Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (3 page)

Within a year or two of our move to Alexandria, my father, an avid golfer, was elected to membership in the Belle Haven Country Club, an old Virginia enclave a mile or two up Fort Hunt Road from where we lived. As an Irish Catholic carpetbagger, Dad would have been decidedly unclubbable, but this was Red Scare time, and as head of Air Force counterintelligence, he was a spymaster with profile. I took the "privilege" entirely for granted, but at Belle Haven, too, I sensed the difference between me and the sons and daughters of the first families of Virginia. So one day I asked Peter why he and his parents never came to the swimming pool at Belle Haven.

"We don't go there," he said simply.

"Why not?"

"Because it's a club, and we're Jews."

I do not recall what, if anything, the word "Jews" meant to me, but "club"—Peter and I were a club of two—seemed only friendly. I pushed, saying that Belle Haven was fun, that we could go there on our bikes.

Peter explained calmly what he knew, and what I had yet to admit: "Jewish" was a synonym for unwelcome. "Unwelcome," he could have said, "in this case by you." I was a notorious blusher, and I blushed then, I am sure.

"No big deal," he said, but I saw for the first time that Peter and I were on opposite sides of a kind of color line. I took for granted that Negroes were unwelcome at Belle Haven, except as caddies. But Jews?

"No big deal" meant, We're not discussing this further. Which was fine with me.

Later, I asked my mother, and she explained that the Seligmans' being Jewish meant they did not believe what we believed. About Jesus, I knew at once. And those Holy Week readings from the pulpit at St. Mary's must have come back to me: This has to do with Jesus and what they did to him. That easily, I was brought into the sanctuary of the Church's core idea, even without removing my hat.

My mother added a phrase that served her as standard punctuation. "Live and let live," she said with a shrug. "The Seligmans are good people." Much later, I would understand the slogan and my mother's coda as her own private rejection of the then reigning Catholic ethos of "Outside the Church there is no salvation," but to me that day her reaction seemed dismissive. She had efficiently sidestepped the fear I had that my one friendship in that alien territory had somehow been put at risk. Indeed, my belated recognition of the Seligmans' Jewishness in the context of their exclusion—Jewish means unwelcome—accounted for why my and Peter's parents had extended to each other nothing beyond a minimal neighborliness. If the Seligmans were unwelcome at Belle Haven, they were just as unwelcome in our house. It would take many years before I began to understand the deadly effect that this introduction to Jewishness had on me. Even as I set myself against antisemitism,
¹⁷
this essentially negative framing would condemn me to think of Jews as candidates for rejection. Although I self-consciously refused to reject Jews, I was still defining them by my refusal. Whether I am capable of allowing Jews to define themselves in purely positive terms, with no reference to a dominant Christian culture, whether anti- or philosemitic, remains an open question. That, in turn, underscores "the depth and persistence," in Rubenstein's phrase, "of this supreme hatred." How could hatred have stood in any way between Peter and me? Yet now I see that it did.

Even when the cross of Jesus Christ is planted at Auschwitz as a sign of Christian atonement for that hatred, and not of anti-Jewish accusation, the problem remains. By associating the Jewish dead with a Christian notion of redemption, are the desperate and despised victims of the Nazis thus transformed into martyrs whose fate could seem not only meaningful but privileged? What Jew would not be suspicious of a Christian impulse to introduce that category, martyrdom, into the story of the genocide? Jews as figures of suffering—negation, denial, hatred, guilt—are at the center of this long history, although always, until now, their suffering was proof of God's rejection of them. Is Jewish suffering now to be taken as a sign of God's approval? Golgotha of the modern world
¹⁸
—does that mean real Jews have replaced Jesus as the sacrificial offering, their deaths as the source of universal salvation? Does this Jew-friendly soteriology turn full circle into a new rationale for a Final Solution?

