To Kill the Pope (38 page)

“But what is there to ‘restore'?” Tim inquired with deep respect, anxious to keep the archbishop talking about his beliefs and the Fraternity. It would be absurd to argue with him. And, with luck, the old man might reveal in his extraordinary vanity what Tim Savage had set out to discover. Tim knew this was his only and last chance to pull together all the strands of the conspiracy.

*  *  *

Leduc, flatly informing Tim that there was plenty to “restore” in the Church after the Second Vatican Council's “vandalisms,” as he called them, his basso voice rising to the rafters, proceeded to expound in the most minute detail, with long Latin quotations, on the doctrines of Trent and Pius V and Pius X. He seemed to enjoy
hugely holding this tutorial for Tim, unmindful of the passage of the hours and the darkness descending on the garden outside. He was not, however, aiding Tim's cause with great revelations.

When the archbishop finally stopped, his narrow lips in a thin, triumphal smile, Tim frantically tried another approach to save the day.

“You are an amazing teacher,” he told the archbishop. “But there is one more thing I would beg you to do, Your Grace. Could you summarize for me the key points of your rejection of the Vatican Council?”

“It's all in my book—the title is
They Have Uncrowned Him: From Liberalism to Apostasy—the Conciliar Tragedy
—and you should have read it, if you are serious about your studies,” Leduc said with a touch of petulance. “Especially the chapter on Brigandage of Vatican II. Brigandage, of course, means depredation by brigands. The word goes back to the Council of Ephesus in 449 A.D. . . . But I shall give you a summary. Pay attention!”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Tim responded humbly.

“In the first place, there is the question of the Decree on Religious Freedom,” the archbishop announced. “It was an incitation to equate error with truth and an assault on the social kingdom of Christ. The Church must safeguard the religious unity in the true religion and protect Catholic souls against scandal and dissemination of religious error, and limit and prohibit, if required, the freedom of false cults. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Tim said. “Very clear. Please continue.”

“And that maniac in Rome, that Gregory XVII, keeps agitating in favor of ecumenism, of the unity of Christian churches,” Leduc spat in disgust.
“He
is in defiance of the Church, not I! He is destroying the Church! He is violating the Second Commandment: ‘Though Shalt Not Have Other Gods Besides Me . . .' Who is
His
God, the god he has placed ahead of the Lord and ahead of Christ? You shall see: this pope will pay for it one day . . . It breaks my heart! And, as you know, I am always right!”

Tim held his breath. What was the infuriated archbishop telling him?

“Pay for it?” he asked, trying to control his voice, keep it normal. “You mean literally? Like with his life?”

“There are many ways of redeeming sins.” Leduc shrugged. “It is always God's will.”

“I understand,” Tim said. “And the other points?”

“Vocem Iucunditatis Annuntiate!”
the archbishop sang out in his rich, deep voice with a French inflection in Latin. “Do you know what it is, Father Savage?”

“Yes,
Declare It with a Voice of Joy!”
Tim answered, smiling despite himself. The old prelate's sense of theater and drama remained intact. “It's the beginning of the Solemn High Pontifical Mass in the Tridentine Rite. The line is from the prophet Isaiah . . . I first heard it when I was a brand new priest in Rome. There was only one church where you could hear a Tridentine Mass, and I was curious. Besides, I love Gregorian chant . . .”

“Exactly!” Leduc cried triumphantly. “It's the Mass! It's liturgy! The Council and the conciliary popes, from Paul VI to Gregory XVII, have betrayed the Church and the religion when they abandoned the great and true Tridentine Mass, recited and sung in Latin—with the Gregorian chant—and proclaimed that Mass would henceforth be said in vernacular, the local language. I say ‘betrayed' because that is precisely what they did: they destroyed the unity of Catholicism that the Latin Mass had provided and replaced it with a Babel Tower of tongues, with no certainty that the prayers were adequately translated. You do
not
translate Mass! You declare it, in Latin, a universal language, with a voice of joy as the Fathers of the Church did . . . Can you imagine the Liturgy of the Word in the vernacular? It's a travesty! The betrayal of the Tridentine Mass symbolizes the subversion of the Church by the Vatican Council . . . Today, eternal Rome is reduced to silence, paralyzed by that other Rome, the liberal Rome, that is occupying it . . .”

