Byzantine Plot Burdens Vatican Thriller

The Soviet Union was not responsible for the near-fatal shooting of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981, despite the pope’s powerful support for the Solidarity movement in his native Poland. Nor was the assassination attempt an Islamic plot, though the gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, belonged to a Muslim extremist group in Turkey.

This much seems clear, but much else remains murky in this “ecclesiastical thriller” by Tad Szulc, a former New York Times foreign correspondent whose biography of the pope was published in 1995. While researching that book, Szulc says, he learned that the Vatican, frustrated by Western police and intelligence agencies’ inability to find out who hired Agca--or their reluctance to do so, lest the trail lead to the Soviets--undertook its own investigation.

When Agca was recently released from an Italian prison, it wasn’t just because the pope had personally forgiven him, Szulc says, but because the Vatican had accepted “the findings of its . . . secret inquiry, in effect exonerating the gunman.”

Szulc says promises he made to his sources kept him from giving us a direct, journalistic account of the probe and its findings. Instead, he has written a novel in which the pope, Gregory XVII, is a Frenchman rather than a Pole. The gunman is renamed Agca Circlic. The Vatican investigator--based loosely on the original, Szulc says--is Timothy Savage, an American Jesuit who worked for the CIA before he resigned in disgust over assassinations and torture by the agency’s Phoenix program during the Vietnam War.

Szulc flat-out invents the intermediate villain, Jake Kurtski, who was Savage’s boss in Vietnam and took fiendish delight in the bloody U.S. effort to eradicate the Viet Cong “infrastructure” at the village level. By sheer coincidence, just as Savage gets his instructions from the pope’s private secretary, Romain de Sainte-Ange, the people who hired Circlic to kill the pope hire Kurtski to try again.

Who are these people? Right-wing Catholics, the novel says, led by an Archbishop, Julien Leduc, who would rather split the church than accept the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These “Integrists” were linked to the Vichy government during World War II and trace their anti-papal feelings to the war of extermination waged by Pope Innocent III against Albigensian heretics in southern France in the 13th century.

Alexandre de Marenches, chief of the French equivalent of the CIA, warned John Paul II in advance of the 1981 assassination attempt, Szulc says in an afterword to the book, after which de Marenches died under suspicious circumstances. De Marenches, who was real, is succeeded in the novel by a fictional cousin of the fictional Sainte-Ange. When Kurtski fails to kill Savage, the cousin arranges for Leduc to die in a traffic accident to spare France embarrassment.

The model for Leduc, Szulc says, died in 1991 of natural causes; his published writings are the basis for the words put into Leduc’s mouth. Transparently, we are meant to believe that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Swiss-based Confraternity of St. Pius X, excommunicated by John Paul II in 1988, was the man who, with the aid of unwitting Muslim fundamentalists, hired Agca and his gun.

A charge of attempted murder is a grave thing, at least as grave as commitments to one’s sources. It’s unfair to accuse Lefebvre of so great a crime by insinuation--especially when it’s not always clear what purpose is served by the fictionalizing. As a novel, “To Kill the Pope” is a plodding read, burdened by Szulc’s tendency to “empty his notebooks”--to tell us more than we need to know about the CIA, Vietnam, Rome, Istanbul, the church’s “just war” doctrine, the training of Jesuits, the Albigensian crusade and much else, even as the facts we want to know are coyly and maddeningly disguised.