Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (12 page)

To those who saw John Paul II in Jerusalem, he seemed a man prepared to spend the last energy of his life on what had brought him there. As he pressed into a crevice of the Western Wall a piece of paper that included as a prayer the words "We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history caused these children of yours to suffer,"
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both the sadness and the suffering seemed very real. And when John Paul stood in the shadows of the hall at Yad Vashem, even those who had hoped to hear a more explicit acknowledgment of the failures of the Church to oppose the Holocaust saw something they could never have expected. "The sight of this pope expressing his sorrow," as the historian Karen Armstrong summed up the event, "surrounded by the symbols of Jewish suffering and in the full knowledge that he was being watched closely by millions of people all over the world, was a far more eloquent apology than any sermon or papal document."
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We will return to the matter of apology later, when the full shape of what requires it has become evident, and when the question of whether the category of apology is adequate can be answered, but here we can recognize the depth of John Paul I Is witness, from the dawn of his papacy, to Auschwitz, to its twilight in Jerusalem. He has put the question of Jewish-Christian reconciliation at the center of Catholic concern, and therefore mine.

John Paul II has begun something, not completed it. Difficult questions remain, and the pope's own cross, still at the death camp wall, embodies perhaps the hardest of them, beginning with the question Jews put to Christians at Auschwitz: Where in your theology of redemption is there any room for the bottomless evil that the death camp had to have been for those who died here? Every question I ask in this book will be a way of asking, How did this happen? But I will do so as a way of asking, How might this not have happened? I will be asking, What choices led to this, and who made them? But I will do so as a way of asking, What choices could have led to something else? In pursuing this inquiry, I mark as a kind of mantra the words of John Paul II, spoken in 1999 and repeated in "Memory and Reconciliation" only a week before his journey of healing. The Catholic Church, he said, is "not afraid of the truth that emerges from history and is ready to acknowledge mistakes wherever they have been identified."
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I am fifty-seven years old, a quarter of a century out of the Catholic priesthood, which nevertheless defines me still. When I left the priesthood, I was distraught and self-obsessed, yet I knew where to begin such work. What I did not know yet was how. And so once again—but this time with the question clear—I carry it back to Jerusalem, where the story begins, and where, during John Paul IPs pilgrimage, its urgency became apparent to the world. This is a story about the cross—as I remember it, as the Church remembers it, and as Jews remember it. Christians and Jews have an obvious stake in such an inquiry, but so does everyone who carries the weight of this history. And who, in our culture, does not?

Hannah Arendt entitled a collection of essays
Between Past and Future,
which evokes the way she pursued the work of history. For Arendt, the present hovers between the remembrance of tragedy past and the desire for a more humane future. But in contrast to the way the past and future are traditionally conceived, for her it is their impact on the present that matters. She quotes Faulkner: "The past is never dead, it is not even past."
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It is the act of memory, cultivated in the present, in which past and future meet. Memory—as opposed to a mere cataloguing of bygone episodes and doctrines—presumes a personal commitment, a sense of urgency, an implicit hope. Doing history as an act of personal and institutional memory, and not merely as the repetition of records or the reassertion of conventional interpretations, is thus an act of responsibility to the future. History differs from memory, of course, because, to use a distinction of the scholar Paula Fredriksen, public knowledge differs from personal recollection. But both presume an active work of imagination, in resistance to the forces of forgetting that block the way. The past must, in effect, be reinvented, albeit in faithful adherence to the facts of the past as they are able to be known, for "history is in some sense testable," as Fredriksen puts it. "It is in its obligations to both evidence and testability that history as a discipline is scientific."
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To expose the biases of the past, however, does not mean one does so free of the biases of the present. It is the nature of bias that the one inflicted with it is the last to know. The study I am undertaking may be no less conditioned than previous perceptions have been. But Arendt's insight is that present experience demands a constant turning to the past, not for the sake of an absolute knowledge, but because the perennially contingent nature of our knowing leaves us no choice but to try to refine it. And in that process, present experience is a constant revelation that reveals the past as never before; equally, the past illuminates the present. "Looking backward," the historian David Landes writes, "we think we know what happened. Looking forward, we have to contemplate diverse outcomes. Such questions focus attention on cause and effect, help us distinguish between major and minor, direct and indirect influences, suggest possibilities otherwise overlooked."
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The discovery that the past might have gone another way is simultaneously the discovery that the future can be different. The present is revealed as far more open to new meanings than official dogma ever has it, and the future takes on added weight as the source of the questions that must be faced. Still the goal is relatively modest—not to offer ultimate answers to what are, at times, impossible perplexities, but, as Arendt said, "to live with them without becoming, as Sartre once put it, a
salami
, a hypocrite."
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I presume to undertake precisely such a work, and I welcome the participation of fellow Catholics, all Christians, Jewish readers, and everyone who recognizes in the Holocaust the dark heart of our civilization. For all of our sakes, may this be a work, in John Paul II's phrase, of moral memory. "May it enable memory to play its necessary part"—his words bear repeating as a kind of anthem—"in which the unspeakable iniquity of the Shoah will never again be possible."
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PART TWO