Leduc stopped to catch his breath, having failed to point out to Tim that he favored Latin as a dead language, ruling out all risk of liturgical evolution.

“And the liturgy!” he resumed, “Liturgy and the priest! What they've given us is the Mass of Luther! The sense of mystery of liturgy has been shattered. In the past, the priest faced the altar and Christ and the Virgin Mary—and the faithful could not observe his ritual gestures because they only saw his back. That was part of the mystery, the reenactment of Christ's sacrificial death on the
cross, and the priest's prayers were whispered respectfully, not shouted. Now he faces the congregation, and the fervent faith is gone. It is like theater, sometimes with guitars, not a Solemn Mass . . . And the Council has authorized the use of ordinary bread instead of blessed wafers as the Body of Christ at Holy Communion . . . It is pure blasphemy that must be stopped . . .”

“How, Your Grace?” Tim asked.

“I am personally prepared to lead a crusade to remake Christianity as it is desired by the Church,” the archbishop said, crossing himself Tim did not.

“And do not forget that we have a half-million members and followers,” he added threateningly.

*  *  *

Night had fallen, but Archbishop Leduc seemed most anxious to pursue the conversation, inviting Tim to join him for dinner. It was like the previous evening with the abbé at the seminary. It occurred to Tim that perhaps both prelates experienced a deep need to explain their faith and actions at enormous lengths to outsiders likely to understand them and ready to listen. Perhaps they had very few such private opportunities and listeners as avid as Tim. But Leduc having volunteered to lead a crusade to save Christendom, Tim saw an opening.

“You have mentioned a crusade, Your Grace,” he said after they sat down at the table in the rectangular, high-ceilinged dining room decorated with Flemish tapestries, “and this made me think of the Albi crusades here in the Languedoc back in the thirteenth century. With my scholarly interest in heresies, I'd be most intrigued to hear how you judge the Cathar heresy and all that surrounded it.”

Leduc was clearly pleased with Tim's question. Even his icy blue eyes grew warmer.

“Well,” he said, “I am so glad you asked. You see, the Cathars are our inspiration in every way. They led saintly lives. We are very much alike, we share the same objectives—you may wish to call them heresies—and we share the same enemy. The Cathars, too, were in schism. They called Rome the ‘Wolves' Church' and this is what Rome is today. The pope, Innocent III, was determined to eradicate them with the sword and fire of
his
crusade in the early
1200s—he even authorized secular power to burn convicted heretics—and Gregory XVII is determined to do away with me and the Fraternity through more subtle and sophisticated warfare.

“As you probably know,” the archbishop continued, “the pope has resolved to excommunicate me because I propose to consecrate our own bishops—bishops of the Pius V Fraternity—-just as I've already ordained a number of priests on my own authority. The Cathars who, by the way, were very much of an elite, aristocratic religion, had their own bishops, too. They took the view that they were a separate church, which obviously is
not
what the Fraternity has in mind, but we are
reshaping
the Church, and that is not so different, in my opinion. The Cathars fought and died—and killed to defend themselves—for twenty, thirty, or more years. Perhaps the only difference between us is that they battled to resist the Albi crusade while we are the ones who are launching a crusade against the common foe. But it was Divine Providence that, almost eight centuries later, blessed us with the Cathar example, the example of the pure and Perfect Ones . . .

“Naturally,” Leduc added, “we do not share the Cathar theology: we do not accept their Manichaean notion of dualism between the good Lord and Satan with equal powers struggling for the control of the world. And we do not believe that even the most perfect secular Catholics—like their ‘Perfects'—abstain from sex, even for procreation, or that it is a sin to consume foods from animals that engage in sex. Yes, we eat meat, drink milk, and savor cheese, unlike Cathar ‘Good Men' and ‘Good Women.' Every sect is entitled to its practices so long as it does not undermine the fundamental precepts of the Church and religion. For our part, we act—like launching a crusade—when the faith is betrayed, like now.”

