Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (55 page)

The Church had traditionally seated its absolutist claims in the authority of Jesus—
he
is the way! But with Boniface, the claim moved from the authority of Jesus to that of the Church. "Urged by faith,"
Unam Sanctam
begins, "we are obliged to believe and maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confer with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sin."
⁸
That pronouncement, made in 1302, would remain a watershed in the life of Catholicism, and its underlying assumptions still influence key figures in the Church establishment.

Only a few years before, Thomas Aquinas, following the train of thought set in motion by Anselm, and adding the new fuel of an Aristotelian notion of metaphysical necessity, had defined Jesus Christ as "the absolutely necessary way to salvation." Thomas himself grappled openly with the logic of such an assertion: Not only is Jesus the way, but the Church is; not only the Church, but its divinely established head. If Jesus is necessary as "the one road," isn't the Vicar who tends the gate also "necessary"? Doesn't the one who has authority over the creed of those who follow Jesus ipso facto have authority over all, since all are called to follow? As I first learned from Hans Küng, Thomas concludes as much, asserting that since "it is for the Pope to define what faith is," it must follow that "it is necessary for salvation to submit to the Roman Pope."
⁹

And not only that. In
Unam Sanctam,
Pope Boniface VIII extends the two-sword theory of Saint Bernard, justifying the state's use of the temporal sword when it is completely submissive to, and under the judgment of, the spiritual sword wielded by the Church. That submission is compelled by Thomas's link between the authority of the Church and the authority of "Christ's Vicar, Peter, and Peter's successor." This link is made explicit when
Unam Sanctam,
in its last sentence, repeats the pronouncement of Thomas verbatim: "Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff."
¹⁰

Thomas had nowhere explained how this principle applied to him. In 1263, Pope Urban IV had formally outlawed the study of the pagan Aristotle, as his predecessors had in 1231 and 1245.
¹¹
Two years after Urban's interdiction, Thomas began his
Summa Tlieologiae,
the direct application of Aristotle to Christian faith.
¹²
Ironically, this apparent act of disobedience to papal authority led to the most far-reaching definition of papal authority ever given by theology, before or since.

At the Dylan performance, Pope John Paul II made his claim not for himself or the Church, but only for Jesus Christ. He thus observed the new canon of ecumenical modesty. Catholics had renounced "No salvation outside the Church" in 1953, when Richard Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, at the direction of the Vatican, excommunicated the antisemitic priest Father Leonard Feeney for bludgeoning Jews with it. But Feeney had Saint Thomas Aquinas, logic, and exactly 650 years of Church history on his side. In the years since the close of Vatican II, Church reform has faltered, and the logical inconsistency in the Church's position—making universalist claims for Jesus as the "absolutely necessary way," but not for the institution that alone shows the way to Jesus—has not been fully dismantled.
¹³
Non-Catholics, so far, have seemed grateful for this more limited absolutism, and have not pushed against its hollow part. Catholics who have done so, like Hans Küng, have been silenced as teachers of Catholic theology. At Bologna, the ancient resonance of that "One!" seemed, therefore, familiar.

As indicated by the echo of Nicaea in its title,
Unam Sanctam
was a new plateau along the trail on which Constantine had first set out. The emperor's goal had been an absolute unity of politics and faith under his own imperial power. Boniface VIII completed the work of his medieval predecessors in reversing that primacy from prince to pope. "
Ego sum Caesar,
" he would resoundingly declare to his cardinals, "
ego imperator!
"
¹⁴
This theological and political assertion, while a logical outcome of forces unleashed in the previous two centuries, would shape the two centuries to come in ways no one could have anticipated—or wished. And this is nowhere more true than in relation to the Jews. If, in a fully realized universal society, there is, in the scholar Jeremy Cohen's phrase, "no room ... for infidels,"
¹⁵
what happens to them? In the case of John Paul II, who has done more to heal the Christian-Jewish breach than any other pope, the answer is nevertheless unclear. His friendship with Jews is one thing, but his defense of absolute papal power is another. His rigid crackdown on dissent within the Catholic Church is not unrelated to the fate of Jews, in a milieu of univocal control of doctrine, any more than, in the past, campaigns against Christian heresy were.

