And when it came to Gregory XVII, what did Tim Savage know about his past, his connections, his commitments?
The fact was that he knew almost nothing about the French pope, now in his eighth year in power, beyond what was in official biographies, shallow newspaper and magazine articles—and usually unreliable Vatican gossip. Without deeper knowledge of Gregory XVII, Tim realized he would be incapable of effectively pursuing his investigation. He had to search for what this pope may have done or said—or stood for—publicly and privately to provoke an assassination attempt, even if the act itself stemmed from irrationality on the part of one or more actors in the drama.
Things never happen in a vacuum, and Tim increasingly doubted that the shooting in St. Peter’s Square five years ago was simply the idea of a mentally deranged individual. Police and tribunal trial records made that quite clear. The guiding principle in the craft of intelligence, as he well knew, was to look for significant clues, no matter how seemingly small or irrelevant, before centering on trails to follow in order to arrive at the ultimate solution. Thus far, Tim had found none.
The official Vatican biographical sketch on a bookshelf at Villa Malta told him what he already knew: that Gregory XVII, now nearly sixty-seven, was the two-hundred-sixty-fourth Roman Catholic pope, that he was the tenth French pontiff in the history of the Church, that he was elected in 1978, and so forth. But Tim’s pursuit turned more and more interesting as he worked his way through further material, as he began to develop something of a perspective on the pope’s life.
* * *
Gregory XVII was born Roland de Millefeuille, the only son of parents descended from a long line of Provençal nobility, on November 11, 1918, the day of the signing of the Armistice ending World War One. As a child, he lived in great comfort at his parents’ family mansion on the left bank of the Rhône, not far from Avignon, where seven French popes reigned for seventy-three years in the fourteenth century. It was near the Philippe-le-Bel Tower, a magnificent thirteenth-century structure. The mansion was his birthplace.
From a thick new biography of Gregory XVII, published in Rome the week Tim had met with Sainte-Ange, he learned that Roland was a most precocious youngster and student, amazing his teachers with his acuity. The boy, it seemed, was endowed not only with extraordinary intelligence, but was kind and friendly, pious and impressively mystical even at a very young age. His parents believed that his mysticism was atavistic, flowing from ancient Provençal traditions of religion and faith—and kept alive as a mystery by the disquieting mistral winds of the south, the mystical poetry of Frédéric Mistral, the great bard who composed in beautiful, romantic Provençal language, and the ancient ballads of the troubadours of the land. There was a hint that this mysticism also had roots in the thirteenth-century crusades against Cathar heretics in Languedoc, just north of the Pyrénées and between Toulouse and the Mediterranean, when uncounted thousands of God-fearing but independent-minded Cathars were massacred or burned at the stake by French armies on the orders of the pope in Rome.
Roland himself wrote his first poem—in French—when he still attended the parochial Catholic grade school. It was an ode to Our Lady of Lourdes, composed after visiting with his parents the Marian Shrine at the Massabielle Grotto, where great miracles were said to be performed in healing the sick through the intercession of Mary, who had appeared eighteen times in 1858 to a fourteen-year-old local girl. Roland’s piety grew during his years at the lycée—he went to church every morning to pray on his way to high school—but he also excelled in Latin, French literature, and history, and was considered to be the best center forward on his Avignon school soccer team.
Tall, athletic, hawk-faced, with a darkish Mediterranean complexion, and known for his Provençal courtliness, Roland was highly popular at school and among his teachers and other adults. Reading the pope’s biography, Tim continuously came across quotations from those who had known Roland in his youth, describing his “phenomenal willpower,” his “determination always to be best at everything,” and his “charm and charisma.” None of these traits seemed to have changed over the years. Even his appearance at the age of sixty-eight did not betray too much the passage of time: he still stood tall and erect, the hawkishness of his strong face giving him a commanding presence.
Tim suspected that there was a touch of hagiography in Roland’s depiction, and was therefore intrigued and surprised by the words of a classmate, quoted in the book, that “Roland de Millefeuille does not tolerate disagreements with his views and opinions.” Actually, Tim had heard rumors and comments that Gregory XVII had placed the Jesuits on a short leash, theologically and politically, believing them to be too assertive, but there was no noticeable evidence of it. The General Superior naturally would not discuss the subject with subordinates like Tim, and the rumors continued to float around the Jesuit community in Rome. But, as he thought about it, Tim began to wonder whether Gregory XVII’s frequent and stubborn rejection of views of others—if it was really the case—might have been a motive for someone to plan his assassination. He stored this idea away in the back of his mind.
