Cardinal Katic is fully fictional. There was a Croatian (Yugoslav) Cardinal who participated in the 1978 conclaves, Cardinal Franjo Šeper, who was a curial cardinal serving as the as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position he held from 1968 to 1981. Interestingly, Šeper was succeeded in this position by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who held the position from 1981 until 2005 when he was elected as Pope Benedict XVI following the death of John Paul II.
In 1960, Cardinal Šeper had succeeded Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac as the archbishop of Zagreb. In the book, I made that succession go from Stepinac to Katic, and had the seat of the archbishop moved from Zagreb to Zadar.
To give the book more suspense, I felt it necessary to have a cardinal-elector come from another of the eastern bloc countries allied with the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia, as it then existed, provided the solution as in 1978 it had no Cardinal other than Šeper, and he was based in Rome. The Tito regime had a tenuous and often tempestuous relationship with Moscow, and was never part of the Warsaw Pact, Moscow’s military alliance that served as a counter-weight to NATO. In that sense, Tito’s communist regime had a rather mixed and complex relationship with the Soviet Union.
This was a perfect basis for the mixed and complex emotions felt by Cardinal Katic. On the one hand he was sympathetic to many of the aims of the Tito regime, but on the other he was a Christian, and a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He is suffering the difficulty of trying to serve two masters, and trying to decide how far one can go in the service of one without encountering the trauma of trying to serve the other. For Katic, this is a personalization of the same conflict that the nation’s trapped in the Soviet sphere wrestled with throughout the Cold War. And, like those countries, in the end the loyalty to a philosophy so opposed to one that is more consistent with human desires and emotions causes the former to be rejected in favor of the latter.
I used Zadar (pictured above) as the seat from which Katic serves as the Croatian Archbishop for two reasons. First, it creates a clear distinction between the fictional Katic and the historical Šeper. Secondly, my wife and I visited Zadar while on our 2012 cruise up the Dalmatian coast. Zadar is a beautiful port city, and had suffered the sad history described in Chapter 6, one that included considerable competition and conflict with Venice. I used this history to further complicate Katic’s emotions in following his orders from Moscow. Zadar itself, its barrier islands, and its Cathedral of St. Anastasia, are as described in Chapter 6.
Cardinal Katic also stands in total opposition to Cardinal Krol. Both are uneasy about the roles they are playing for Moscow and Washington, and both must wrestle with serious contradictions. But for Krol these contradictions are largely reconcilable, while for Katic they are not, a circumstance on full display in Chapter 23 when Katic asks for absolution from Krol, as he comes to grip with his personal Segno di Contraddizione (Signs of Contradiction).