To Kill the Pope Read Online Free PDF Page B

della Conciliazione. The broad avenue led, west-east, to the Vatican from the Tiber and Castel Sant’Angelo, where a head of the Jesuit order was imprisoned by Pope Clement XIV over 200 years ago. The street was a triumphal gift to Rome from Benito Mussolini, and had required the razing of hundreds of ancient houses. Tim walked slowly toward his office, meditating every step of the way, wondering how he was going to carry out his instructions. It would not be in his nature to admit failure, particularly on a mission for this particular pope.
    Gregory XVII had the reputation of being a very exacting man. As the first foreign pope in almost half a millennium, he also was the tenth French pontiff in history. It once made France the “First Daughter of the Church,” but now an often disobedient one, and the second-largest purveyor of Roman popes after the Italians. Gregory XVII was the first French pope in 607 years, following in this Gallic tradition Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who had taken the name of Gregory XI and reigned for a year from 1370 to 1371. Theimmediate previous two popes were also Frenchmen, Urban V and Innocent VI. The first French pope was Urban II, né Oddone di Lagery, who ruled for eleven years, between 1088 and 1099, and was famous for proclaiming the First Crusade in 1095, a papal precedent many French would come to curse before very long. Gregory XVII took this name because Gregory the Great, who straddled the sixth and seventh centuries, was his role model. He also wished to honor the previous French Gregory, the eleventh, and his predecessor of this name, Gregory XVI, a pleasant Italian who occupied St. Peter’s throne from 1831 to 1846, just before Europe’s “Spring of the Peoples.” The present pope certainly would not choose to be identified with Gregory IX, the thirteenth-century Bolognese lawyer who endorsed legislation authorizing secular powers to burn convicted heretics at the stake and who instituted the Great Inquisition in 1231. It was another papal precedent that would martyr much of France. Eight centuries later, it was history Gregory XVII could not afford to ignore.
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    Tim Savage himself had experienced memories and mysteries of death that he could not erase from his mind.
    Displayed in the place of honor at his office was the neatly folded Stars and Stripes that had been ceremoniously handed to Tim’s mother by an Air Force general after his father had been killed in a fiery crash of his B-25 bomber during World War Two. Tim was two years old at the time, and he already understood death. His father’s bomber had been shot down by the Germans over Monte Cassino, the site of the hilltop Benedictine monastery where the Nazis long resisted the Allied advance across Italy. It was one of the most stubborn battles of the war, and the monastery was leveled along with its famous medieval libraries. After he had come to live in Rome, Tim made a pilgrimage to Monte Cassino every year, leaving flowers over ruins that still lay there. He had no idea where exactly his father’s body reposed.
    Then, very much later, there was the Arab youth, his throat slashed, in a narrow Cairo alley. Tim was twenty-six at the time. And, still later, when he was thirty-two, there was the haunting face of the dead peasant woman, a tiny cross on a chain around her neck, outside her burning hut in that little village in Vietnam.And there had been others whose deaths had been part of his life.
    But now that he was a middle-aged Jesuit in Rome, neither feeling nor looking the age that follows youth, Tim remembered that past though he was no longer condemned to live and relive it. His quiet sense of humor had returned. His intelligence was as intense as his penchant toward independent thought, not an uncommon Jesuit trait. He was calm and relaxed most of the time. Courtly and friendly, Tim was likable in the eyes of both men and women. He was, of course, aware of