“In your crusade, Your Grace, would you countenance killing and death?” Tim asked, looking into the archbishop's hard eyes—thinking as much of his experience with Kurtski this morning as of Gregory XVII's experience with Circlic, the Turk, over five years later.

“That would depend,” the archbishop replied. “You know, a crusade is a war, and in our religion there is such a thing as a just war,
ius bellum,
sanctified by St. Augustine and St. Thomas
Aquinas . . . And there is the old tradition of
Sic Semper Tyrannis
—‘Thus Ever to Tyrants!' ”

“But, then, there also exists in our religion the Sixth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Murder,” Tim ventured. “How does one reconcile all these concepts?”

“I believe it is a matter of absolutely honest judgment—absolute honesty in the eyes of the Lord—that in the end must be trusted by all Christians,” Leduc said. “It's not a question of theological semantics. Popes, too, have killed and killed, even in the absence of an overarching moral judgment.”

“Well, Your Grace, would you countenance, for example, the killing of the papal legate by the Cathars, which Innocent III used to justify the Albi crusade?” Tim pushed the argument, the archbishop visibly enjoying the intellectual skirmish with him.

“Probably not, but for commonsense reasons,” Leduc told him. “The Cathars gained nothing by murdering the papal legate. Remember the Cathars were the nobility elite. All it did was open the way for the pope to demand that the French king, Philippe Auguste, lead the following year with his armies the crusade against the Cathars in the Languedoc. I'm sure you know your history . . . My answer to your question is not that the end justifies the means—that is another school of power philosophy—but that a correct judgment of the circumstances, benefiting the Church and most people, must be made by those of us who are in charge. Do you see what I mean?”

“Why, would you say, Your Grace, the Fraternity enjoys such support in the Languedoc and elsewhere in the South?” Tim asked.

“It's the Cathar tradition,” the archbishop answered. “It is still so much alive here that the people see in our work the preservation of the Cathar spirit. They accept our moral judgments and decisions, and I know that we can count on this support in every instance. The weight of history is with us.”

“But would other Catholics, French Catholics, at least, go along with your crusade, even if pushed to the extreme—like killing in the name of the faith?”

*  *  *

“You seem obsessed with killings,” Leduc said gently to Tim.

They were back in the library, over coffee and cognac, the archbishop
having invited him to spend the night at the abbey, given the late hour. Tim, of course, had no place to go—and no means.

“You will be safe here with me,” the archbishop assured Tim with what the Jesuit could have sworn was a twinkle, slightly malicious, in his eyes. “I knew you had a
contretemps
this morning, but we must not dwell on it.”

“Sure,” Tim said, wondering uneasily how Ledoc already knew about it, “but why did somebody wish me dead? And using a gunman I happened to know from my past? I am not obsessed with killings, Your Grace, but I take a dim view when they come so close to me, personally or institutionally.”

My God, Tim thought, I am smack in the middle of a conspiracy. He shuddered.

Leduc sniffed his cognac appreciatively and turned to Tim.

“Yes, I admit that what happened this morning with you was not the best idea,” he said. “Someone had lost the sense of perspective. It was a wrong moral and strategic judgement. Besides, I did not know you as I think I know you now.”

“Then you must know, Your Grace, that I killed the man who had attacked me—in self-defense and without making any moral judgments,” Tim told him. “Indeed, I was forced to become a killer, something I had always resisted, and therefore I cannot forgive what occurred today.”

“Yes, I am aware of it,” the archbishop acknowledged. “The message was radioed to me here from our people in Fanjeaux. And I must also confess that I had accepted the recommendation from Bishop Laval—he is my good right hand—to have you killed because, as they say in detective novels, you knew too much or you were getting to know too much. As I said, it was a wrong moral judgment and a strategic stupidity, but I take full responsibility for it.”

“Getting to know too much about
what?”
Tim asked, hoping he sounded perplexed. Now he had the scent of blood.

“Oh, come on, Father Savage! You know what I'm talking about . . .”