After completing the lycée, Roland had opted for priesthood and entered a seminary. He was ordained in the spring of 1940, just weeks before France surrendered to Nazi Germany and nine months after the eruption of World War Two. Not quite twenty-two, and one of the youngest priests ever ordained in the French Church, Roland was assigned by the archbishop of Avignon to a small parish down on the Rhône, an impoverished hilly village of elderly peasant families.
Father Roland spent nearly five years at his parish, until the end of the war, looking after his flock as best he could and hungrily devouring volumes on theology, philosophy, and ethics borrowed from the Avignon archdiocesal library. But he also led something of a double life as an organizer of the maquis, the French anti-Nazi resistance, in his area. The priestly cassock was an excellent cover, and the Germans never suspected the pious young abbé and the old people of the somnolent village, to whom Roland was so devoted, of secret contacts with the Free French. He was subsequently credited with assuring safe passage for scores of Allied officers and men who had escaped from German prisoner-of-war camps and sought to make their way to Spain and on to England. Roland was very heroic and after the war he was awarded the Medal of Liberation.
However, he had also realized, with considerable shock, that quite a few priests in his region had turned over escaped Allied prisoners—and Jews hiding across Provence—to the Nazis. Roland discovered when records were opened by postwar French governments that about 75,000 Jews, including 12,000 children, were deported from France to Nazi death camps between 1941 and 1944 and that only 2,500 survived. He shuddered at the thought that some of the Jews—even a single one—might have been sent to slaughter by his fellow priests.
Roland was deeply disturbed to find out at the same time that after liberation many of these priests often provided safe haven to French war criminals, police officers, and other collaborateurs with the occupiers, tarnishing the Church in France with the brush of extreme rightist coloration. When his own pro-Allied activities during the occupation became known in the aftermath of the war, Roland’s ultraconservative priestly colleagues launched a whispering campaign, accusing him of communist tendencies. Tim read about it with amazement in a magazine article Sister Angela had sent him from the Apostolic Palace in one of her frequent packets of materials. Could this charge loom behind the conspiracy against Gregory XVII after so many years, Tim asked himself, but rejected the notion as wholly implausible. The French Church could not be so deeply divided, its past notwithstanding, he thought. But it was the pope himself who, as a young priest, had delivered a devastating critique of his fellow Frenchmen, charging in a sarcastic sermon that “under the banner of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,” they had transformed the monarchy into an evil empire. Roland was alluding to the prewar Third Republic with its corruption and immorality. That, too, could go for the French Church.
Studying papal materials twelve or more hours a day in his Villa Malta room, pausing only to sleep, eat, and run occasional personal errands, Tim saw Roland’s ecclesiastic career unfold before his eyes. Thus, within a year of the war, the abbé was assigned to Marseille to minister to the faithful and their families in the tough, impoverished port district, the famous Canebière. The Archbishop of Marseille had been searching for an “inspired” priest, and his Avignon colleague, who owed him favors, instantly recommended Father Roland.
Roland spent a year in Marseille, discovering the despair of the urban poor and joining the new movement of worker-priests. In slacks, blouse, and jaunty black beret, Roland labored on the docks alongside the stevedores, helped to run soup kitchens, and at night taught adults literacy. Naturally, he performed his priestly duties as well: from hearing confessions to dispensing advice on family matters, and officiating at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. He also began to write articles about Christian ethics of social justice for progressive Catholic publications. The lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who helped to redefine and modernize social thought in the Church, became his intellectual and spiritual hero. And Roland formed friendships with destitute Muslims from North Africa who, in quest of work, were settling in southern France by the tens of thousands—and creating one more social problem. Marseille was Roland’s first contact with Muslims and Islam, and the beginning of his interest in the religion of Muhammad and His followers. Was this a first clue to what would happen so many years later, with a Muslim Turk firing his pistol at the Roman Catholic pope on St. Peter’s Square? And if so, what did it mean?
There were so many dots to connect in the puzzle. What, for example, was the nature of the connection between Father Roland and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who, according to a one-sentence mention in the new biography, was “well acquainted with Father Millefeuille whom he saw often in Marseille”? Then there was a similarly passing remark suggesting that when the rebellion erupted in Algeria in the late 1950s, Roland, then studying in Rome, openly supported the National Liberation Front’s demand for independence from France. This was not unusual among progressive priests in the French Church, but it left Tim with the impression that the young Father was sympathetic to Islam-linked causes, which, in turn, made it rather unlikely that a Muslim would try to kill him some twenty years later—when Roland already was Gregory XVII. On the other hand, however, Tim was aware that none of it led to logical conclusions, one way or another. He knew precious little at this juncture.
