To Kill the Pope (5 page)

The whole scene added up to faith and devotion, curiosity and recreation, and a never-ending business bonanza. Foreign currency bank exchange counters—the modern-day money changers in their temples—adorned both sides of Conciliazione. The trivialization and commercialization of religion was absolute. And the Vatican, too, participated in it, selling tickets to the Sistine Chapel and Holy See postage stamps, and charging foreign television crews for filming inside its walls. It was reminiscent of the selling of indulgences once upon a time. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Vatican had been enmeshed earlier in a mind-boggling scandal involving its own bank, along with Italian banks, with one top executive found hanging under a London bridge and other officials, including priests, under a dark cloud.

Tim Savage, feeling the rising heat of the late morning through his black ecclesiastic uniform, followed Conciliazione for two long blocks, then turned left into Via dell'Erba, a narrow street consisting entirely, on its western side, of an ancient
palazzo
that had been turned into a Roman Curia office building. The headquarters and offices of some of the Holy See congregations, pontifical councils and commissions, and other organizations forming the government of the Church under the pope are outside the Vatican proper, spilling out to adjoining avenues and streets, even as far away as the beautifully historic Santa Maria in the Trastevere
neighborhood. The State of the Vatican covers only 109 acres, taken up mainly by St. Peter's Basilica and the square, the Apostolic Palace, the Vatican Library, the vast Paul VI Auditorium where the Wednesday General Audiences are now held, the magnificent Vatican gardens, several administrative palaces, a tiny railroad station, and the duty-free shop for Vatican employees, and, quietly, their secular friends.

*  *  *

The building at Via dell'Erba 1 houses the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity, and the Commission for Religious Relations with Jews. The Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims functions under the Inter-Religious Dialogue Council, both headed by a highly respected Third World cardinal. The Muslim Commission has offices on the ground floor of the Via dell'Erba building, and this was where Father Timothy R. Savage, S.J.—Tim to his friends—has been working for nearly two years as a full-time consultant—
consultore
—in recognition of his expertise in Muslim and Arab religious and political affairs, and his command of spoken and written Arabic, though mostly as spoken in Cairo.

Tim was one of the very few English-speaking priests who were Islam experts—English having only recently replaced French as the scholarly and political language in the Muslim world—and the president of the Muslim Commission had been overjoyed at recruiting him from the Gregorian University to which he had been attached. And now, Tim realized, it was the pope's turn to recruit him. He allowed himself to be pleased—and challenged—by the assignment as the first shock of the meeting with Sainte-Ange began to wear off. But of course Tim would resist the sin of pride, even in his mind.

There was a pleasantly international atmosphere in the Via dell'Erba building and its councils and commissions—something like a Ministry for Foreign Religious Relations—that was unlike the other musty Curial congregations and institutes where mind-dulling Italian Church provincialism still prevailed. Here, people continuously came and went on missions, overt and covert, to and from every continent and nation where the
Vatican had an interest, which meant virtually everywhere. Just before entering the main door, Tim noticed with a touch of wistfulness a young man in jeans leaning against the building wall, one hand around the waist of a pretty young woman, the other holding a cellular phone to his ear and talking away. “I hope it works for you,” Tim said silently to the boy.

Inside his office, Tim removed the jacket of the suit, rolling up the black sleeves. For his visit to the Apostolic Palace today he dressed up in full Jesuit attire; he had even pressed the crease in his black trousers. Tim had been summoned only the previous evening when, without any further explanation, the general superior of the Society of Jesus, his top boss, had instructed him by telephone to be at Sainte-Ange's office at ten o'clock the next morning. He further instructed Tim to enter the Vatican through the Bronze Doors, used mainly by pilgrim groups, rather than through the Sant'Anna Gate. “It's less ostentatious that way,” the general said.

Tim had met the French monsignor only once, just before Easter, when he accompanied the rector of the Saudi Arabian Islamic Theological University to a private audience with Gregory XVII. Their entire conversation consisted of Sainte-Ange ordering him not to follow the rector into the pope's private study. Escorting Muslim dignitaries, clerics, and scholars who had business at the Vatican of one kind or another was among Tim's duties at the Commission, and when the general called him, he assumed it concerned a similar occasion.

In the morning, as he dressed in his room on the top floor of Villa Malta, the Jesuit residence perched atop steep Via di Porta Pinciana in downtown Rome, Tim's only concern was to be free as soon as possible to go to his office and to get on with his current work—an analysis of the situation in Iran seven years after the Islamic revolution had toppled the shah. The Secretariat of State had ordered it as a top priority in preparing a confidential mission to Teheran. Relations with Muslim countries were very much on Gregory XVII's mind, especially after the Iranian upheaval that had followed his election to the papacy in 1978 by a few months. As a Frenchman and long archbishop of Marseille, he was familiar with Muslim North Africa and its religious and political problems,
and now he was absorbed by the situation in the Middle East and along the Persian Gulf The papal desire to be fully informed on these matters had kept Tim busy ever since he joined the staff of the Commission for Relations with Muslims two years earlier, the only American there.

Normally, Tim took the bus from Via del Tritone to Via dell'Erba. But today he decided to travel in style to the Apostolic Palace—in a taxi—even if it took a bit longer in the suffocating Rome morning traffic and cost more.

“Buon giorno, Padre,”
the smiling driver greeted him after Tim asked to be taken to St. Peter's Square. “Are you on your way to see the Holy Father?” Returning the smile, Tim said, “Yes, of course . . . I see him every day!” Both men laughed happily.

