Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (28 page)

***

I am sixteen years old, kneeling next to Mom on the cold marble step of a columned railing in a corner of the largest church in the world, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome—a religious version of Constantine's palace. My family is soon to have the private audience with Pope John XXIII referred to earlier. The privilege, as I said, was due my father as a general and a Catholic. My mother has status too. She will be congratulated by His Holiness, as she has been by Cardinal Spellman, for her work as president of the Military Council of Catholic Women. Her position involved, for one thing, arranging a series of members' pilgrimages to holy places. Mom had taken a few preliminary trips herself, and I had accompanied her to several Catholic shrines, mostly in Germany—journeys I would retrace for this book.

But now, at sixteen, beside her, I am staring at the wondrous face of another mother, for we are kneeling at Michelangelo's
Pietà.
I glance at Mom. Her eyes are liquid, and I guess that they are fixed on the nail hole in Jesus' otherwise perfect right foot. His calf muscles and knees and thighs are toned and slim like an athlete's. The skin is taut across his ribs. His lifeless right hand rests just off the fold of Mary's dress. His left hand falls toward her lap. Each hand has its hole.

The fingers of Mary's right hand press out from below his armpit. Who has ever touched you there? His head is cradled in the crook of her arm, which is why his face has fallen into its repose. Jesus is dead, but he knows she has him. Theology says that—
consumatum est—he
gave himself over into the hands of his Father, but Michelangelo thinks otherwise, and what sixteen-year-old son would disagree? Who needs a father with a mother like this? The magic of the
Pietà
is in Mary's youth. The law of generation requires her to be at least middle-aged. In first-century Palestine, middle age would be old. But not here. Michelangelo's sculpture is luminous, as if lit from inside by her youth. It is the girl who glows. She has the complexion, the untouched lips, the swan-like, unwrinkled neck of a fifteen-year-old. She is Juliet holding naked Romeo, yet chastely. Death was the only consummation to touch this flesh. Yet the intimacy between these figures is entirely sensual.

At sixteen, I had already begun looking for a female of my own. Girls just like this one—whether picking up a dropped book in the school corridor, sipping a Coke at a drugstore fountain, or staring out from a shampoo ad in a magazine—were my obsession. I could not speak of it with Mom. I was aware of the curve of her figure, but incestuous longings were a mile below the surface. Yet I was acutely conscious of the sexual pull toward girls my age as a betrayal of her. I could not imagine abandoning Mom to the heartless world of male power, even as represented by my good but mostly absent father. The welter of an adolescent's inner life boiled down to the fact that I had no idea yet how to be a man and a son both. What I had learned from my mother by then, though, was that no intense worry, not even if vaguely taboo, need be left outside a Catholic church. Why else do they have kneelers in front of the cross and every statue? Being sinners was what qualified us, and what was it to be a sinner if not lost like this, confused, afraid? These feelings, with their roil of sexual restlessness, were the heart of my first real prayer.

Michelangelo's Mary—the artist was twenty-four years old when he created her—soothed that unarticulated ache in me by being so simply a girl and a mother both. Her exquisite sexuality was fully robed against her son's nakedness, yet when has the inside of a wrist ever seemed more dangerously exposed? What face has ever been readier to be transported by ecstasy? Her sexuality combined with moral purity was an adolescent's ideal of hope. Grace and sin, hope and doom, love and fear—Michelangelo's Mary succeeds as the balance of such opposites because she is the incarnation of grief. That was surely what my mother recognized, and what, at bottom, I identified with. It would be years before my understanding could match that feeling—the grief I'd felt from the moment I left my mother's womb, a grief that, since I was no longer hers, she was already no longer mine. This is the slap from which we never recover, yet we never stop trying, especially in the longing known as sex.

