Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (40 page)

As I focused on the gleaming
Heiltumskammer,
the tabernacle concealing the Robe, the welter of feelings I had experienced came back to me. Within days of being here in 1959, I would start my senior year at Wiesbaden High School. Soon my mother, father, and brothers would return to the United States without me. I would stay behind to finish school, living in the dormitory where, unknown to my parents, my girlfriend also resided. I would be free to give myself to her, to football, to a new sense of myself as something other than pious. This forbidden hope grew in my throat, and I remembered looking across at the Robe of Jesus hanging there, right there, and thinking to myself, Who are they kidding? The doubt I had not allowed myself in Cologne blossomed in Trier. Corpses of the Three Kings? Give me a break. Inwardly, "I chattered away," as Saint Augustine described an equivalent moment, "as somebody in the know."
⁶

Augustine emerges in my free association here perhaps because of his mother, Saint Monica. "For she loved having me with her, as all mothers do, only she much more than most."
⁷
When I read such lines, a shiver of recognition runs through me. As I stood recently in the cathedral in Trier, I remembered what it was to stand beside my mother, knowing she was praying for me. I have never completely come out from under the mixed feeling of being doomed by that love. Yet to be the son of such a mother is to be discreetly but immeasurably blessed, for, as one sees eventually, the winding round and round is the spiral of forgiveness that extends to both of us. A son becomes a man when he sees his mother as a human being as much in need of mercy as he is, and then when he extends that mercy himself. And what else has he been longing to do all his life? What he can at last offer to her, he can at last accept himself.

The question that hit me in the cathedral was, How could I have forgotten what my mother and I were looking at together while she prayed? How could I have forgotten what had actually brought us to Trier? And why had my glimpse of the venerated Robe slipped into a received memory of a generic Passion play? The answer, all at once, was obvious. Not until I was in the presence of the suspended piece of cloth had I acknowledged my indifference to it. Everyone around me, including my mother, was swept up in sacred emotion. "It is impossible," one reads in Augustine, "that the son of these tears should be lost."
⁸
But I felt nothing—nothing, that is, in relation to the Robe. It seemed a secret declaration of independence to have set myself apart from this particular form of piety, and in relation to that, I felt exhilarated.

I was questioning, of course, whether the Robe was real—whether, in other words, that Robe
there was
real. We were told that science had established its age and seamlessness, but had that cloth in fact wrapped the skin of Jesus? If it had not, I was free. I was free, in my mind, to leave Mom, Mary, and Helena behind, free to love a girl who was
not
somebody's mother. Everything rode on the Robe, and instinctively I had made my choice—even if later I would reenter the world of the
Liebefrau
by joining the
Kirche.
But for now I was out, young, free. It did not occur to me to ask, as Crossan would force me to ask years later, whether the Robe, as described by the Gospel of John—or Matthew's Magi, for that matter—had ever existed at all. It was enough to have my secret, and its liberation. A short while later, my family went to Italy where we had our audience with the pope. It was then that I knelt with Mom before the
Pietà,
secretly, shamefully aroused by the swan-like neck of the mother of God. From the Vatican, my mother, father, and brothers went to Naples, to embark on a ship for home, while I stayed behind for the rest of my senior year. I saw my family off at the Stazione Termini, waving my handkerchief as their train pulled away as if I were sad. Then I exploded out into the Piazza Barberini and up the elegant Via Veneto, past the American embassy, where I imagined myself a young Foreign Service officer, a spy. Free! My joy was shameful to me, but also it was precious, as were my unleashed unbelief and the lust I was determined to act on as soon as my own later train returned me to Wiesbaden. Of all this, my mother, in whom it was my solemn duty to confide everything, knew nothing.

