To Kill the Pope (30 page)

Recovering in his room at the Jesuit Residence from the shock of his Toulouse discovery, Tim resolved that it would be premature to pass on the new information immediately to Monsignor Sainte-Ange. His instinct warned him against it. Besides, his instructions were to find the truth, the full truth, and all he had at this stage was very incomplete truth. He had too much to discover about the “integrists,” whoever they were, the history of their movement—or movements—their milieu, and their backgrounds. He had to identify them, locate them, perhaps even confront them to obtain proof of their culpability. It was Tim's standard meticulous operating procedure to absorb everything
possible before proceeding further ahead, just as he had learned in the CIA.

Emotionally exhausted, Tim wondered vaguely whether he would have confided his new knowledge to Sister Angela, had she been there, and what she would have thought of it, as a Catholic, a nun, and such an intelligent person? He smiled even as he fell into a troubled asleep.

*  *  *

After Tim Savage and his council associates left the room, Faisal sank into deep thought. The imam, now in the seventh decade of his life, never regarded himself as saintly, unlike many learned ulemas and bombastic mullahs he knew. But he did believe that he had always been an honest man in his secular activities and in his devotion to Allah. Tonight, however, he faced an awesome test, a moral dilemma and uncertainty that he must overcome and, if needs be, act on accordingly. As night turned into dawn, Faisal prayed to Allah for guidance and read the appropriate
suras
in the Koran, seeking inspiration and answers. His white goatee quivered and there were tears in his eyes.

Faisal had been profoundly shocked upon learning from the Jesuit priest that he and his fellow Muslims on the Toulouse council had been used—most dishonestly, he thought—by the Catholic believers in helping them to find through their Istambul connection a punishing hand, a murderer, to right a religious wrong. It had never crossed his mind that the intended victim would be the pope, the supreme head of another great monotheistic religion.

The imam and his colleagues had hesitated for long days before deciding whether to honor this request at all. They had been very troubled by the notion of providing assassins even for high religious reasons, although religion could justify murder in very special cases, as narrated both in the Koran and the Old Testament. In the end, they agreed to do so in the name of solidarity among those who wished to preserve the purity of their respective faiths. Christians and Muslims, after all, were children of Abraham, and, quarrels, wars, and crusades notwithstanding, they still had very much in common. However Faisal himself had remained most uneasy even after Istambul had been contacted and the arrangements made.

Now, though, he understood that he may have contributed to a tragedy of historical proportions. He was guilty of sacrilegious criminality in terms of his own cherished moral precepts as well as of religious and secular law. Muslims, who, along with Jews and Christians, recognize Moses as prophet, shared the admonition of the Commandments that
Thou Shalt Not Murder.
Faisal realized tonight how frightfully wrong he had been. Yet, it had happened—and it could not be undone, no matter how he chastised himself. And he hated himself for failing to connect the Turk's attack on Gregory XVII with the Catholics' request for a gunman. Where had his mind been? Was he becoming senile?

But Faisal's torment now went far beyond that dreadful act. Did he have the right to confide in the American Jesuit that the Toulouse council had played a crucial role in helping to recruit a murderer on behalf of the avenging Catholics? Had it been a violation of trust, had it been a betrayal—even after Faisal had learned the terrible truth from the Jesuit? Did he have the right to judge and to compound one immoral act with another immoral act? He sighed and prayed again.

It was already light outside when Faisal concluded that he could not live with such a breach of trust on his part, regardless of the sins of others. One could not be two-faced, it was mandated in the Koran and in the Bible. This left him with only one course of action, shameful and devastated as he felt about it—and about himself.

Faisal gathered his robes and left the store with a heavy step. It was early morning, but the street in the immigrant neighborhood was already teeming with men and women rushing to work—and those—the majority—who had no work, but faithfully congregated on street corners awaiting they knew not what. That would be their day, like yesterday and like tomorrow. From a nearby mosque, he heard the taped voice of the
muezzin
in morning prayer.