Jesus in the cradle of his mother's arms: I knew from the familiar welling in Mom's eyes that what she saw in the scarred body was my brother's. That was no offense to me by then. She had her grief, I had mine. I would be a man someday. I would always be her son. So being next to her before such a thing was enough. Behind the
Pietà
was a huge cross, the naked wood of which seemed to miss him. Jesus had just been lowered from its arms into his mother's. The name of the
Pietà
chapel was
Cappella del Crocifisso.
The cross was a permanent presence behind us, too. It had focused the religious landscape through which Mom and I had moved the last two years, on those preliminary pilgrimages ahead of the military women. Our day trips through the Rhineland brought to a kind of climax our custom of intimate sojourn to various churches. By sheer coincidence, they gave me a personal stake, which I only now see, in the field of battle between the Church and the Jews. This reminiscence of my mother may seem a long way from that, but it is not.

***

Our house in Germany was about a mile from the Rhine, but decidedly, for us Catholics, on its wrong side. We lived in the town of Wiesbaden, directly across the river from Mainz, which, as the metropolitan see of the largest ecclesiastical province of the Holy Roman Empire and as home of the most powerful archbishop elector, was once known as "the Rome of the North." The Mainz Cathedral, dating to the eleventh century, dramatically displayed the transition from Romanesque to Gothic to Baroque style, and its towers were long famous for stamping the city with Roman Catholic primacy. The several churches of Wiesbaden, on the other hand, were showily Protestant—brick instead of stone, solitary steeples instead of twin or triple towers, crosses without corpses. Our city's
Dom
("cathedral"), in effect, was the Spielbank, or casino, which, with the Kurhaus, or hot spring baths, had made Wiesbaden a favorite resort of the Prussian nobility. The architect of the lavish Kurhaus designed several other notable buildings in Wiesbaden, including the requisitioned mansion that the U.S. Air Force assigned to my father as his family quarters. One of the kaiser's marshals had built it, we were told. The opulent digs were ours because of my father's rank, but also because of my mother's fertility: With five sons, our Irish Catholic family was too big for the houses on Generals' Row at the air base. Unlike Mainz, a mere two miles away, Wiesbaden had not been bombed, which is why Eisenhower had made it his headquarters after crossing the Rhine in 1944. It had evolved into the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force in Europe ("U-Safe," we said) when my father was named its chief of staff.

There were three places in the Rhineland to which our mother took us, all across the river: Cologne, for its cathedral and its precious relics; Koblenz, for nearby Maria Laach, the ancient Benedictine abbey; and Trier, which was significant to us as the site of the exquisite thirteenth-century
Liebfrauen-kirche,
but not even that was what brought us there.

The first major purchase my parents made in Germany was a tan VW convertible. My father was chauffeured in a blue Lincoln staff car with stars on the bumper, but the thrill of his status was matched by that of having a suddenly racy mother, liberated from the musty old Studebaker by that roadster Beetle. I still remember with pleasure my mother at the wheel of that car, with wisps of hair feathering out from her scarf as we bombed along the autobahn. She seemed another person from the grim worrier of my brother Joe's illness only a few years before. Now one or two or all three of my younger brothers might be bundled into the back seat, but with Joe away at college and Dad at work, there was no one to compete with me for riding shotgun. The wind feathered my hair too.

The trips along the Rhine were plunges into virtue and adventure both. We careered up the river valley, past hillside vineyards and cobblestoned villages, above island castles and below the fortresses of Rhenish barons. Passing the Lorelei, Mom would tell us the legend of the enchantress whose song lured boatmen onto the rocks. Passing the giant statue of Bismarck on a mountaintop, Mom would call it "the Watch on the Rhine," and we would joke that it was another of the clocks she'd taken to collecting. "Look at that!" she'd say, but what she meant was "Look at us!" If only the headset girls she had supervised at the phone company in the Loop could see her now!

Our visits to Cologne, perhaps four hours down the Rhine, were emblematic of all that was at stake for us. That city was living proof both of the savagery of which an unleashed America was capable—by 1945, 90 percent of Cologne's city center was reduced to rubble—and of our nation's sensitivity, for our skilled bombardiers had spared the great Cologne Cathedral, whose twin steeples, before the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889, had been the tallest structures in the world. I would not realize it until years later, but one reason we drove all that way to Cologne, while almost never crossing into nearby Mainz, was that the even more sacred cathedral of Mainz had been half leveled by the same Allied bombers that spared Cologne's
Dom.
Even in 1959, a decade and a half after the destruction, the holy center of Mainz was not fully restored. We spared ourselves that refutation of American humaneness by pretending it was not there.