Another potential clue came Tim’s way as he read Roland’s articles on Mission de France, the worker-priest movement with which he had been associated in Marseille. He was struck by Roland’s comments on the struggle between Roman Catholic and communist and socialist unions for the control of the Marseille docks—and his firm identification with the Catholic unions. Tim thought this was interesting enough to warrant further research, and he spent several days at Rome’s National Library going through books on postwar labor problems and rivalries in Western Europe. He found no mention of Father Millefeuille’s name, but what jumped out at him was the story of how the CIA and the American Federation of Labor secretly provided funds to Catholic trade unionists in Marseille—and their silent gangster-longshoremen allies—to fight and defeat the communists. It was, to be sure, ancient history by now, yet it coincided with Roland’s presence in Marseille and his worker-priest involvements. The more Tim worked on his life story, the more of Roland’s footprints materialized in seemingly unrelated and even contradictory contexts. He certainly was an activist in and out of the Church, and activists do tempt fate, even lethal fate.
* * *
Gradually, Roland’s reputation spread throughout the Church hierarchy. One day, he was summoned by the Avignon bishop, still his ecclesiastic superior, to be “informed”—actually it was an order—that he would be attending the Sorbonne in Paris to earn his doctorate in philosophy; he already had the equivalent of a lower university degree through his baccalauréat from the lycée and his seminary studies.
“You are the hope of our Church,” the old archbishop told him. “You have the mind and you have the heart . . . Today, our Church lacks both . . .”
Three years later, at the age of thirty-two, Roland received the doctorate: his dissertation was on Mission de France and its implications for the Church and secular ethics.
The 1950s were the heyday of Church intellectuals and Roland de Millefeuille was a rising star among them. His friends included a bishop from Orléans, himself a philosopher, who had converted from Judaism as a teenager during the war—his parents had emigrated from Poland to Paris and he was born there—and now was a leading thinker among Church liberals. On his advice, Roland applied to the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome to work on a doctorate in theology. His bishop friend had warned him “that it’s no longer enough to have just one doctorate.” Roland’s friendship with the “Jewish Bishop” won him still more hostility among the coterie of right-wing priests. This is interesting, Tim Savage thought, making a note in the fat ledger, the centerpiece of his growing papal dossier.
Roland remained in Rome for seven years, earning his theology doctorate and establishing a wide-ranging network of Curial friendships, a precious investment for the future. Elevated to the rank of monsignor, Roland de Millefeuille was drafted by the Secretariat of State as a speechwriter—in Latin—for Pope John XXIII. Early in 1962, the pope approved his nomination as bishop of the Fréjus-Toulon diocese, a choice appointment on the affluent Riviera; the diocese also comprised the great French naval base at Toulon and therefore high-level military connections.
Back in the south of France, Roland rediscovered his Provençal roots, addressing in Provençal the simple people in the fishing and hill villages, and his wealthier faithful in elegant French. Mass in those days was still said in Latin, the sixteenth-century Tridentine Mass inherited from the Council of Trent and Pope Pius V, its rigid implementor.
Roland, however, believed that for the Church to survive in the modern world, liturgy had to be modernized—and Mass celebrated in the vernacular, the language of the faithful in their country. He frequently wrote and spoke about it, winning further opprobrium among the traditionalist priests who began circulating letters in their dioceses sharply criticizing Roland. The letters attacking the bishop violated Church obedience rules, but the authors were prepared to be in defiance to make their views heard.
As soon as he was installed in Fréjus, Roland had arranged for his seminary friend Romain de Sainte-Ange to join him at the diocese as administrator. They had stayed in touch over the years, though separated by distance, especially during Roland’s long stay in Rome where Sainte-Ange managed to visit him only twice, but as bishop in Fréjus, Roland had the power to choose his deputies for the management of the diocese. At the time, Sainte-Ange was the parish priest of the largest church in Honfleur in Normandy, and there was no problem in having him transferred to Fréjus. Roland could not be happier: not only could he entrust the actual day-to-day administration of the diocese to his friend, but he had also acquired a loyal and absolutely discreet interlocutor with whom he could discuss his ideas about the future of the Church—and his own.
