The next morning, Mother decided it was time for therapy. The psychiatrist was an old Jesuit with an office that smelled like wet books and clove cigarettes. On his desk was a signed picture of Pius XII, the pope who said Freud was a pervert and Jesuits shouldn’t smoke. My mother asked if I should wait outside, but the doctor said it was only an informal evaluation, and if Simon needed treatment, she would have to wait outside as well. So my mother, in tears, took her one chance to ask if there was a medical term for Simon’s problem. Because the term in all the magazines was “death wish.”
The Jesuit asked Simon some questions, then asked to see where the drumstick of his thumb was sutured back to his palm. Finally he said to my mother, “Signora, are you familiar with a man named Maximilian Kolbe?”
“Is he a specialist?”
“He was a priest at Auschwitz. The Nazis starved him for sixteen days before poisoning him. Kolbe volunteered for this punishment in order to save the life of a perfect stranger who would have been killed instead. Would you say this is the sort of behavior that concerns you?”
“Yes, Father. Exactly. Do you have a name in your profession for men like Kolbe?”
And when the Jesuit nodded, my mother cracked a hopeful smile, because anything with a name might have a cure.
Then the doctor said, “In my profession, signora, we call them martyrs. And in the case of Maximilian Kolbe, we call him the patron saint of this century. A death wish is not the same as a willingness to die. Take heart. Your son is just an unusually good Christian.”
One year later, Mother escaped her greatest fear: that she would outlive Simon. And the last thing she said to me before she died, other than I love you, was: Please, Alex, watch over your brother.
By the time Simon finished seminary, it looked as if he might not need the watching. He was asked to become a Vatican diplomat, an invitation that only ten Catholic priests, out of four hundred thousand in the world, receive each year. It meant studying at the most exclusive Church address outside Vatican walls—the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy. Six of the eight popes before John Paul were Vatican diplomats, and four were Academy men; so other than the Sistine Chapel during a conclave, no place on earth is likelier to house a future pope. If Simon remained in diplomatic service, the sky was the limit. All he needed to do was avoid giving away the family silverware.
Still, it seemed a surprising choice for my brother. There are two dozen departments in the Holy See bureaucracy, and if Simon had chosen a job at almost any other, he could’ve stayed at home. Everyone would’ve welcomed him at our father’s old haunt, the Council for Promoting Christian Unity, or he could’ve made a statement by joining the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, which defends the rights of Eastern Catholics. Uncle Lucio, like most Vatican cardinals, had been given a few extra appointments outside his bailiwick, so he had suggestions of his own: the Congregation for the Clergy, or the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, where he could help nudge Simon up the ladder. And of all the reasons Simon had for turning down the Secretariat, the biggest was our family’s history with its leader, the Vatican’s second-in-command, Cardinal Secretary of State Domenico Boia.
Boia came to office just as communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe. The Orthodox Church was reemerging after years of enforced atheism behind the Iron Curtain, and John Paul tried to offer it an olive branch—only to find his new secretary of state standing in the way. Cardinal Boia mistrusted the Orthodox Church, which had split from Catholicism one thousand years ago in part because of disagreements over the pope’s power. Orthodox consider the pope to be, like the nine patriarchs who lead their Church, a bishop worthy of special honor—first among equals—but not a superpower, not infallible. This seemed dangerously radical to Boia. So began a silent struggle in which the second-most powerful man at the Vatican tried to save the pope from his own good intentions.
His Eminence began a campaign of diplomatic snubs against the Orthodox that would set back relations by years. One of his most ardent helpers was an American priest named Michael Black, who had once been my father’s protégé. In Simon’s eyes, no department could have embodied hostility toward our father’s ideals more than the Secretariat. Yet instead of refusing the invitation, he seemed to take it as a sign. God wanted him to take up our father’s work of trying to reunite the Churches. And the Secretariat was where He wanted it done.