Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (9 page)

To Hochhuth's pope, Communism is the real evil to be resisted. "Hitler alone, dear Count, is now defending Europe. And he will fight until he dies because no pardon awaits the murderer. Nevertheless, the West
should
grant him pardon as long as he is useful in the East."
¹⁶
This portrait of Pius XII has been discredited—"at best, a very dubious sort of armchair psychologizing," as one critic put it.
¹⁷
The Deputy
sought to scapegoat the Vatican at a time when other major institutions of the West—Swiss banks, the Red Cross, French governmental offices, the U.S. State Department, Volkswagen, Bayer, and others—were still in rank denial of their share in responsibility for the near success of the Nazi project. Pius XII's defenders mocked the idea that a word from him could have deterred, or even slowed down, the Final Solution. Nevertheless, there was a ring of truth in the denunciation of the pope's World War II "silence," and no one heard it more clearly than we seminarians.

We knew enough to contrast Pius XII's silence in relation to Nazism with his forthright condemnations of Communism, including his 1949 excommunication, "at a stroke," of Communist Party members everywhere in the world.
¹⁸
Yet not even Hitler was ever excommunicated, and it shamed us to realize only now that the German dictator died still on the rolls of the Roman Catholic Church into which he had been baptized as an infant.
¹⁹
So we passed contraband copies of
The Deputy
from hand to hand as if it were pornography, and for a time the debate among us was endless. In one heated session I remember, we read passages from the play's climax to each other. It concerns the harsh fact of the Gestapo roundup of Jews in Rome, "as it were, under the pope's window."

We learned that it was true. On October 16, 1943, more than twelve hundred Jews were arrested practically within sight of the Apostolic Palace. They were held for a time in a building a stone's throw from the Vatican, then taken away, most to die in Auschwitz. There is no record of a public Church protest. "He who knows evil is being done, and does nothing to stop it, is guilty with the evildoer"—the aphorism is attributed to Saint Ambrose of Milan.
²⁰
Years later, Pius XII's defenders would insist that he worked behind the scenes to help Jews, and, in particular, that he quickly, if quietly, brought the Roman deportations to a halt. We will see more of the question later, but for now, suffice to say that such assertions remain in dispute.

In the 1960s any suggestion of papal failure landed with a jolt. Hochhuth's contempt for the pope offended us—Hochhuth was a German Protestant, after all—but his central thesis, pointing to the absence of any open resistance, seemed finally irrefutable: If Christ's "deputy" would say nothing even as Jews were hauled away at the foot of Vatican Hill, Hitler could reasonably count on Church silence everywhere. And Church silence licensed the silence of others. At the very least, Pius XII was guilty of a serious strategic mistake. Within a couple of years, we seminarians could pass among ourselves the report of Hannah Arendt, re-counted in her essay "Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli: A Christian on St. Peter's Chair, from 1958 to 1963," that not long before his death. Pope John XXIII had read
The Deputy.
"[He] was asked what one could do against it," Arendt wrote. "Whereupon he allegedly replied: 'Do against it? What can you do against the truth?'"
²¹
The story made John XXIII's memory even more precious to us, but his simple authenticity was coming to seem like an exception, as much in relation to ourselves as to Pius XII.

In the same period, fueling our debate along with our anxiety, there appeared a book by a Catholic sociologist named Gordon Zahn entitled
German Catholics and Hitler's Wars.
It was a frontal assault on our proudly held assumption that German Catholicism—typified by Konrad Adenauer, a concentration camp survivor and the postwar architect of the democratic West Germany I had seen for myself—had been a bastion of anti-Nazi resistance. As a teenager in Germany, I had had no knowledge of the uses to which such a myth was being put—enabling the Catholic-dominated Christian Democratic Party to serve as the spine of Allied containment of the Soviet Union. With Zahn's work, the myth of German Catholic heroism collapsed. He applied Saint Thomas's principle of the just war to the German situation in the 1930s and 1940s, showed how Hitler's war was in obvious violation, and how, nevertheless, Catholics enthusiastically supported it. The German Catholic hierarchy and clergy, in particular, were guilty of a grievous moral failure, and we saw it. "In World War II," Zahn wrote, "the leading spokesmen of the Catholic Church in Germany did become channels of Nazi control over their followers, whether by their exhortations to loyal obedience to legitimate authority, or by their even more direct efforts to rally those followers to the defense of
Volk, Vaterland,
and
Heitnat
as a Christian duty."
²²
Support of Hitler was not only allowed to Catholics, but was required of them.