In October 1962, Roland was back in Rome to attend, with 2,859 fellow bishops from all over the world, the Second Vatican Council, convoked by Pope John XXIII to force the Church to enter the modern age. The first Vatican Council had been held in 1869 and 1870, nearly a century earlier. Roland was assigned to the drafting of the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, which, for the first time, authorized the use of the vernacular in celebrating Mass—Roland’s dream—and the drafting of the Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to non-Christian Religions. These were magnificent assignments for an ambitious intellectual prelate, and Bishop de Millefeuille turned into an outstanding figure at the Council. He formed strong friendships throughout the world Church, among Western and Eastern European bishops, North and Latin Americans, Asians and Africans. As he told a biographer many years later, “I was privileged to help build the true universal Church . . .”
Tim Savage found it extremely interesting that Roland had been a coauthor of the Nostra Aetate (In Our Time) declaration, which, in a historical breakthrough for the Church, had affirmed that Jesus’ Crucifixion “cannot be blamed on all the Jews living without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today.” He wondered whether this pro-Jewish stand could have triggered enough resentment among Muslims to result in an assassination attempt, now that Roland was pope? Could it explain why the Turk, a Muslim, was the shooter? Tim knew that most Muslims were not viscerally or fanatically anti-Jewish in the religious sense, but Islamic fundamentalism was rising rapidly—the 1979 revolution in Iran, led by fanatic mullahs, was certainly a worrisome example—and a conspiracy against Gregory XVII could not be ruled out altogether.
But was it not equally plausible, Tim asked himself, that the plot had been hatched by extreme right-wing Catholics, priests, or laymen, who were fundamentalists in their own way? No, he decided, it was too absurd. We are not living in the Middle Ages, when popes were murdered at regular intervals for religious reasons, real or imagined. Tim still had no clues to point him in any convincing direction. He noted that Sainte-Ange had accompanied Roland to the Council, but there was nothing to indicate whether he had influenced his friend in any fashion or how he reacted to conciliar texts coauthored by the Fréjus bishop.
* * *
In the post-Council years, Roland was busy actively building his Church career. In 1967, he was named archbishop of Marseille by the pope. Not only was this familiar territory from his young worker-priest days, but now he had to live with the new realities of France—and of the Church. Algeria’s independence, which Roland had supported from the outset, filled the French Mediterranean coast with Pieds-Noirs, French colonialists expelled from their North African ancestral homes, and still another wave of young Arabs fleeing to the urban centers to find work. Social tensions, already exacerbated by youth rebellions of 1968 across France, were barely controllable in Marseille and along the entire southern coast. The new archbishop had to act as pastor to the faithful; conciliator between employers and workers; adviser to the police, the gendarmerie, and local politicians; preacher of racial and religious tolerance; and executor of Vatican theological instructions. In 1970, Roland de Millefeuille became cardinal, the first name on the pope’s consistory list that year. He was fifty-two years old, full of ideas, energy, and very strong opinions. He moved to Rome once again, this time to be prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, a powerful post rarely given to a newcomer to the College of Cardinals. But the old pope saw the future of the Church in Roland, a notion fully but quietly shared by the new cardinal.
Eight years later, the old pope died peacefully, and his duly elected successor died mysteriously after a month on St. Peter’s throne. The conclave, back at work at the Sistine Chapel, found itself stalemated by the rivalry of two Italian cardinals, rapidly concluding that it had to turn to France, the country that had already provided nine popes. Turning to France meant electing Cardinal Roland de Millefeuille, the charm-blessed intellectual with a social conscience, two doctorates, a distinguished role at the Vatican Council, enviable political and diplomatic acumen, impeccable pastoral credentials, an impressive strength of character—and powerful friends in the College of Cardinals who elect popes.
At sixty, his age was perfect for the papacy: his pontificate would probably be neither too short nor too long, which was the way cardinals wished it to be. Thus Roland de Millefeuille of Avignon became Pope Gregory XVII, the pontiff of the enchanting smile and steel-trap mind. The cardinals explained that they had been inspired by the Holy Spirit.
Gregory the Great, as Tim Savage noted, wrote once: “I am ready to die rather than allow the Church of the Apostle Saint Peter to degenerate in my day.” That was in the sixth century. Roland de Millefeuille would do no less in the twentieth century.