NEW TESTAMENT ORIGINS OF JEW HATRED

8. My Great-Uncle

I
T WAS THE YEAR
of the Rising against the British, and he died an Irish hero." So my mother was told, as a girl in Chicago, about her father's brother Jim back in Tipperary, and so she told me. She never knew him. Before my mother was born, her father had emigrated from the elegantly named Irish village of Four Mile Water, in the hills above the River Suir. Yet my mother grew up revering the memory of her martyred uncle, one of two Jims for whom I am named. Like her, I grew up attached to the legend. The glow of Jim Morrissey's rebel heroism settled on me, his namesake, as an inherited halo. From an early age, I knew the songs of Irish resistance. Even while fancying myself a Johnny Reb, I carried an image of my uncle linking arms with Michael Collins. The myth would inspire my early novels
Mortal Friends
and
Supply of Heroes.
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When I was ordained to the priesthood in 1969, family and friends gave me envelopes containing checks and money orders—the young priest's trousseau. I took in more than a thousand dollars, a small fortune. As a Paulist, I was bound by a promise of poverty, so there was no question of my actually keeping the money, but—perhaps this was the beginning of my own downfall, my rebellion—instead of turning it over to my religious superior, I bought an airline ticket for Ireland, a first-time trip I would take on my vacation. So it was that I found myself that summer in Four Mile Water, outside Clonmel, Tipperary. I tracked down the house where my grandfather Thomas Morrissey was born most of a century before. I found the family baptismal records in the local church, including Jim's. The priest told me that there had been no Morrisseys in the parish during his time, but one day I struck up a conversation with an old man in the road. He had hitched his horse to the rusted chassis of an engineless truck. When I said "Morrissey," his eyes brightened. He had known Bridgit, he said, the sister Tom left behind. When I asked about their brother Jim, the old gent said, "Sure," and he pointed to a distant hilltop. He explained it was the site of a long-abandoned cemetery. It had not occurred to me that my mother's hero uncle would be buried in Four Mile Water. I had always pictured him at the General Post Office in Dublin, one of the victims of that Easter Week massacre, and of the British punishment of an unmarked grave along the Liffey. But the old man said, "Jim's up on the hill there with the other Morrisseys. You'll find his stone." And I did. I pushed the high grass away to read the inscription: "James Morrissey, RIP." Sure enough, the date of his death was 1916. So the story was true.

What I saw then, while confirming the literal facts of what my mother had been told, turned the myth of my hero uncle on its head. I now made out before his name the letters "Pvt.," and below it was the seal of the British Empire. I read the words "Killed in France." I was confused only for a moment. Private James Morrissey "died an Irish hero in the year of the Rising against the British," but instead of as an Irish Republican Brotherhood rebel, he died as a British soldier, fighting for the king in the Great War.