But just as I turned away from devotion to my mother toward conflict with my father, away from Europe's past agony toward the brutal war in Vietnam, away from the nightmare question of Jew hatred in the name of Jesus toward white people's hatred of yellow people—just then, a Jew came as powerfully and unexpectedly into the story as, in a different way, years before, Peter Seligman had. "To speak about God," Abraham Joshua Heschel said in 1965, "and remain silent on Vietnam is blasphemous."
²³
In that year of
Nostra Aetate, The Deputy,
and Operation Rolling Thunder, the year of Norman Morrison, Rabbi Heschel joined with Daniel Berrigan, William Sloane Coffin, and others in founding Clergy Concerned about Vietnam, which quickly evolved, in that anticlerical time, into Clergy and Laity Concerned.
²⁴
At my seminary, St. Paul's College, we formed a chapter, which, in my weak-kneed case, would provide the support I needed not just to break with the war but with my father. And that conflict was what drew me to Heschel, who seemed like nothing if not a father one could trust.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a longtime professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. He was, in his daughter Susannah's phrase, "an Orthodox Jew with a white beard and yarmulke."
²⁵
Yet he was something for me, too. He was born in Warsaw in 1907, but he went to Berlin for university and rabbinical studies. His early work on the prophets of Israel established his reputation, but it also forged a moral vision that joined piety and hunger for social justice—always a dangerous combination. One night in 1938, the Gestapo rousted him from his apartment, expelling him from Germany back to Poland, which he then fled just ahead of the Nazi invasion. His mother and two sisters died in the Shoah. (A third sister was killed during the invasion.) Heschel made his way to New York, describing himself later as a "brand plucked from the fire of Europe."
²⁶

His daughter, Susannah Heschel, is a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth. She writes of her father, "His survival was a gift, because he became a unique religious voice in an era in which religion was in grave danger."
²⁷
In the early and mid 1950s, he published two works that remain classics of American theology:
Man Is Not Alone
and
God in Search of Man.
He was at the peak of his intellectual influence when I entered the seminary. As was true for many Christians, my reading of Heschel, sparked by his resolute rejection of my father's war, was my first direct experience of postbiblical Jewish thought. To read Heschel was to step aboard the endangered but still seaworthy idea that the most transforming adventure of all can be intellectual. Heschel changed my notions not only of Judaism but of religion itself, and of God.

As is obvious by now, I had been raised with an anachronistic idea of Judaism: the Scribes and the Pharisees, worship at the Temple, the stereotype of the vengeful Old Testament God. Catholics like me knew nothing of the living tradition of Jewish thought and observance, ignorance that reflected the Christian assertion that after Jesus, Israel had been superseded by the "new Israel," the Church. Heschel's vital theology, rooted in a biblical vision but informed by two millennia of rabbinical wisdom, was a stark rebuttal of all this. "The central thought of Judaism is
the living God
" he wrote. "The craving for God has never subsided in the Jewish soul."
²⁸
Heschel put words on that craving as I experienced it, requiring me to revise entirely what I thought of Judaism. He did something similar for many Catholics. Indeed, he was present as a consultant at the Second Vatican Council, helping to shape
Nostra Aetate.

Heschel was a loving critic of religion, his own included. He had seen with his own eyes the failure of religion to resist Nazism, and his testimony forced a generation of Christians as well as Jews to see through "parochial saintliness," how easily it can amount to "an evasion of duty." It was worth volumes of theology to see his white beard and yarmulke in the front ranks of the march in Selma, Alabama, arms linked with Martin Luther King, Jr. A photograph of the pair gave me my first image of Heschel. I never met him, although I heard him preach at a service on the eve of an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C. I don't recall what he said, but I felt his gentle authority as an antidote to the self-righteous judgmentalism of the radicals who never failed to make me nervous on the streets.