1942

F
OR A CHILD
of a traditional, middle-class American Catholic family, a personal visit to the “Holy Father”—or, at least, to the power center of the church that commands one billion faithful—was an amazing occurrence. Tim Savage was keenly aware of it as he had walked past the black-and-orange-clad Swiss Guards at the bottom of the Bronze Doors on his way to see Monsignor Sainte-Ange. He felt the frisson of adventure.

Tim was the youngest of three Savage children. His sister Julia was a Foreign Service officer who had attained the rank of ambassador of the United States and now served as envoy to Brazil. The middle child was Anthony, who had graduated from the Harvard Law School and was a partner in a well-connected Washington law firm, specializing in powerful foreign clients, ranging from multimillionaire Palestinian contractors living royally in London to Asian finance ministries. The family of Captain James W. Savage, killed in combat over Italy, had done superbly.

Tim Savage was born in Washington at the end of the first full year of America's entry into World War Two, a year after Pearl Harbor. His father had come back on short home leave just before Tim had turned two years old: he saw his youngest only that one time before dying. Tim, of course, had no recollection of it. Two years after the end of the war, Tim's mother married Jim Stella, an Air Force officer who had been Captain Savage's best friend. Highly decorated for service in World War Two and Korea, he had retired as brigadier general by the time Tim entered the priesthood.

With Stella as his stepfather and his devout mother, Tim's childhood and adolescence, like Julia's and Anthony's, were years
of strict, traditional Catholic upbringing. He attended a parochial school a few blocks away from the family home, a rambling old house off Reservoir Road below Georgetown, near the Potomac, which had belonged to his mother's wealthy parents. Next, Tim went to the Jesuits' fashionable Gonzaga College High School on “I” Street in the Northwest. That was the period of the “Catholic Ghetto” in Washington, as it was called, but Gonzaga catered to the capital's Catholic elite.

And for Tim's family it was Mass every Sunday, confession at least once a month at the Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, their church for decades, and the observance of all the religious feasts: Ascension and Corpus Christi, not just Christmas and Easter. His elementary education, before the parochial school, had been at the Holy Trinity Grade School.

Graduating from Gonzaga with both athletic and scholastic honors, Tim entered Georgetown University. It had always been assumed in the family that he would apply—and be accepted—at the great Jesuit University in Washington, just as Julia and Anthony had done. At first, Tim was not entirely certain about his major though he knew that his inclination ran toward humanities, not sciences. He had selected ethics as an elective course—it attracted him intellectually, and it addressed the ancient Catholic concern, back to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, with concepts of good and evil. As luck would have it, it brought him into the classroom of Father Hugh Morgan. That opened wide horizons for Tim—and the fascination with Islam would follow, Father Morgan being an Islamic scholar as well as an ethicist.

The early sixties were a bracing, exhilarating time in Washington. Young John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic to be an American president, had launched the “New Frontier,” and the nation's new generations were swept up in a wave of idealism. The new president promised peace, racial equality, and, among other ambitious initiatives, launched the Peace Corps, the most exciting expression of youthful American idealism in a rapidly changing world. That the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, organized by the Central Intelligence Agency, had failed and Kennedy had dispatched the first military “advisers” to Vietnam were tiny clouds over the “New Frontier” and its euphoria.

It seemed to be a time of universal renewal. In one of their increasingly frequent chats, Father Hugh called Tim's attention to Vatican Council II, which Pope John XXIII had just inaugurated in Rome. John XXIII and John Kennedy were the world's most popular and attractive leaders.

“The idea is to streamline and modernize the Church,” the priest had told Tim. “This is the first great Council in nearly a century—since 1870—and I'll bet you that the Catholic Church will never be the same again. Nor will the papacy. It was heroic on the part of the Council, for example, to replace the Latin Mass with Mass in the vernacular . . . So I think that the renewed Church will be in dire need of brilliant young priests, superbly educated, to carry out the decisions of the Vatican Council . . . And, you know, we in the Church need idealism, too. There will be powerful forces, even within the Church, fighting us and there will be great battles . . .”

Father Morgan had refrained from direct suggestions that Tim turn toward priesthood; they had an unspoken agreement not to return to the subject after Savage had declined the original hint to make the Church his life. Nevertheless Tim was very much interested in the Vatican Council as a significant event in history, and Morgan supplied him with a steady flow of information and documents over the Council's duration—a period parallel with Tim's Georgetown undergraduate studies. In his senior year, Tim had added a course in Church history to his curriculum.

*  *  *

One afternoon, a few weeks before graduation, when the Georgetown campus was a sea of azaleas, tulips, and dogwood, Tim was invited to tea by the dean of the School of Foreign Service to which he had applied for postgraduate studies. His sister Julia, then just starting up the hierarchy of her spectacular State Department career, had been pushing him in that direction. Entering the dean's office, Tim was introduced to a middle-aged man in hornrimmed glasses, expensively casual gray slacks, a tweed jacket, white shirt, and rep tie. He wore it like a uniform.

“This is Mr. Billington from the Central Intelligence Agency,” the dean said. “He asked to meet you.”

Tim nodded, mystified. He had never encountered anyone from the CIA. But Billington wasted no time on small talk.

“The CIA is actively recruiting employees, a lot of them on the best campuses in the country,” he briskly informed Tim. “Your name came to our attention as a promising prospect, and the Dean here was kind enough to arrange for us to meet. I hope I can interest you in a CIA career. You know, as the President said, it's ‘what you can do for your country.' ”