The other thing that took us to Cologne were the relics of the Three Kings, the Magi. Their bones were, and still are, enshrined in a triple pyramid of gold caskets on the high altar of the cathedral. How did the dust of Melchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar come to rest in that far city of Europe and not in Arabia, Mesopotamia, or Babylon? The answer hinges on the medieval politics of relics. Seeking to strengthen his hold on the northern realm, Frederick Barbarossa brought the remains of the Wise Men to Cologne in 1164. The subsequent influx of pilgrims, requiring the building of the new cathedral, lent prestige to the imperial center, solidifying its market and helping it to compete with Mainz and Trier. But where, twelve hundred years after the Epiphany, had Barbarossa obtained such relics? He found them in Milan, the imperial center to which they had been brought in the fourth century.

Around that time, the bones of saints and martyrs, and other relics, had become central to the religious imagination of the Church. Things believed to be remnants of an earlier age, and associated with its heroes, enabled the faithful to feel connected to the sacred past, even to invoke its magical power. When Constantine was buried, twelve empty coffins were placed around his, one for each of the apostles. By the time his son died, the bones of several apostles had been "discovered" and brought to the imperial mausoleum.
¹
Coffins no longer had to be empty. The Christian hunger for the Incarnate God spawned a hunger for nearly unlimited incarnations of holiness.

I remember a young American priest explaining about the bones of the Three Kings to my mother and me on our tour of the cathedral. What jolted me, and what ties the memory of my mother to the knot of this story, was that he credited the relics to the mother of Constantine, Saint Helena, a woman I had heard my mother speak of as the discoverer of the True Cross. Saint Helena had brought the bones of the Magi to Milan, the priest said, and her name made it seem true. As the priest walked us around that sanctuary, speaking of her—Helena was a general's wife, like my mother—I felt the bond with my mother as something new.

The triple sarcophagus is large enough for adult corpses. It is elaborately gilded, bejeweled, and embossed with bas-relief biblical scenes. The crest of the city of Cologne bears three crowns, for this. How does an uncertain teenage boy dismiss such accumulated piety? There is a hint of the genius of the Catholic aesthetic in the tradition of reverence for relics, a manifestation of the deep sacredness of the flesh, a refusal to treat the wall separating the past from the present as impenetrable. The same human impulse leads Americans to honor Plymouth Rock and the flag of Betsy Ross. But what happens when reverence for relics becomes swamped by superstition, when the past is treated as infinitely malleable, depending on the needs of the present? Really—the Three Kings? I would surely have dismissed it except for that priest's explanation. Saint Helena was an authenticating hook on which to hang any story, and people like us would believe it. If she had discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem, why could she not also have discovered corpses of the Three Kings in the same city? Saint Helena was central to the piety of Catholics of our kind. If you started to disbelieve her, where would you stop?

In addition to celebrating the virtue of omnipotent America, our pilgrimages through the Rhineland implicitly honored the heroic integrity of Roman Catholicism, which, we were assured, had never been sullied by the Third Reich. We knew the Catholic Church as a staunch opponent of totalitarianism—in the 1950s, Pius XII was America's fiercest and most outspoken ally against Stalin. We all assumed that Catholics had bravely defied Adolf Hitler. That Hitler was born and had died a Catholic, even if only a nominal one, was never referred to. The living witness to Catholic virtue in Germany was the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who ranked in the postwar pantheon with Charles de Gaulle and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Adenauer was a living refutation of the Soviet emphasis on pan-German culpability, as opposed to a narrow American emphasis on Nazi guilt. The American position suggested that there were relatively few Nazis, and they were all gone. We wanted a revived Germany to stand with us against Moscow, and Adenauer's roots in the Roman Catholic Christian Democratic Party—not the Social Democrats of, say, Willy Brandt—served that purpose.
²
I grasped little of this at the time, but I knew that Adenauer was a former mayor of Cologne and a staunch Rhinelander. He had had the new West German capital built in nearby Bonn. Such a commitment to a region we had adopted only made him, and his virtue, seem that much more like ours.