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that dreadful day when an assassin had roamed the Vatican; he had been deeply moved when he discovered the body of his chief on the roof above. But now, for the first time, he sensed the truth of Traeger’s warning. He had seen the assassin. If the man were apprehended alive, it would be Brendan Crowe’s task to say, “That is the man.” But far more than his personal safety concerned him. The double life he had been living for years now threatened to become one life.
    â€œNow.”
    That had been the single word in the message from Catena. He had received it the day before, in a cybercafé on the Via Boezio, using the AOL address he held in the name of John Burke. Burke was only the latest of several names he had used to provide a buffer between himself and the e-mail address that connected him with the Confraternity of Pius IX. It had all seemed a game.
    Not all priests who were assigned to Rome became disenchanted with the all-too-human aspects of Church governance. When John Henry Newman had been named cardinal, he asked and received permission not to come to the Eternal City to receive the red hat. It was better, the Englishman had confided to friends, not to get too close to the engine room of the bark of Peter. Brendan Crowe was one of the disenchanted.
    It had begun while he was still a student, shocked by the heterodoxy of professors teaching in the very shadow of the Vatican. The time came when he wondered if it was he rather than they who were out of line. Surely the wild theories were known by the Curia, by the Holy Father. Vatican II was interpreted in ways that called into question the hierarchical nature of the Church. Now, it was alleged, we are the People of God, not a monarchical bureaucracy deriving from the age of Constantine. The gap between clergy and laity must be closed, as well as that between men and women in the Church. Celibacy, they were assured, would soon be a thing of the past, a reminder of the Church’s failure to understand fully the incarnational character of the faith. Crowe had appealed to old Father Donohue, a fellow Irishman, who taught Church history and was clearly out of sympathy with his more radical colleagues.
    â€œOf course it’s madness,” Donohue said. He had produced a bottle of Irish whiskey and poured half an ounce for Brendan.
    â€œYou’re not having any, Father?”
    â€œI have to keep my wits about me. Such as they are.”
    Donohue developed a theme he had already discussed in his lectures. In the long history of the Church, the period after an ecumenical council was often a time of turmoil. This was particularly true in recent times. Take Vatican I. He went on about Dollinger and Lord Acton and the scourge of modernism, the Old Catholics who broke from Rome. The long view of history seemed to provide all the consolation Father Donohue needed: this too will pass. It had not been enough for Brendan Crowe.
    The teaching going on in the pontifical universities in Rome after the Council suggested that a coup had taken place. It was as if the Reformers of the sixteenth century had been offered professorial chairs in Rome to spread their doctrine. From there it had been a small step to think that a palace coup had taken place in the Vatican itself and that hostile forces were in charge, bringing about the demise of the Church.
    Brendan Crowe had resisted this upsetting interpretation of what was going on in the Church. Who was he to stand in judgment of men far wiser than he, more educated, in positions of responsibility? Perhaps the differences were not as deep as he thought. For years after the Council, as he worked in one of the more obscure dicasteries of the Vatican, disputes about such matters had seemed to him just an exchange of personal opinions, both sides of any issue occupying positions suggestive of authority. And then in 1985, twenty years after the Council closed, at the second extraordinary synod held in Rome, the