussions of “L'affaire Leduc.”

A photograph of a youthful-looking, smiling, blue-eyed priest, a picture obviously taken decades ago, graced the cover of one of the biographies. The face was somewhat familiar to Tim as he looked at the photograph, but he could not place it, and made no effort to search his memory. As life stories of bishops went, Leduc's career had been rather interesting, Tim thought, as he plunged into his latest research project, an undertaking requiring quite a few days of reading, note taking, and analyzing.

Jules Leduc was born in 1905 in Ajaccio on Corsica, the island that had been Napoleon's birthplace, the year when the French Parliament had approved the law on the separation of church and state, and the expulsion of religious orders. That was the latest milestone in the battle between the two great entities, dating back to the 1789 revolution, an event the French Church had neither forgotten nor forgiven to this day. As it happened, an amazing ironic coincidence, the separation law, born the same year as the archbishop, would become a lifelong obsession for him. He saw it as high crime and treason.

One of eight children—five of whom took religious vows—Leduc was ordained as priest at the age of twenty-four. Because he
was spotted by the Church as a man of great promise, Leduc was sent to Rome to study for doctorates in theology and philosophy at the Jesuits' Gregorian University, another irony for this priest who hated Church “liberals” from the bottom of his heart. A bishop assigned to a diocese in southern France—in Languedoc—at forty-five, Leduc was named archbishop of Casablanca at fifty. It was 1950, and Morocco was still part of metropolitan France as were Algeria and Tunisia. Leduc believed that North Africa should remain French forever, not only because of his patriotism, but, principally, his fear that otherwise Islam would engulf that vast region. Islam was the object of one of Leduc's many profound hatreds.

It took Vatican Council II, which he attended in the mid-1960s, to unleash fully the furies that possessed Leduc. In a flood of articles, lectures, and books—among them
I Accuse the Council
and
They Uncrowned Him,
meaning Jesus Christ—Leduc declared that the Council was a criminal conspiracy against the Church and the past popes. He spoke darkly of the Council and its modernizing decisions verging on “satanism” and being “AIDS of the Church,” the second epithet hurled some years later, when AIDS was actually isolated and identified.

Leduc despised and condemned everything about the postconciliar new Church: the Declaration on Religious Liberty, which he described as a “fundamental vice” and the “death of the social reign of our Lord Jesus Christ”; the policy of ecumenism aimed at reuniting Christian churches after the Great Schism of 1054, because, the archbishop felt, Catholicism was the only “true religion”; and the approval of the new Latin Mass by Pope Paul VI, replacing the ancient Tridentine Mass, and, horror of horrors, the legitimizing of Mass in vernacular. Leduc similarly denounced the new liturgy, with the priest at Mass facing the worshipers rather than the altar, shocking him as an affront to Jesus Christ.

Given his odium toward the Council and the “liberal” Holy See, Leduc resigned his archbishopric in 1968, presumably before being fired for his runaway rebellion. Two years later, he founded his Pius V Fraternity, and within four years he ordained his first priests, an illegal act in the eyes of the Church that led Paul VI to suspend him in his spiritual prerogatives. By then, however,
Leduc's “parallel church” was progressing with astounding speed. The archbishop, for one thing, was a highly likable personality and a fine and convincing speaker, particularly to the ears of Catholic conservatives. Young priests swarmed to the seminary he had established at the lovely old town of Mirepoix in Languedoc to spread the Leduc doctrine. Integrism was strong in France.

Leduc, as Tim discovered, had a high opinion of himself. He had designed his own coat of arms in which a bishop's wide-brimmed black hat reposes atop a cross that tapers off as the tip of a sword. The motto, in Latin: “We Believe in Charity.” The archbishop often explained, in all seriousness, “I cannot help it if I am always right!”

“You know, Tim,” the priest-librarian told him, “Leduc is, in effect, a papist against the pope, and he literally believes that he is
plus catholique que le pape.
You may think he is crazy, but don't sell him short.”

Leduc, in fact, had a following not only in France but in a half-dozen countries with Catholic majorities. In Spain, for example, Tim read, a young Catalan priest linked to the Fraternity had become a media star with his “Moors versus Christians” nationwide television program.

Hoping to quell Leduc's rebellion, Gregory XVII received him on November 18, 1978, within a week of his election, but these two strong-minded Frenchmen could not accept a compromise. Negotiations between their representatives trailed inconclusively for nearly three years, then broke down when Leduc refused to budge from his extreme positions. He also described the Vatican Council as a “heresy” and the Church's “self-destruction.” And he compared Gregory XVII to Pilate, rendering further conversations rather difficult to keep alive.

Studying the Leduc dossier, Tim noticed with curiosity that in consecrating his own bishops, the archbishop was in violation of Canon Law promulgated by Pius V and proclaiming that “all bishops” must be nominated by the Holy See. But it was obviously too late for theological and legalistic niceties and technicalities. Leduc was on the offensive, a
blitzkrieg.
And soon after Pope John Paul I died in 1978 after his month-long reign,
Civilita Cristiana,
a pro-Leduc publication in Rome, charged that Church “liberals” had
planned to kill him because they “feared” that he would reverse the reforms mandated by the Vatican Council. Yes, Tim reminded himself, offense is the best defense. Was it part of careful, patient advance planning?

Tim also noticed that the collapse of the negotiations between the Holy See and Leduc's representatives occurred in February 1981. The attack against Gregory XVII occurred exactly three months later, on May thirteenth.

J
AKE
K
URTSKI WAS
stretched on the narrow bed in his cell-like Rome hotel room, furiously chewing on a dead cigar and swearing softly to himself in Polish and in English. He had just left the young Frenchman, his conspiracy contact—he still did not know his name—who had given him startling new marching orders, consisting of a command to turn himself into a cheap hired gun.