Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (88 page)

The cardinal whom I cited earlier as declining to protest the April 1 boycott of Jewish businesses was Adolf Bertram, archbishop of Breslau, a city east of Berlin, now Wroclaw, Poland. Bertram's position as head of one of the six archdioceses in Germany, as one of only three cardinals, and as the chief of the Fulda Episcopal Conference made him the leading Catholic prelate in Germany. After the concordat was initialed by Pacelli and Papen in early July, Bertram worried that it had not included sufficient protection for "non-Aryan Catholics," who were often targeted by Nazi thugs as if baptism had not removed them from the company of Jews. Though the Church of the Inquisition had flirted with the racial definition of Jewishness, and though some Catholic institutions like the Jesuits were still applying blood purity restrictions into the twentieth century, the ancient Catholic insistence on the
religious
note of difference as decisive had been reasserted. Otherwise the Church would have had to yield its hope that the Jews as a group would be converted yet, for if baptism did not wash a person clean of Jewishness, why would he submit to it? If conversion was not ontologically as well as religiously respected, then the End Time conversion of Jews would not signal the Messiah's return. Something central to eschatological hope would be lost. So Church figures like Bertram and others saw the biological racism of Nazi antisemitism as a lethal threat less to Judaism than to Christianity. This insistence on religion, not race, as the defining note of Jewishness would permanently separate the Catholic Church from Nazism. A baptized Jew was no longer a Jew, but try telling that to a member of the Hitler Youth.

Cardinal Bertram wanted it told to Hitler, and he wanted the principle set down in the concordat. On September 2, 1933 Bertram wrote to Pacelli, "Will it be possible for the Holy See to put in a warm-hearted word for those who have been converted from Judaism to the Christian religion, since either they themselves, or their children or grandchildren, are now facing a wretched fate because of their lack of Aryan descent?"
³⁴
The cardinal's urgency in this plea indicates his firm grasp of the jeopardy the new situation of
Gleichschaltung
represented for Jews. Pacelli agreed with Bertram's concern and raised the issue with Berlin. His note in defense of "non-Aryan Catholics" was careful to acknowledge that the Vatican's concern was not with the fate of other "non-Aryans." The note began, "The Holy See [has] no intention of interfering in Germany's internal affairs." That is to say, the Holy See recognizes that the fate of non-Aryans is a matter outside the circle of Vatican concern, with one exception. "The Holy See takes this occasion," Pacelli wrote, "to add a word in behalf of those German Catholics who themselves have gone over from Judaism to the Christian religion, or who are descended in the first generation, or more remotely from Jews who adopted the Catholic faith, and who, for reasons known to the Reich government, are likewise suffering from social and economic difficulties."
³⁵

Thus, right at the outset of the Nazi regime, and after its savage anti-Jewish intentions were indicated, the Catholic Church at its highest level sent a signal both to Hitler and to the German Catholic Church that the Jews, "facing a wretched fate," were on their own. The Church laid a tentative claim to authority regarding baptized Jews, which would be reflected in its occasional objections to Nazi "racism," as opposed to "anti-semitism," but otherwise, it would have nothing to say. As, indeed, it did not. Obviously, Hitler was not waiting for this signal before resolving to eliminate the Jews one way or another, but it surely helped him realize that the way ahead of him in this campaign was clear. The Church, for its part, had come to a decision it would stick with, almost without exception—that the "wretched fate" of the Jews was unconnected to its own fate, or that of anyone else.

This decision was the result of an inability and a refusal to see Jews except through the clouded lens of the religious hatred that is the subject of this book. This decision also amounts to the climax of our narrative, which is why the return to Bornewasser's Trier is so full of implication. It is the revelation at last of where all the roads of this story have been leading, from the first century's complex reading of the meaning of the Seamless Robe, to Helena's claim of it, to the bishop of Trier's wish to display it for Adolf Hitler. To Marcellus, the Robe was a battle trophy, proof of the Roman "victory," as he put it, "over the King of the Jews." In 1933, the Robe had been brought out of its secret place for Hitler, and now its secret was exposed whether Hitler had come to see it or not. The Robe had been twisted by this history into a Christian battle trophy too. Hitler, in other words, had not started the war against the Jews, even if it was his central purpose now to finish it.