By definition, Jews, the original and quintessential dissenters, call into question the supremacist universalism of claims made for Jesus Christ. In the present age, with its overlay of politesse, the depth of this conflict, and the danger of it, are obscure. But the history of the time when its structures were erected—structures that John Paul II has sworn himself to uphold—embodies a tragic warning. Beginning with the Fourth Lateran Council's (1215) resolve to eliminate heresy, and Pope Gregory IX's
Excommunicarnus
(1231), which set up roving Dominican and Franciscan ecclesiastical courts, the early Inquisition had pursued its program intermittently, with no central apparatus. With Pope Innocent IV's decree (1252), torture was permitted. Boniface VIII's absolutism (1302) led to the consolidation of both the ideology and the institution. The coming of the Spanish Inquisition in the fifteenth century, as we shall see, would brace the soul of Europe before becoming planted in Rome itself. The cruelty and narrowness of the Roman Inquisition are linked in the public mind with the Galileo case (1633), but that was tame compared to what had gone before. This unprecedented institution, whose abuses are now roundly denounced by all,
¹⁶
intended only to uphold the oneness of the Church.

Is it possible to repudiate the Inquisition without questioning what it sought to defend? Beyond its methods and abuses, what about the broader impact of the Inquisition on the Catholic mind? In fact, the Inquisition would fatally undermine the positive side of the long-standing Catholic ambivalence toward Judaism, and would fundamentally change the Catholic attitude toward "the Jewish-born," in the careful phrase a newspaper applied to Bob Dylan. The Inquisition would spawn the idea of "Jewish blood." In what follows, we will see how Catholic medieval absolutism exacerbated anti-Jewish religious hatred, fueled new levels of violence, and sponsored an ever more hysterical conversionism, which, when up against continued Jewish resistance, finally led to modern anti-semitic racism.

32. My Inquisition

M
Y OWN BRUSH
with the Inquisition was trivial, but even a now humorous encounter with a mere vestige could make an impression. It came when I was not quite twenty years old. I had arrived at the seminary with a small cache of books, which I was resolved to read in the spirit of self-improvement. I have no idea how I had made my selection of titles, but one of the books was
The Age of Reason
by Jean Paul Sartre. Somehow my possession of this philosophical novel came to the attention of the seminary rector, who summoned me. He demanded to know if I had been reading Sartre. I recall that the first phase of my panic was tied to shame at being unable to understand the work of the French existentialist. My intellectual mulishness would be exposed. Then I realized the rector had read as little as I. He confiscated the book, announcing it as "on the Index." The word carried a jolt, evoking an image of heretics burning at the stake. The Index was the devil's own library, a store of ideas too dangerous to know about. The Index? Me? But what really seemed amazing was that books on the Index were available in paperback.

The Index of Forbidden Books, dating to the sixteenth century, was the Inquisition's list of publications deemed to be heretical. Catholics could not read these books without formal dispensation. The Index was not abolished until 1966. The Roman Congregation of the Inquisition, formally called the Holy Office, was renamed in 1965, becoming the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The prefect, or head, of that congregation today is Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, to whom we have already referred. Ratzinger is the putative author of Canon 1436. I of the Code of Canon Law, which states, "One who denies a truth which must be believed with divine and Catholic faith, or who calls it into doubt, or who totally repudiates the Christian faith, and does not retract it after having been warned, is to be punished as a heretic or an apostate with major excommunication."
¹
This canon and others like it were added to the Code of Canon Law only in May 1998, by Pope John Paul II, with an apostolic letter,
Ad Tuendam Fidem
("To Defend the Faith"). Cardinal Ratzinger wrote an accompanying explanation that gave numerous examples of causes for excommunication, such as affirming the right of women to be ordained to the priesthood and questioning the absolute prohibition on sex before marriage.
²
The pope's amendment to canon law and Ratzinger's commentary drew relatively little attention outside professional Church circles. An editorial in the Catholic newspaper
The Tablet,
published in Britain, commented, "The recent
moto proprio Ad Tuendam Fidem,
and above all the commentary on it from Cardinal Ratzinger, are clearly designed to shut down debate on matters about which there was much more to be said ... Rome's desire to silence theological dissent contradicts the deeply felt commitment to the importance of freedom of speech and intellectual integrity that is characteristic of modern democracies. In the secular world, only dictators silence their opponents and demand unquestioning obedience."
³