* * *
Tim Savage finally put down Gregory XVII’s biography, having underlined what struck him as revealing passages, making copious notes in his ledger, and placing questions and exclamation marks wherever something had caught his special attention. In the ledger’s section dealing with the pope’s personal history, Tim wrote, CONCLUSION: MANY ENEMIES—MANY FRIENDS, then listed names, organizations, and governments in each column, assigning plausible but tentative motives under MANY ENEMIES. He chose not to put down comments under FRIENDS; his intelligence training had taught him that one could never be certain who might be on his trail, following him, possibly breaking into his room, and finding the ledger, though it was locked inside a safe Tim had bought. Mild paranoia is part of the craft of intelligence. His comments about ENEMIES were essentially obvious, and it would not really matter if they were read by one or another of the “enemies.” Comments about “friends,” however, should not fall into the wrong hands; it was none of the business of the “enemies” who were the significant “friends” of Gregory XVII and how they could be relied upon in the course of Tim’s investigation.
Studying Church history at the Jesuit seminary, Tim had naturally become familiar with endless schisms and heresies, great and small, divisions, internecine battles, and conspiracies of every imaginable type affecting Christianity over the past two millennia, or nearly so, since the dawning of the Christian era. But now Tim was curious about the relations over the centuries between France and the Holy See, hoping that he might come upon some useful lead. It was uncanny how history, even fairly ancient history, could help one comprehend certain contemporary realities. Religions and nations have eternal memories, always ready to act upon them. Wars, civil or otherwise, over religion and its interpretations had been as common in the first Christian century as they were in the twentieth: they involved early Christian heresies; battles over the Protestant Reform; modern fundamentalism among Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims; conflicts between Muslims and Hindus; and so on and on. And in the case of France and the Roman Church, history was unbelievably intractable, contradictory, petulant, and violent.
* * *
It began in the second half of the fifth century when Clovis, king of the Salian Franks, converted to Christianity—his Christian wife, Princess Clotilda, had long urged him to do so—in gratitude to God for victory over his enemies, the Alemanni, the Germans of the day. Clovis was baptized by St. Remigius in Reims on Christmas Day of 496, along with three thousand Franks. Becoming one of Europe’s most powerful rulers, Clovis made Paris the capital of his kingdom, erecting the Church of Holy Apostles, known later as St. Geneviève’s. His soldiers were armed with battle-axes known as franciscas, one of France’s early claims to glory. Today, as Tim learned, Clovis is still celebrated by the Church as the hero who made France its “First Daughter.”
Urban II, the first French pope, who reigned for thirty-seven years from the late eleventh to early twelfth century, was a passionately obsessed and zealous Church reformer. He was determined to make the Church pure, excommunicating in the process Catholic sovereigns across Europe and savagely persecuting bishops and archbishops who resisted reform and insisted on corrupt practices. He was, of course, the same pope who had proclaimed the First Crusade against the Islam “infidels” of Palestine in 1095. Did Islam fundamentalists today remember that crusading Frenchman? Probably not, Tim decided, but made a notation under ENEMIES in his ledger.
At the outset of the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III, an Italian, launched the European crusade against Cathar heretics—also known as Albigensians—in the south of France in alliance with the French king, Philip Augustus, whom he had earlier attempted to turn into his vassals. The Albigensian Crusade soon exploded into a civil war between northern and southern French aristocracy, with Innocent III fully in support of Philip Augustus and the northerners. Tens of thousands of the southern heretics, the “pure ones,” were burned at the stake or otherwise liquidated with the pope’s enthusiastic blessings. This put the French in Innocent’s debt, not long after northern French priests and laymen loudly demanded independence from Rome for their Church.
Reading up on the Cathars, Tim was uncertain how they should be listed in his ledger: as FRIEND or ENEMY? He was now aware that this ancient heresy and its dreadful consequences had not been forgotten. Thus Frenchmen in the south may feel atavistic hatred toward Rome and the northerners may feel gratitude—or none of the above. Besides, this was Gregory XVII’s corner of the world. Tim just placed a question mark over the episode; his instinct told him that it was not unimportant in the broad scheme of things.
A half-century later, France surged as Europe’s superpower, forcing the papacy into submission to the French crown. Curiously, the French power had been consolidated by Louis IX, a pious king who was later canonized by the Church. During the fourteenth century, relations between the Roman Church and the French oscillated crazily. Elected in 1305, the French pope Clement V refused to reside in Rome because of internal Italian conflicts and, instead, established Avignon as the pontifical See for a long period of what was called the “Babylonian Exile” of the popes. The Church became even more submissive to France. With five more French pontiffs ruling from Avignon and the College of Cardinals packed with Frenchmen, the Church soon resembled a French institution. Only in 1362, Urban V, himself a Frenchman, returned the Apostolic See to Rome.