51. Maria Laach and
Reichstheologie

T
HE MOMENTOUS
1933 shift in official Catholic attitudes toward the Nazi movement, from disapproval to an acceptance that ranged from reserved to euphoric, certainly reflected the traditional Catholic bias in favor of state authority. In Germany, the Catholic impulse to defer before the power of the state had only been sharpened since the Kulturkampf, which had left Catholics eager to prove their good citizenship. In that case, Hitler's election as chancellor in March was decisive. But there were other, underlying factors at work as well. Pacelli's concordat with the Reich, like the 1929 Lateran Treaty, which had achieved rapprochement between the Vatican and fascist Italy, was born of the quiet desperation that had marked the institutional Church since the mortal challenges of 1870: Garibaldi in Italy, the Paris Commune in France, the Kulturkampf in Germany.

But there was something else. For more than a century, the Church had been thrown off balance by liberalism or modernism, that post-Enlightenment confluence of political revolution, intellectual skepticism, and cultural secularism. In their early stages, fascism and then National Socialism each displayed what a German Catholic theologian would recognize as a "fundamental kinship" with the Catholic Church.
¹
Of primary significance was the fact that both fascism and National Socialism opposed Bolshevism. Since the murder of the archbishop of Paris, which would be repeated in the mid 1930s with the Republican murders of a dozen bishops and hundreds of priests in Spain, Communists had evolved into what they would remain for most of the twentieth century—the Catholic Church's archenemy. The fascists and Nazis opposed other liberal phenomena as well, from parliamentarianism to feminism to the "decadence" of modern culture. Catholics could see in the Lateran Treaty and the
Reichskonkordat
the first steps, however tentatively taken, toward the restoration of a premodern European ideal. The fascist and Nazi visions of society were alike in emphasizing the primacy of corporate unity—in Germany, the
Volk;
in Italy, a recovered empire—which could seem to Catholics an antidote to the rampant individualism of the post-Enlightenment age. In addition, the Church still harbored the dream of a reunited Christendom, with a healing of the Protestant schism, not by denominational reconciliation but by the marginalization of the other denominations.

The fierce calls for totalitarian unity that would overcome all divisions, calls that marked the rhetoric of Mussolini and Hitler—
Totalitátsanspruch
was the Nazi slogan, "claim of the Whole"
²
—could fall on Catholic ears like a promised return to the medieval ideal of one nation and one church. The liberal doctrine of the separation of church and state was as detested by the two dictators as by the pope. That there was no true common ground for the ultimate social union—would His Holiness agree to a subservient Church?—could be deflected.

In sum, many Catholics recognized II Duce and the Führer as inherent allies in the fight against modernism, and saw them adopting common strategies. For example, the Vatican's response to the crisis of Garibaldi's occupation of Rome, which was an unprecedented assertion of authority personal to the pope, could seem to one German Catholic theologian, Robert Grosche, a foreshadowing of what Hitler did in demanding the extraordinary powers of the Enabling Act after the "crisis" of the Reichstag fire in 1933. "When in 1870 the infallibility of the Pope was defined," Grosche wrote, "the Church anticipated on a higher level, that historical decision which is made today on the political level: for the Pope and against the sovereignty of the Council; for the Führer and against the Parliament."
³
The German Reich, proclaimed as the Total State, embodied in the realm of politics what the Church, as of 1870, was reduced to embodying in the realm of spiritual authority. Or, as Grosche put it in 1934, "The
Reich
is the secularization of the Kingdom of God."
⁴