Mother. The Catholic faith of Europe had bound us. And now I wanted the bond to break—"She wept bitterly to see me go and followed me to the water's edge." This is Augustine, except in his case Monica is the one doing the seeing-off. He is setting sail from Carthage, without her. But she was

clinging to me with all her strength in the hope that I would either come home or take her with me. I deceived her with the excuse that I had a friend whom I did not want to leave until the wind rose and his ship could sail. It was a lie, told to my own mother—and such a mother! ... But she would not go home without me, and it was all I could do to persuade her to stay that night in a shrine dedicated to Saint Cyprian not far from the ship. During the night, secretly, I sailed away, leaving her alone to her tears and her prayers ... The wind blew and filled our sails, and the shore disappeared from sight. The next morning, she was wild with grief ... proof that she had inherited the legacy of Eve, seeking in sorrow what with sorrow she had brought into the world. But at last she ceased upbraiding me for my deceit and my cruelty, and turned again to you to offer her prayers for me. She went back to her house, and I went on to Rome.
⁹

Oddly, it was in Rome that my version of this scene took place—an Irish American version, lacking in histrionics yet full of equivalent feelings. I loved the Via Veneto for its
palazzi,
the imposing mansions and villas of the richest people in the world. It was a street without churches—no churches for me. I returned to Wiesbaden, where I was happy to be, finally, on the wrong side of the Rhine.

In my recent visit, I discovered that the Trier Cathedral also possesses one of the three nails of the True Cross (one of the other nails Saint Helena had given to her son, who had it promptly melted down for use in a new battle helmet). I also learned that nearby stands the Church of St. Matthias, which entombs the remains of that apostle. Helena is credited with bringing what was left of him to Trier as well, no doubt to invincibly arm her hometown for the coming relic wars. Why Matthias? He was the apostle elected, according to Acts, to take the place of the suicide Judas.
¹⁰
Matthias, replacing the traitorous Jew, was supersessionism personified.

The great relics of Trier, and the city's all-trumping tie with Helena herself, enabled it to maintain its religious, and therefore political, primacy over Mainz and Cologne for centuries. But Helena's relics did something else, too. In part because of the cults attached to these particular totems of the Passion story, Trier developed as a center of Christian hatred of Jews. We will return to this region during the Crusades, the Enlightenment, and the Nazi period in subsequent sections of this book. Suffice to note here, for example, that in 1349, Trier was one of the places where the scapegoating of Jews for the Black Plague was most extreme—townspeople murdered the entire Jewish community. Jews gradually returned to Trier, but in 1418 they were driven from the city, well ahead of the 1492 expulsion from Spain.

For all these reasons, from its origin in "prophecy historicized," to its role as a "proof" denied, to its close association with the pointedly "non-Roman" deicide, the venerated Seamless Robe became an eloquent symbol of all that Christians hold against Jews. I said earlier that the archbishop ordered the Robe put on display as a way of giving thanks in 1959, and I learned recently that thanksgiving had been the constant religious meaning of the rare unveilings. But there is political meaning here as well. By displaying this relic only rarely, the pitch of popular interest in it—and in Trier—was maintained. The Robe spawned periodic pilgrimages that enabled a literally backwater town on the Moselle to compete with trading centers of the Rhine. The Robe reinforced Trier's connection to Helena, who had surpassed her omnipotent son in being a saint of the Latin Church. Political uses of the Robe are nothing new.

In 1959, I saw how it works with my own eyes. We understood the properly unspoken assumption from our place among the dignitaries in the balcony, looking across at the shirt of Jesus, that thanksgiving for the recovery of West Germany was offered as much to the United States as to God. But were we, perhaps, really being thanked for refusing until then—our Cold War strategy against Moscow required a virtuous ally in Bonn—to hold the German nation responsible for its most heinous crime?

In 1891, the last time save one that the Robe had been displayed, the archbishop of Trier had been thanking God for the end of the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf, or culture war, and the restoration of the rights of Catholics in the Rhineland. (The monks of Maria Laach were allowed to return in 1892 from an exile that had lasted most of a century, and their ancient title to the abbey was restored in 1893.) Clearly this was a world where no hard and fast distinction between religion and politics had been possible, even after the Enlightenment, so why shouldn't the unveiled Seamless Robe, a symbol of political joy, have been lifted up before the believing eyes of a relieved people? I said before that the display of the Robe in 1959 was one of three such occasions in the century. In fact, it was the second.
¹¹
My mother and I did not know that. We did not know the date of the first, or what it implied. Neither the guides nor the cathedral's brochures mentioned it. We stood in the VIP section knowing nothing. Nothing about Germany—the SS an exception! And nothing about the Roman Catholic Church. By the time I returned to Trier to research this book, I had learned a thing or two, but I was still unprepared for what I learned then. The previous showing of the Seamless Robe had taken place before throngs of rejoicing pilgrims in the summer of 1933.