In 1404, cardinals in Rome elected as pope a Neapolitan who took the name of Innocent VII, but who had to compete with Benedict XXIII, a Spaniard and the second of the four “antipopes” elected by French cardinals in Avignon and who held court at Avignon. This was the time of the “Great Schism” in the Church, pitting Rome against France. Benedict, of course, had the support of the French crown. Gregory XII became pope in 1406 on Innocent’s death, but he and Benedict could not come to terms. Meanwhile the French Church turned its back on Benedict, and Martin V, an Italian, was chosen in 1417, ending the “Great Schism.” At that point, Tim Savage’s head had begun to swim as he strove to understand the vagaries in the conflicts between France and Rome.
But, inexorably, the story went on. The French and the papacy could not leave well enough alone. Late in the fifteenth century, Charles VII of France occupied Rome on behalf of a clique of rebel cardinals, and threatened to depose Pope Alexander VI. For the next three centuries, Rome and Paris swung back and forth between conflict and collaboration—in power politics, not theology—until the milestone of the French Revolution.
The 1789 Revolution had declared a full-fledged war on the Roman Catholic Church, for which the Holy See has not really forgiven France—to this day. In fact, Tim knew an aging monsignor who spoke of François Mitterrand, then the French socialist president, in the same spirit as he spoke of Robespierre. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign led to the occupation of Rome by his armies and the capture of Pope Pius VI, who soon thereafter died in exile in France. But five years later, Pius VII anointed Napoleon as emperor, transforming the monarchy into an empire. Five years after that occasion, Napoleon annexed the Papal States in Italy and deposed his erstwhile friend Pius VII, removing him to France. It was a far cry from Christmas Eve in 800 A.D. when Charlemagne, an earlier emperor, lay prostrate in St. Peter’s basilica waiting for anointment by Pope Leo III. But when Napoleon finally fell from power after Waterloo, Pius VII returned to Rome in triumph. In the end, the Church always seemed to win.
Still, the rivalries continued. Pope Pius IX had been forced to flee Rome by the 1848 liberal revolution in Italy, but French armies restored him to power two years later. The papacy was protected by France until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the defeated French had to concentrate on their own affairs. In 1901, the French Third Republic demanded that religious orders—from the Benedictines to the Jesuits—leave the country, closed 14,000 Catholic schools, and confiscated Church property.
A lot of this long history was plain power-hunger warfare, bloodshed, and intolerance among some of Europe’s most civilized people. With rare exceptions, the kings and the popes were not shining examples of virtue—most were capable of unspeakably dastardly deeds. Tim marveled that so much mischief and criminality on the part of the enlightened rulers and their courtiers could belong to the same epochs as much of Europe’s splendid culture and creativity in arts and human thought.
Evidently good and evil could coexist happily in the Dark Ages as well as during the Enlightment. But, then, Tim thought, things were not all that different nowadays. It was just as plausible to kill a pope today as at any moment in the history of mankind and religion. The mindset was always present and there were always plenty of devout volunteers—not just mercenaries—believing that they were God’s instruments in doing away with popes they thought were betraying the Church. For Tim, papal history offered valuable perspective he had lacked, and quite a few key findings. They included periodic outbursts of protest, resentment, and even violence by extremist French clerics and their followers against the papacy, especially after the Second Vatican Council in the mid-Sixties. Tim duly noted them in his ledger. Now he had to consider that the assassination attempt against Gregory XVII could, after all, have come from within the Church, discarding the conventional wisdom that it had to be plotted, say, by Moscow or Muslims—to the exclusion of other possibilities. On the other hand, conventional wisdom might have had it right.
Tim’s research fascinated him as he delved deeper and deeper in the materials he was receiving from Sister Angela. But he was totally exhausted when he finished reading the hundreds of pages on the history of the papacy in the early morning that June day. Despite the newly acquired perspective, he had no sense of having achieved any meaningful progress in his work. All he had after a month of study were half-formed ideas and suspicions. Suddenly, he felt hopeless and depressed.
The sun was already hot and bright when Tim stepped out of the Villa Malta gate to walk down Via di Porta Pinciana to the convent at the bottom of the street. He entered the chapel and prepared to celebrate the Mass of 6.30 A.M., the first of the day, for the few pious elderly women who attended it daily. Tim did this once or twice a week. Saying Mass and being in communion with God always cleared his mind and restored his inner balance. This morning, Tim Savage needed it more than ever, certainly since his tour in Vietnam.