Nothing I had been told prepared me for that recognition, and a mystery still shrouds it, since the remains of few who died in the trenches were repatriated to Britain, much less Ireland. Yet there it was, that British seal. Only later would I learn that, while 250 Irish rebels took over the Dublin GPO on Easter Monday, there were 250
thousand
Irishmen in British uniform, most of them Catholics like my great-uncle, and most of them serving in France, where the savage killing in the trenches was at its peak. More than 50,000 Irish soldiers would leap from the trenches only to be cut down. The Irish regiments were often the first to go over the top, and that would be especially true after Easter 1916, when the last thing London wanted was a sizable population of trained veterans returning alive to a restive Ireland. At the Somme, a few months after Easter, the Irish went first into the German maw, and were decimated.
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Irish Catholics volunteered for the British Army during the Great War for numerous reasons. Lloyd George had promised that Irish support of the war effort would lead to home rule at war's end, and many Catholics channeled their nationalist aspirations into this hope. Others enlisted for the bonus, which, to an impoverished peasant family, offered the sole chance at a sum of cash. Many Irish girls paid for their passage to America in those years with money their brothers accepted from British recruiters. Some Irish Catholics enlisted because they identified with "wee Belgium," and happily took up the fight against the kaiser. The point is that in the post-Easter Rising mythology of the south of Ireland, these Irishmen were forgotten. The Ulster Brigades in Northern Ireland would be memorialized with poppies every November, but both the Irish Republic and England would wipe out all memory of the Catholic regiments from the south. The martyrdom of Patrick Pearse and James Connolly; the glamour of Michael Collins and the fierce resistance of Eamon de Valera; the diehard extremism of fewer than two thousand members of the Irish Republican Army, when reinforced by the brutality of post-Easter British repression, particularly the marauding Black and Tans—all this took over the entire field of the Irish Catholic memory. For the rest of the century, with disastrous political consequences, the fact that the broad Irish population of 1916, including my mother's uncle Jim, saw London as other than an enemy was simply forgotten. "It was the year of the Rising against the British, and he died an Irish hero." This was true. But in what we had made of it, it was not true. The loss of a full political and social context to an amnesia that was itself shaped by a competing political and social context turned a factual statement into a damaging falsehood.

My subject is not the conflict between the Irish and the English, but rather the conflict between Catholics and Jews. Yet the two illuminate each other, an insight I first encountered in the work of the Catholic scholar John Dominic Crossan, a native Irishman. Discussing what he calls "autobiographical presuppositions," he compares his experience as a postcolonial Irishman with that of the colonized Jews of antiquity.
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Even if my legacy as the great-nephew of a man in the middle differs from Crossan's, my reflections on my own family's version of the Irish-Jewish analogy are inspired by his.

Is it possible that something similar to the way my family misremembered its past happened in the Christian memory? Is it possible that the dominant memory of Christianity's foundational events, a memory that features Jesus' conflict with the Jews and then his followers' conflict with the Jews, by omitting or distorting the full political and social context within which those events unfolded, has enshrined a falsehood?

Crossan and others note that the New Testament records a polemical dispute—or rather, one side of a polemical dispute—between "Christians" and "Jews" that is traced to disputes between Jesus and "Jews." As with my great-uncle, certain remembered "facts" seem clear: Jesus was put to death on a cross, as the Gospels and also the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (37–100
C.E.),
writing at the end of the first century, testify. The main extrabiblical source of information about Palestine in the first century, Josephus was an upper-class Jew who served in the Roman army and wrote about it in
Jewish War.
His patrons included the emperor Vespasian and the emperor's son Titus. Josephus was friendly to Rome, yet the callousness of its colonial administration and the brutality of its war machine clearly come through in his writing. His important work about Judaism is
Jewish Antiquities.
He is regarded by most scholars as a more or less reliable witness,
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although readers should always keep in mind his broad purpose of advancing his brand of establishment Judaism at the expense of marginal groups.