At the big intersection a block away, Faisal boarded the city bus, also already thronged, to ride to the other side of Toulouse, across the Garonne. He left the bus on a quiet, old-fashioned working-class street of identical houses and identical dwellers. He walked three blocks to the church of St. Adalbert, a smallish structure covered
with the patina of time. The door was unlocked and Faisal entered. Incense wafted in the air from the six o'clock morning Mass, but the church was empty. Faisal crossed over to the sacristy.

“Good morning, Father,” he said to the tall priest in a black cassock who stood in the center of the room studying the front page of the morning newspaper. He was the same priest, an old acquaintance, who had come to Faisal nearly six years ago, shopping for a murderer.

“There is something I must tell you,” Faisal went on. “A Jesuit priest named Timothy Savage, an American, came to see us last night to ask us what we knew about the assassin who attempted to kill your pope. You hadn't told us at the time that it was the pope you wanted murdered. Thus it was my obligation, as a man of God, to tell him that we had acted on your request. Now it is my obligation, I believe, to inform you of what we have told the Jesuit.”

Faisal bowed in courtesy and left the church. The tall priest had not reacted to his words. He had remained silent, his face stony. When he was alone again, he reached for the telephone on his desk and dialed an out-of-town number.

“I must see you with the greatest urgency, Excellency,” he said softly and hung up. He was pale with anger.

*  *  *

In his room that morning, Tim spent long hours making notes and analyzing the information from the Muslims. What mattered the most were the motives of the Catholic fanatics: Was the assassination attempt an aberration by a few? Was it the work of a small splinter group in the Church? Was it a new schism or heresy? Was it the opening volley in a new kind of Catholic religious war? Did its roots wind all the way back to the Dark Ages and medieval times, back to the first centuries of Christendom?

It was one thing for those “integrists” to invade and occupy churches in France, as they were doing with rising frequency, to parade with posters and banners and to defy the Holy See by consecrating their own bishops and refusing to remain in communion with Rome. But to try to kill the pope was something else again, on a demonic scale. And this time it was not just unleashing rampant mobs, as in the past, to capture the power of the papacy—now it was theological and ideological, a religious cleansing.

Schisms and heresies, of course, dated back to the infancy of the Church, and Tim decided it would be useful to refresh his memory about this aspect of Christian history. It might help to create a context for today's “integrists.” He found it curious that so much Christian heresy had occurred in France.

And the more Tim studied the history of heresy, the more he became convinced that the plot against Gregory XVII was the ultimate expression of a modern heretical defiance of the Holy See. The heretics, naturally, regarded themselves as the only true defenders of the faith, damning the Rome papacy for sullying the legacy of the Fathers of the Church. The Vatican, then and now, saw its theological challengers as heretics in the full sense of the term, the historical sense, and thereby subject to excommunication, a virtual expulsion from the Church, its priests banned from administering holy sacraments.

Heresies were so much a part of the Church's history that a formidable study of
Heresies of the High Middle Ages
that Tim used to teach himself the subject was an 865-page volume in small print. Some of the great minds of theology, he found, had been profoundly engaged in battles against heretics, including the famous St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century; he had even gone to Toulouse to combat the influence of Henry of Le Mans, a preacher described by Church historians as “eccentric but highly popular” as he stirred an anticlerical uproar among the faithful.

Contemporary heretics like Henry of Le Mans and others rallied against the Roman clergy for its hedonism, insisting on the spiritual character of the true Church to the exclusion of its material attributes. Generally, heretics of that time considered themselves as “pure” and, as Tim noted, they were essentially conservative Christians, horrified by the behavior of the organized clergy and the papacy, prepared to kill and die for their beliefs, and in open defiance of Rome. The Church in those days often engaged in simony, which was the buying and selling of ecclesiastical preferment, such as high posts; it was named after Simon Magus, a Samaritan sorcerer. There was also lucrative traffic in indulgences and widespread corruption. There was a touch of heroism about these early heretics, Tim thought, and they were, in effect, the forerunners of today's Catholic fundamentalists. Still,
this gave them no license to perform as radical an act as killing the pope: Today's Church was not corrupt, it was modernizing itself.