A few months before
Ad Tuendam Fidem,
in January 1998, Cardinal Ratzinger announced the opening to scholars of the archives of the Holy Office—the Inquisition. In making available these previously closed records, which amount to some forty-five hundred documents, Ratzinger referred to
Tertio Millennio Adveniente,
the pope's premillennial call for a thorough Catholic examination of conscience. "It is appropriate," John Paul II wrote in 1994, "that, as the Second Millennium of Christianity draws to a close, the Church should become more fully conscious of the sinfulness of her children, recalling all those times in history when they departed from the Spirit of Christ." Aware of the distinction between "the Church" and "her sinful children," Ratzinger confidently predicted that historians would find that the archival records "clearly affirm the role of the Roman Pontiff to 'confirm his brothers in the faith.'"

That distinction was central to "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," the 1998 document in which the Vatican attempted to confront its own relationship to the Holocaust. "We Remember" and Ratzinger's announcement about the Inquisition archives were published almost simultaneously, which seemed odd given one of the former's omissions. While individual members of the Church were acknowledged, in "We Remember," as having been guilty of pro-Nazi collaboration or worse, the Church as such was exonerated. So were the popes (as we saw, Pius XII was praised for the "wisdom" of his diplomacy), and so was the Vatican. The document carried the distinction between "sinful children" and the "Church as such" back through history, summarizing the "tormented" record of relations between Jews and Catholics dating back, as it says with such implication, to "the dawn of Christianity, after the crucifixion of Jesus." In this summary, Christian "mobs" were guilty of abuses toward Jews, including "violence, looting, even massacres ... expulsions or attempts at forced conversions." To "the Church as such," however, belonged only virtues, like compassion for Jews.

Two weeks after the Vatican announcement about the opening of the archives, the Brown University historian David Kertzer wrote in the
New York Times,
"We can learn much from the newly opened archives. The explanation of what made the Holocaust possible is to be found in no small part in the files of the Inquisition. Those documents will deepen our knowledge of how for centuries the Roman Catholic Church conditioned the European population to view the Jews as inferiors."
⁴
But in its statement about Christian abuses of Jews, the Vatican does not explain how the Inquisition, the Holy Office, was the work not of the "Church as such" but of individual members departing from the Spirit of Christ. In fact, "We Remember" never mentions the Inquisition.

33.
Convivencia
to
Reconquista

I
T ALL BEGINS
in what some remember as a kind of paradise. The Iberian Peninsula, cut off from Europe by nearly impassable mountains, and spared the long darkness of northern barbarian domination, had been the locus of a rich intermingling of Moorish, classical, Christian, and Jewish cultures. Three geographically distinct regions pollinated one another economically, intellectually, and aesthetically: the seafarers in the west, the land tenders and silk makers in the south, and the castle dwellers and townspeople of the center and north. A common culture resulted from the balance of these various regions, and it even included an anomalous mixing of religious influences. Spanish historians refer to this period as
convivencia,
a word loosely translated as "coexistence,"
¹
but one implying a far more creative interaction than that of, say, the United States and the Soviet Union during their time of coexistence.