Uneasiness with such associations has prompted some Jews to reject the very word "holocaust" as applied to the genocide, since in Greek it means "burnt offering." The notion that God would accept such an offering is deeply troubling.
¹⁹
When the genocide is instead referred to as the Shoah, a Hebrew word meaning "catastrophe," a wall is being erected against the consolations and insults of a redemptive, sacrificial theology of salvation.
Shoah,
in its biblical usage, points to the absence of God's creative hovering, the opposite of which is rendered as "
ruach." Ruach
is the breath of God, which in Genesis drew order out of chaos.
Shoah
is its undoing.
²⁰

Such subtleties of terminology were not on my mind when I went to Auschwitz as a writer working on a magazine article. I am a novelist and an essayist, and in presuming to relate a history that culminates at the cross at Auschwitz, I do so with an eye to details and connections that a historian might omit or that a scholar might dismiss. I am looking for turns in the story in which one impulse overrode another, one character reversed the action of another, all with unanticipated, ever-graver consequences. And if I am a professional writer, it is not irrelevant to my purpose that I am an amateur Catholic—a Catholic, that is, holding to faith out of
love.
Yet love for the Church can look like grief, even anger. Nevertheless, my intensity of feeling is itself what has brought me here. So my life as a storyteller and my faith as a Catholic qualify me to detect essential matters in this history that a more detached, academic examination, whatever its virtues, might miss.

Yet in coming to Auschwitz, I knew enough to be suspicious of emotional intensity, as if what mattered here were the reactions of a visitor. So I had summoned detachment of another kind. In coming to the death camp, I had resolved to guard against conditioned responses, even as I felt them: the numbness, the choked-back grief, the supreme sentimentality of a self-justifying Catholic guilt. I had visited the barracks, the ovens, the naked railway platform, the stark field of chimneys, more or less in control of my reactions. But before the cross something else took over. Even as I knew to guard against the impulse to "Christianize the Holocaust," I was doing it—by looking into this abyss through the lens of a faith that has the cross embedded in it like a sighting device. Perhaps I was Christianizing the Holocaust by instinctively turning it into an occasion of Christian repentance. The Shoah throws many things into relief—the human capacity for depravity, the cost of ethnic absolutism, the final inadequacy both of religious language and of silence. But it also highlights the imprisonment of even well-meaning Christians inside the categories with which we approach death and sin. Christian faith can seem to triumph over every evil except Christian triumphalism. When I found myself standing at the foot of that cross, on the transforming edge of a contemporary Golgotha, I knew just what the pope meant when he evoked that image. Yet I reacted as I imagine a Jew might have. The cross here was simply wrong.

Even so, perhaps I was just another Christian presuming to supply a Jewish reaction. But perhaps not. Because of the insistence of Jewish voices—protesters at the cross at Auschwitz and Jewish thinkers who have claimed a preemptive right to interpret the Holocaust in terms consistent with Jewish tradition—the old Christian habit of seeing "the jews"
²¹
as a scrim on which to project Christian meanings no longer goes unchallenged. I love the cross, the sign of my faith, yet finally the sight of it here made me, in the words of the spiritual, tremble, tremble, tremble. Because of a resounding Jewish response, I saw the holy object as if it were a chimney. But also, Christian that I am, I saw it through the eyes of the man I have always been. The primordial evil of Auschwitz has now been compounded by the camp's new character as a flashpoint between Catholics and Jews. So the ancient Christian symbol here, despite my knowledge that it was wrong, was a revelation. I was seeing the cross in its full and awful truth for the first time.

2. Stumbling Block to Jews

W
HEN I
WAS A
college freshman at Georgetown University, I attended a weekend retreat that was mandatory for undergraduates at that Jesuit school. I remember the stark corridors and monkish cells of some novitiate or minor seminary to which we crew-necked college Joes had been bused deep in the Virginia countryside. Our first day was spent in the chapel, listening to the stern warnings of a crucifix-wielding Jesuit out of James Joyce. The long axis of the missionary cross he held up, as if warding off the evil eye of our indifference, was the length of a slide rule. With just that mathematical infallibility, it worked. By the end of the day, damnation had never seemed so near. Ignatius Loyola was the poet laureate of the crucifixion, and in our rooms, Gideons Bible style, were copies of his
Spiritual Exercises.
They were verbal versions of the El Greco imitations on the chapel walls, with Jesus crying out from the cross—not to God, but to us. The call of Jesus—it was coming to me. No wonder I welcomed it when they banged on the door to say lights out.