In that year of Hitler's coming to power, the Vatican signed its concordat with the Third Reich. By doing so, the Catholic Church became the first foreign power to enter into a bilateral treaty with Hitler. I knew that. I even knew that in 1933 the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Germany had overridden an earlier ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party. But the Robe? However dubious its claim to a strictly scientific authenticity, the tunic's having been venerated as Jesus' own garment for perhaps fifteen hundred years had invested it with sacredness of another kind. On the occasion of my recent visit, I was far from indifferent to that history. I could no longer stand in the presence of the Robe's tabernacle and feel nothing. So the question hit me with unexpected force: Had the Robe been enlisted in a rapprochement with Hitler? I stood before the
Heilturnskammer,
and, in truth, I deflected the question by turning it into a prayer.

Later, I asked it of my guide: What was the archbishop of Trier expressing thanks for in 1933? What were all those devout Germans celebrating? The guide winced, sorry to be asked. "There was among Catholics," she said with a shrug, "a feeling that things would work out."

23. The Danger of Ambivalence

T
HE CROSS AT
Auschwitz continues to be a flashpoint, and it symbolizes the complexity of Catholic attitudes. When the Catholic nationalist referred to at the beginning of this book was indicted in a Polish court in Oświęcim for having led the campaign to erect hundreds of small crosses in the field around the large papal cross at the wall of the death camp, he was charged with inciting hate against Jews. "I only said the truth," he proclaimed, "and will prove it in court." Later, in 1999, as we saw, the Polish senate passed a law requiring the small crosses to be removed, but making the papal cross permanent.
¹
This despite the fact that a Vatican commission, in response to Jewish objections, had proposed the removal even of the papal cross "to an appropriate alternative site." But there was a telling ambivalence in the Catholic hierarchy's response, and now, perhaps, we can more fully take the measure of that ambivalence.

The Polish Catholics who had acted in defiance of the apparent intentions of the Polish pope, and of the explicit recommendation of the Vatican commission, could have pointed not only to local Church support
²
but to a strong signal that had just come from Rome on another, but related matter. Only three weeks before the new crosses had been erected, the Vatican had announced that Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac, the wartime archbishop of Zagreb, Croatia, was to be regarded as a martyr and would be beatified the following October, the penultimate step to sainthood. Stepinac died in 1962 while under house arrest by the Communist government of Yugoslavia. He was a heroic opponent of Stalinism, but his prior role as the primate of a national church in whose name unspeakable atrocities were committed by the pro-Nazi Ustashi made observers ask what the Vatican could be thinking. It was clear that Stepinac had been condemned by the Tito regime for political reasons, that he had been unjustly prosecuted for crimes he could not prevent. Exoneration, perhaps. But Jews and Catholics both could ask why a man who nevertheless embodied the Church's flawed responses to events of World War II should be elevated to sainthood?

As at Auschwitz, the conflict was over how the Holocaust would be remembered. This is the issue with which we opened this book, and now we can begin to see how the Jewish-Catholic conflict at Auschwitz crystallizes the competing rivalry that goes back to the generation after Jesus; to the decisive split illustrated by the distance between the New Testament and the Mishnah; to the habit of mind, born of the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, according to which the new supersedes the old. In Poland, the cross at the death camp wall was seen by some Catholics as a commemoration of the many Catholics who had died there; in the disputed field itself, it was said, the Nazis had executed some 150 Polish Catholics. But were they to overshadow the memory of about a million and a half Jews who died at Auschwitz?