Christian heresies went back to Manichaeism in Persia, lasting from the third to the sixth century, and apparently spawning Gnosticism and later the Cathars. These were “dualistic” heresies and sects, proclaiming that two creative and irreconcilable forces—good and evil—operated in the universe. Mani, the father of the Manichaean doctrine, believed in two realms of being, Light and Darkness, each under its own lord, battling each other, and his Gnostic and Cathar descendants accepted this rejection of the idea that God was the Creator of all. Their unanswered question was, “if God is good, whence comes evil?”

Dualism in its many forms, Tim read, was probably the most powerful and the longest lasting of the great heresies—and it was still surviving to some degree in today's south of France as a Cathar tradition. But France also produced heresies in Châlons-sur-Marne, Aquitaine, Arras, and Orléans in the eleventh century; the Orléans heresy was the first “popular heresy”—a mass movement—a century before the advent of Catharism in the south. In the twelfth century, Waldenses heretics, named after Waldes, a rich merchant who underwent a religious experience, emerged in the city of Lyons—they became known as the “Poor of Lyons.” But there also were Messalians in Armenia and Priscillians in Spain in the fourth century, Paulicians in Asia Minor in the seventh century, and the Bogomils, the ancestors of the Cathars, in Bulgaria and Macedonia in the tenth century. Joan of Arc was burned as a heretic in Orléans at the age of nineteen in the fifteenth century.

It was an extraordinary history that Tim was absorbing in great gulps, increasingly certain of its relevance to his investigation. But he had to find ways of relating the past Catholic heresies to the French Catholic “integrism” to understand what had led to the attempt to kill the pope. That France and the Holy See had been perpetually at war since the 1789 revolution—and that to this day both liberal and hard-line Catholic splinter groups were defying Rome—suggested that the conspiracy was French in origin. But Tim needed proof.

“If you're still interested in integrism,” the Jesuit priest-librarian told Tim after the Angelus mass at the Toulouse Residence chapel,
“come to my office tomorrow afternoon and we'll chat. I'll even make coffee for you.”

Both Jesuits and both scholars, Tim and the priest-librarian soon discovered another bond between them: Vietnam. The librarian had been a career French Foreign Legion paratrooper, a
para
as the elite corps was admiringly known, and served as a captain with General de Lattre de Tassigny when Dienbienphu fell to the Vietminh communists in 1954. He had lived a wild youth in the best traditions of the Foreign Legion, but the horror of the Indochina war transformed him, and Jesuits he knew in Saigon after the defeat helped to guide him through the religious revelation. His parents, he knew all along, had been collaborators with the Vichy regime and the Nazis during the German occupation, and this inherited guilt was another reason he sought atonement. Like Tim's, the librarian's vocation for priesthood had been late, and similarly precipitated by Indochina experiences. Nearly twenty years older, the librarian appointed himself to be Tim's mentor in Toulouse and beyond; he seemed to divine his mission, though Tim had never mentioned it in so many words.

A bizarre wooden contraption on the librarian's desk looked to Tim like a prehistoric
espresso
machine, which it actually was, with a glass bubble for heating water inside, and it produced excellent coffee. “I brought it back from Vietnam,” he said proudly, pouring cups for Tim and himself.

“But let's talk about ‘integrists' whom some people call ‘integralists' because they accept unquestioningly the most rigid, antiquated Church doctrines,” the librarian said. “They are quite important and quite dangerous, in my opinion, given their access to powerful Church, political, and economic individuals and organizations. They work overtly and they work covertly. Their most visible and very militant religious institution is the Fraternity of St. Pius V, which may have between a half-million and a million adherents, mainly in France—it was naturally a French idea—but also in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and even the United States. It is a full-fledged schism, with its own priests and bishops, and in full, formal defiance of Rome. In a way, it has already become a separate church, full of hate for the pope and the Holy See. Politically, it is in league with reactionary political parties like the Front
National here in France and extreme right-wingers, even neo-Nazis, elsewhere in Europe. The Fraternity is, of course, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant. During the war, many of the priests who are today Fraternity members collaborated with the Vichy police and the Gestapo in rounding up Jews for transport to Auschwitz and other death camps. Believe me, I am very familiar with this subject: my parents, I regret to say, were
collaborateurs.”