That night I slept fitfully. At one point, I snapped awake in the middle of an ominous foretaste of eternity. My eyes opened to the glowing figure of Jesus on the cross, hovering in the air a few feet above the end of my cot. Conditioned, no doubt, by that day's apparition-laden tales of Saints Paul, Francis Xavier, and Ignatius Loyola, I froze. Suspended in that moment, I felt visited.

Visited by the broken Lord to whom, in fact, I had long before commended myself. But, so it seemed, I'd been in flight from him until now. Not just from him—from his suffering. As a child, kneeling beside my mother at the foot of the cross in St. Mary's Church in Alexandria, always in the very early morning—Monsignor's Mass—I had learned that the suffering of Jesus was for the purpose of mitigating my mother's own. My brother Joe had contracted polio when he was four and I was two. My first experience of the disease was of my mother's agony more than his. But then it became everyone's. The disease attacked Joe's legs, as did a succession of surgeons. I used to see his bandaged shins in my sleep, then wake up certain that I was the one who could not walk. Certain, then oddly relieved. My brother's wounded legs were what taught me about suffering. My own whole legs began to seem like contraband, as if I had stolen them from him. Sometimes at night—say, after yet another set of his casts had been removed—I would lean down from the top bunk to pull his blanket back and stare at his bones. When I saw my first pictures of liberated inmates of the concentration camps—this would have been in 1947 or 1948—I thought they had legs like Joe's. And not surprisingly, I grew up recognizing those selfsame battered legs on every crucifix. Joe's suffering, my mother's, and therefore mine—and the suffering of those photo-ghosts behind barbed wire—were made bearable by knowing that God too, in Jesus, had suffered like this. The nails in Jesus' feet were his polio.

The cross in the night helped me decide to become a Catholic priest. I chose not the Jesuits but the Paulists, yet still a preaching order, convert-makers, holy men who wore the mission cross in their cinctures, where it looked less like a slide rule than a dagger. I spent most of the 1960s in the Paulist seminary at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., was ordained to the priesthood in 1969, and left the priesthood five years later. Despite publishing ten books in the twenty-five years since, and numerous articles and columns for the
Boston Globe
and various journals, my brief time as a priest marks me more indelibly than anything else.

Such was the power of that nighttime vision of the cross that when I leaped from the cot to turn on the light, to find hanging on the crowding wall a pale green plastic Day-Glo corpus, the aura did not quite dissipate. I went to sleep smiling at the joke, but also feeling sure that Jesus on the cross had truly come. It was a feeling—crazy, I know, but sure—that remained a sacred, if secret, aspect of my identity for a long time.

I left Georgetown in 1961, but I have always followed the basketball team, and I regularly note the university's bullpen function—Kissinger to Kirkpatrick to Albright—for the aces of foreign affairs. But lately Georgetown has found itself in the news, and it is because of the crucifix. "Georgetown to Go Way of the Cross," a 1998
Boston Globe
headline read. "Amid Widespread Debate, a Decision to Be Catholic."
¹
Decades after the abandonment of mandatory religious retreats for students, a heated argument broke out at my alma mater over the absence of the crucifix from the walls of newer classrooms. A vocal circle of young Georgetown Catholics, supported by elder traditionalists, accused the university of abandoning its core identity. At first the Jesuit president tried explaining the absence of the crucifix with an ecumenical rationale: Georgetown students and faculty have come to include many non-Catholics. Classrooms, even at Jesuit universities, are not sanctuaries. But the older classrooms have crucifixes, the critics insisted; crucifixes sanctify the daily work of study and learning. Crucifixes root the college in Catholicism, a point that was made by Washington's Roman Catholic archbishop when he joined the argument. "The crucifix," Cardinal James Hickey wrote, "is a basic, identifying Catholic symbol. It coerces no one. It offends only those who are intolerant of the Catholic faith."
²