It is hard to read such a statement now without thinking it mindlessly crude, but in 1934 German Catholics were still, as that Trier tour guide said to me in 1998, "hoping things would work out." In fact, they were having their own separate and positive experience of the
Volk, Vaterland, und Heimat
⁵
idealism that was fueling the Nazis. In the 1920s, a Catholic liturgical movement had taken hold in Germany, inspired by such figures as Romano Guardini (1885–1968), a theological giant of the century, whose 1918 masterpiece
The Spirit of the Liturgy,
as much as any single work, sparked the renewal of the Church that would culminate in Vatican II. We saw this before. Instead of seeing the Eucharist as the sacred act performed by a high priest before a congregation of spectators, this movement began to see the liturgy as the act of the community itself. The priest, no longer above the community, would be its spokesperson, its servant. Christ was present in the Church not through the ordained minister, but through the Mysterium of the entire people at prayer. The whole Church thus becomes defined, in the title of a 1943 encyclical, as "The Mystical Body of Christ." The priest's claim to authority is as the embodiment of the community. This ideology changed the way the Church thought of itself, and it did so mainly through the liturgy. When, twenty years after that encyclical, the priest turned away from the wall to, as we say, "face the people," he was stepping down from the medieval ladder of being. The operative image was a ladder no more, but a circle.

The end result of this liturgical movement, when it came to the United States, would be known as the folk Mass, a form in which the breezy, if inexpert, participation of congregants in the singing of common folksongs would be preferred even to magnificent performances of the Fauré and Mozart Masses, performances that had so long reduced congregations literally to audiences. Yet in the context of the movement's origins—as a religious version of what was going on in Germany at that time, the
volkisch
impulse—the tag "folk Mass" cannot seem quite so innocent.
⁶
Or rather, perhaps the liberating and humane outcome of the liturgical movement suggests that the
volkisch
movement, had it not been seized by the diabolical Hitler, might have had another outcome.

Even though the power of a fascist dictator can seem like a return, as Mussolini abstractly imagined it, to the imperial system, it is something else. As Mussolini showed he understood, his power derived not from the gods, not from a dynasty, but from the approval of a mass culture. That is why the rituals of Nazism and fascism—think of those rallies in Nuremberg and before the Palazzo Venezia—required the collective hysteria in which the individual self was subsumed in an all-engrossing identification with the group. The dictator was all-powerful because of that group's recognition of him, not as a king but as a "leader"—Duce, Führer.

The liturgical movement represented the Church's benign version of this phenomenon, even though, at the abstract level of doctrinal assertion, the Church remained committed to monarchy, the authority that comes from above, not below. Thus the liturgical movement amounted to a kind of democratic countercurrent in the Church, which is why, from an early time, the hierarchy regarded it with suspicion. The form of the Mass, with every syllable and gesture precisely defined, was stuck in the amber of the Counter-Reformation. If the ritual could change—here was revolution—perhaps the Church could. The tradition of the "underground Mass" began literally in the crypts of churches, where the first rubrically irregular worship services were held. Because monasteries, with their independence from diocesan control and their ancient, relatively democratic traditions, had always stood as exceptions to an otherwise strict feudal order, it is not surprising that a monastery was where the first major innovations in Catholic liturgy took place. Oddly enough, that monastery was Maria Laach, the Rhineland pilgrimage center to which, for unrelated reasons, my mother brought me as a boy.

Early in this book, I described my recent visit to that Benedictine foundation, a midpoint among Cologne, Mainz, and Trier. I described how, partly for its name, my mother loved the place, and how, listening to the chant of the monks in choir, I had felt a first faint tug toward religious life, the genius of Catholicism. I described how the mystical ideal of monasticism still enthralls me. The reader may remember that Maria Laach dates to 1093, when monks from Trier established it as yet another outpost of burgeoning Cluniac monasticism. The monastery was no doubt known to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, promoter of the two-sword theory of church-state power. Maria Laach probably hosted Bernard when he came to the Rhineland to exhort Second Crusaders not to attack the settlements of Jews that had survived the First Crusade. The abbey church of Maria Laach, with its paradigmatic colonnaded portico and Romanesque towers, was dedicated in 1156. Including a dozen or more buildings, the monastery sits in the midst of a thousand acres of rolling farmland and forests above the crater lake that gives the place its name. The soft curves of the Eifel Mountains ripple away to the east, while the western land slopes gently toward the valley of the Rhine some miles away. The church itself, with its soaring central belfry and multiple apses, is made of rough sandstone, the mostly curved surfaces of which are broken only by the smallest of windows, some round, others shaped like archers' niches.