Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (86 page)

But the leaders of the Center Party were not uniformly as malleable as Pacelli wanted them to be. For example, they consistently ignored Pacelli's and the pope's express wish that they keep the party out of coalitions with the left-wing Social Democrats.
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Once the new Code of Canon Law was imposed on German Catholics, with the approbation of the German state, it would end such defiance. That is the fateful background to what followed when Hitler, soon after coming to power in early 1933, entered into treaty negotiations with Eugenio Pacelli, by then the powerful cardinal secretary of state.

A seismic shift had occurred in Catholic attitudes toward the Nazis, partly related to Hitler's having taken over the government, but also related to the Vatican's eagerness to deal with the Fuhrer. Within a week of his first cabinet meeting, in early March 1933, Hitler received a friendly message from Pacelli, who was moving quickly to take advantage of a long-awaited opportunity to achieve the
Reichskonkordat.
The message included, as the Vatican envoy told Hitler, "an indirect endorsement of the action of the Reich chancellor and the government against Communism."
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Even an indirect endorsement meant everything to Hitler as he sought to establish his legitimacy at home and abroad. In these early months of 1933, Catholic leaders went from being Hider's staunch opponents to his latest allies. This transformation was dramatically symbolized by the fact that in 1932, the Fulda Episcopal Conference, representing the Catholic hierarchy of Germany, banned membership in the Nazi Party
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and forbade priests from offering communion to anyone wearing the swastika; then, on March 28, 1933, two weeks after Pacelli offered his overture to Hitler, the same Fulda conferees voted to lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party.
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The bishops expressed, as they put it, "a certain confidence in the new government, subject to reservations concerning some religious and moral lapses."
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Swastika bearers would now be welcomed at the communion rail. Cornwell writes, "The acquiescence of the German people in the face of Nazism cannot be understood in its entirety without taking into account the long path, beginning as early as 1920, to the Reich Concordat of 1933; and Pacelli's crucial role in it; and Hitler's reasons for signing it. The negotiations were conducted exclusively by Pacelli on behalf of the Pope over the heads of the faithful, the clergy, and the German bishops."
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Pacelli's negotiations must be seen in the full context of the siege under which Roman Catholicism had found itself in Europe in the previous decades, but there was a distinction in his mind, and in his purpose, between a defense of the Catholic Church in Germany and a defense of the Vatican. Indeed, his disregard for the prerogatives of the local Church is indicated by his readiness to ignore, and even to deceive, important figures in its hierarchy.
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Whatever its stated goal, the effect of Pacelli's maneuvering was hardly to advance the standing of the German Catholic Church. "When Hitler became Pacelli's partner in negotiations," Cornwell observes, "the concordat thus became the supreme act of two authoritarians, while the supposed beneficiaries were correspondingly weakened, undermined, and neutralized."
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The first true beneficiary was Hitler himself. The
Reichskonkordat,
agreed to on July 8, 1933, was his first bilateral treaty with a foreign power, and as such gave him much-needed international prestige, whether the Vatican intended it or not. (The Vatican newspaper
L'Osservatore Romano
published a statement on July 2 saying that the concordat should not be taken as a moral endorsement of Nazism,
¹⁷
and Pacelli would make the same point later.) Yet the price Hitler demanded for the concordat was stiff: the complete withdrawal from politics (and therefore from any possible resistance to the Nazis) of all Catholics
as Catholics.
In negotiations with German officials, Pacelli had offered the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Vatican as a model for the concordat, and Hitler would surely have been aware that the pope had agreed there to Mussolini's demand that the antifascist Catholic political party, Partito Popolare, be suppressed.
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Bismarck had sought to have the Vatican disown the Center Party, which it refused to do. Now Hitler made that a key demand, and the Vatican acquiesced. On July 4, in the final runup to the agreement, the leader of the Center Party, Heinrich Brüning, who had served as Germany's chancellor from 1930 to 1932, consented "with bitterness in his heart to dissolve the party."
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Hitler wanted the Center Party gone because it represented the last potential impediment to his program. In truth, Pacelli wanted it gone for the same reason—for the sake of his own program. But there is evidence that the unseemly rapidity of the Center Party's demise startled Pacelli, and, perhaps, embarrassed him.
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Even before the Concordat was formally signed, the Center Party ceased to exist.

Hitler was not Bismarck. As would quickly become clear, the Nazis were prepared to stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Soon enough, blood would be flowing in the streets, the opposition press shut down, and the constitution abrogated. But in 1933, Hitler was not remotely what he would become, and the connivance of the Roman Catholic Church in these months of transition is part of what enabled him to emerge as a dictator. The Catholic people—there were more members of Catholic youth associations than there were of the Hitler Youth—were the last possible obstacle in Hitler's way. As a baptized Catholic himself, he would have been intimately aware of the courageous and wily history of the victorious Catholic campaign during the Kulturkampf. But instead of being called by the Church—by the pope himself—to "passive resistance," as their parents and grandparents had been, Catholics were encouraged to look for what they had in common with Nazis. And they would find it.