But politics paled: The deepest change I trace to this rabbi is in my notion of God. I remember thinking at first that the title of his masterwork,
God in Search of Man,
was backwards. Aren't we the ones who do the searching? Hadn't that been my own frenzied experience dating back to those pilgrimages with Mom, or to the cross-bearing cell in a Georgetown retreat house? "My heart is restless, Lord," I'd learned to say with Saint Augustine, "until it rests in Thee." But what if the restlessness is God's? In Heschel's view, God was not the aloof, detached figure of the scholastics, whom I was studying in the classroom—the "Unmoved Mover"—but a lover who creates human beings out of a passionate longing. Our craving is met by God's own. "To be is to stand for," he wrote, "and what human beings stand for is the great mystery of being God's partner. God is in need of human beings."
²⁹
Susannah Heschel says that the idea of God's need for us is "the central pillar" of her father's theology.
³⁰
God needs partners in gathering up the precious fragments of the earth into a new whole of peace and justice. Impossible? "The grand premise of religion," the rabbi wrote, "is that man is able to surpass himself."
³¹

By the time Rabbi Heschel died, on December 23, 1972, I was a priest, the Roman Catholic chaplain at Boston University. When I had received that assignment upon ordination in 1969, a senior priest of the order had poked me, intending a show of sympathy. "B-Jew," he said, implying, for that reason, I would hate the place. He was right about Jews at BU—they made up perhaps a third of the student body—but wrong that I would hate it. Jewish students dominated the peace and civil rights groups that drew me in, much as Catholic students dominated ROTC. As a chaplain, I had ties to both groups, but as the war dragged on, I stopped pretending to be neutral. When I joined a picket line at the entrance to the university placement office, to keep a Marine recruiter out, I realized that the defiant kids who sprawled on the floor to block the doorway were mostly Jews; the kids waiting nervously to be interviewed by the Marine were Catholics. They looked at me with hurt eyes.

A few of us mounted a BU production of
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,
Daniel Berrigan's antiwar play. "Our apologies, our apologies, Good Friends..." Berrigan the defendant says, "for the fracture of good order ... for the burning of paper instead of children." The play has a Catholic cast of characters, but we knew to put it on at Hillel House instead of Newman House, the Catholic Center, and not only because of the enviable theater space. Berrigan was a fugitive at the time, and I would later learn that the BU professors helping to hide him, including Howard Zinn and David Rubin, were Jews. Was it that dissent came more naturally to Jews? What was Jewishness in the Christian West, I began to ask,
except
dissent? B-Jew? I too was beginning to think like a Jew. I didn't know yet to wonder if even here, in defining dissent as somehow essentially Jewish, I was assuming the dominance of Christianity and accepting as inevitable a certain pariah status for Jews.

Still, the structure of my inner life had been upended. Had I, in Heschel's phrase, surpassed myself? I wanted very much to think that I had left behind my anti-Jewish triumphalism. That fall, with many others, I had experienced in a flash of recognition something of what the Holocaust must have meant when eleven Israeli Olympic athletes were murdered in Munich by the terrorist group Black September. It was the first time I had any idea of what the explicit and exclusive targeting of Jews
as Jews
meant. By then we had been through the assassinations and riots of the sixties, had thought ourselves hardened, but Munich revealed a horror we had heard of but never felt. "Munich," to our parents, meant Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, but to us it spoke of the anti-Jewish genocide.

Out of that recognition, and, as I thought, out of my complete identification, I proposed to the BU rabbi a joint Jewish-Christian memorial service so that the whole community could express its grief and rage at that crime. I sensed the rabbi's reluctance. For him, I think, the events at Munich had reinforced an old feeling of isolation and rejection, and it seemed a time for an expressly Jewish solidarity. But I pressed, assuring him that we had all experienced the murders as Jews had. Finally, he agreed. And then I proposed as the place to hold the service the monumental Marsh Chapel in the center of the campus. It is a kitsch-Gothic church, a vestige of Boston University's origins as a Methodist school. It seemed an entirely ecumenical venue to me: We Catholics had only recently been permitted to use it for Mass. It was a function of my "parochial saintliness" to assume that that inter-Christian denominational breakthrough had made Marsh Chapel everyone's. The rabbi, though, could not keep the surprise from his face. Marsh Chapel? That vaulted hall with the cross suspended above an altar? "No way," he said to me, but bitterly. You still don't get it, do you?