Word: monsignors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...work, he became a Minutante-document writer in the Vatican's Secretariat of State. He also served as a Chaplain to students at the University of Rome, among whom he fought the tide of Mussolini's Fascism, and his work with them won him the title of Monsignor...
While the young Montini studied the works of Catholic liberals, he also listened to one of the Church's last great autocrats-his superior in the Secretariat of State, Eugenic Cardinal Pacelli. In 1939 Pacelli became Pope Pius XII. Monsignor Montini, as a Substitute Secretary of State, was soon embroiled in the delicate Vatican maneuvering between the enemy forces of World War II. It was Montini, evidence suggests, who coined the famous phrase that Pope Pius uttered on the eve of that conflict: "Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost...
...Monsignor Giuseppe Righi, a tall, erect Vatican diplomat, is flying to New York to take up his post as the Holy See's observer to the United Nations. During a stopover at London's Heathrow Airport, he is accosted by a pair of thugs, bundled into a waiting truck and whisked off into the night. When Righi's ongoing flight departs, the "prelate" in his seat is Colonel Vladimir Panin of the Soviet KGB, physically the monsignor's double, and now fully disguised with a black suit, clerical collar, and a briefcase on his knee...
...begins Requiem per una Spia (Requiem for a Spy), a tantalizing espionage yarn that was no sooner published in Italy last week than it drew critical praise for the authenticity of its Vatican and U.N. settings. Small wonder: the author is Monsignor Alberto Giovannetti, 65, a retired papal diplomat of 30 years standing. The stout, deceptively cherubic Giovannetti was the Holy See's observer to the U.N. for nine years; he obviously knows as much about the murky subterfuge that pervades the corridors of the U.N. as Jacques Cousteau knows about the deep...
...that Giovannetti is, or ever was, a spy. Nevertheless, the monsignor readily admits that Requiem for a Spy, which he describes as "part autobiographical" and "part political fantasy," is a roman à clef based on his long experience and his personal acquaintance with a number of spies he has known, if not always loved. "I knew all the spies in the U.N. organization itself, but they were not up to much," he says. "The big spies are in the various delegations. In any case the book is not based on any particular episode, and there is no real model...