The
Reichskonkordat
effectively removed the German Catholic Church from any continued role of opposition to Hitler. More than that, as Hitler told his cabinet on July 14, it established a context that would be "especially significant in the urgent struggle against international Jewry."
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The deep well of Catholic antisemitism would be tapped, to run as freely as any stream of hate in Germany. The positive side of the long-standing ambivalence, which had again and again been the source of impulses to protect Jews, would now be eliminated, allowing the negative side to metastasize. "This was the reality," Cornwell comments, "of the moral abyss into which Pacelli the future Pontiff"—he would become Pius XII in 1939—"had led the once great and proud German Catholic Church."
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50. The Seamless Robe in 1933

I
N THE HOLLYWOOD EPIC
The Robe,
a Roman centurion, Marcellus, played by Richard Burton, wins the tunic of Jesus in a dice game. The garment is "his first battle trophy, a victory over the King of the Jews." It is at this point that the centurion's troubles begin. Later, a Greek slave, Demetrius, played by Victor Mature, warns him, "You think it is the Robe that has cursed you, but it is your conscience." The film ends with a chastened Richard Burton declaring of the Robe, "It changed my life. In time it will change the world."
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Tradition tells us that the Seamless Robe was brought to Trier by Helena, the mother of Constantine, after her True Cross pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The Robe as a gambler's prize had its origin in the psalmist's reference, "They divide my garments among them, and for my raiment they cast lots."
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We saw how it emerged as one of the imagined details that owed its presence in the original Passion narrative to the phenomenon defined by John Dominic Crossan as "prophecy historicized," rather than as "history prophesied," as such details are more traditionally understood. Once embedded in that narrative, a later generation used the Seamless Robe as a proof of Jesus' foretold Messiahship, a proof to be held against "the Jews," who, despite its source in one of their own texts, nevertheless denied it. The Robe, that is, emerged early on as a symbol of what first went wrong between the followers of Jesus and the post-Temple remnant of Israel that chose another way.

Thus the poignance of the Robe's presence in Trier at the time of the First Crusade, Europe's first pogrom, with its starting point in Trier; at the time of the medieval banishing of Jews, some of whom carried away a family name taken from the place; at the time of the great struggle to define the culture of Europe univocally under the Holy Roman Emperor, one of whose electors was the bishop; and at the time of the dawning of the secular Enlightenment, whose political champion, Karl Marx, was born within a few blocks of the Robe.

Through all of these centuries, the mystique of the Robe increased by the garment's being rarely seen. On occasions of jubilee, the bishop ordered the tattered garment to be taken out of its bejeweled vault. There were only three such occasions in the twentieth century. Recall that on one of them, I was present as a boy of sixteen, admitting a first doubt about the thing itself, a qualm that would live in the vault of my unnerved devotion for years. It was 1959, at the end of the postwar occupation era, and the Catholics of Trier were giving thanks for the reconstruction of the city, including its ancient churches, which symbolized the reconstruction of West German virtue in the great contest with demonic Communism. I can still see the coarsely woven tunic, pressed like a lab specimen between plates of glass that floated in the air above the throng of heads—the men hatless, the women in mantillas and scarves—across which I gazed from beside my stunned mother in the balcony reserved for American VI Ps. Perhaps the size of the Robe caused me to doubt. It seemed a glorified T-shirt, only large enough to fit a child.

The century's prior jubilee when the Robe was on display, as I learned from a tour guide on my recent trip, occurred in 1933. "German Catholics," she had said with a wince, "thought things would work out well." My visit was in July, and I have since learned that sixty-five years before, the festive demonstration took place in July as well. In fact, the occasion for the 1933 celebration, the first since the 1891 display in honor of the end of the Kulturkampf, was the
Reichskonkordat.
Initialed on July 8, the treaty was formally signed on July 20. The signatories were the negotiators: for the Vatican, Eugenio Pacelli; for Berlin, Franz von Papen, the German vice chancellor, the man who, not seven months before, had persuaded the senile Weimar president Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Papen was a Catholic aristocrat, a victim of his own condescension, for he apparently thought that he could control the peasant politician from Austria.

The bishop of Trier, Franz Bornewasser, had been one of Hitler's strongest Catholic supporters, having, for example, urged voters in the decisive March 1933 election to support Catholic National Socialist candidates instead of the Center Party slate.
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Bornewasser, it can be said, at least came to these views honestly, for his selection as bishop in 1922 had already been a political act designed to tilt the Church toward the nationalist purposes of a recovered Germany.
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After World War I, France administered the region around Trier, which was nearly as Gallic as Teutonic. In Paris, it was known as "Rive Gauche du Rhin," and when the bishopric of Trier fell vacant in 1921, France wanted the Church to appoint a prelate who would favor its territorial designs over the Rhineland and the Saar, a coal-rich area with a population of 800,000. As it happened, the bishopric of Cologne, too, had just fallen vacant, and the same pressures were applied there. The Vatican at this point had one eye fixed warily on Russia, now led by Bolsheviks, and the other on France, which loomed on the continent. Though nominally Catholic, France was still a bulwark of anticlerical liberalism, and the wounds of the Dreyfus affair were far from healed. The Holy See, in other words, had reasons for wanting the political counterweight of a recovered Germany, whether dominated by Junker Protestants or not.
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After the chaos of the postwar Weimar years, the overwhelmingly Catholic population of the Rhineland was politically split, with some favoring full union with France, some favoring Berlin, and most, like the Center Party's regional leader Konrad Adenauer, angling for independence. Adenauer was the
Oberbürgermeister,
or mayor, of Cologne. He defined himself as a Rhinelander first and a German second, an attitude that would cause him trouble when the times demanded an uncritical nationalism. That a Catholic leader like Adenauer and the bishop of Trier were on opposite sides of the increasingly bitter struggle is emblematic of the tradition of Catholic ambivalence, the balance of which was quickly lost when the Vatican shifted its weight. And one ready lever in the shifting of such weight, as always, was antisemitism. To take only one example of the still lively power of on-the-ground Catholic hatred of Jews, waiting for Hitler to exploit it, consider that the Catholic Peasant Association in Trier (a kind of grange), had, between 1884 and 1918, brought 13,500 cases of complaint against various traders, merchants, and moneylenders, all charging usury. The association exploited peasant insecurities focused on the deadly stereotype of money and Jews as an organizing strategy.
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