Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (94 page)

Edith Stein began her intellectual life with a study of empathy, the capacity of one person to find something in common with another, very different person. Nearly sixty years after her death, she remains a source of dispute over the meaning of conversion and martyrdom, and a source of doubt about the motives of the Church. Because of her and other candidates for sainthood,
³³
the uses of canonization and their effect on how the Holocaust is remembered have come powerfully into question. Her death at Auschwitz spurred her fellow Carmelites to establish the convent there, and the cross erected in the adjacent field remains the poignant and outrageous symbol of all that still divides Christians and Jews.

Such contradictions gave shape to the life of Edith Stein. "For now, the world consists of opposites...," she was reported to have said en route to Auschwitz. "But in the end, none of those contrasts will remain. There will only be the fullness of love. How could it be otherwise?"
³⁴
But we are not at the end yet. The cross still stands at Auschwitz.

That the Catholic Church has sought to confront the meaning of the Holocaust through a hedged version of the memory of Edith Stein; that the Church has, through Stein, sought to place Catholics in the position of having been Nazi victims; that the Church's expressions of sorrow for the Holocaust have been self-exonerating—all of this shows how deeply inadequate these well-intentioned gestures have been. And, as this book shows, the Catholic Church's ongoing refusal to face honestly and fully the long history of its contempt for Jews is what has made it impossible for the Church to face its own complicity, remote and proximate, in the Holocaust—much less to authentically repent of that contempt, or to renounce it.

For these reasons, Edith Stein is the saint who, instead of advancing Jewish-Christian relations, impedes them. Until the Church accomplishes a complete reckoning with a past that reaches far beyond the Holocaust, Edith Stein, instead of blessing the Church, will haunt it.

PART EIGHT

A CALL FOR VATICAN III

54. The Broad Relevance of Catholic Reform

A
ND THE END
of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started."
¹
What I did not know at the beginning of this exploration was that the Church's attitude toward Jews is so central to everything. The Christian fantasy of "the jew," with its bipolarity, its association with images of revolution and of finance, its attachment to myths of wandering, exile, and expiation—all helped shape the Western imagination. So this book is more than a chronicle of religion, and has as much to say to nonreligious readers as to Jews and Christians. Certainly, more than Catholics have a stake in this story's past and future.

In recognizing the place where I arrive as the place where I started, I am thinking of that decidedly Roman Catholic event, the Second Vatican Council, which shaped my life as a young priest. When I described myself early on as a child of Vatican II, I thought that the greatest significance of the reforming council of the early 1960s was its concern with various aspects of Church renewal, but after this exploration of connections between theology and politics, I see its significance for an entire society beyond the Church. Even among non-Catholics, for example, the figure of Pope John XXIII is linked in memory with that of John Kennedy, and for good reason. Pope John's
aggiortiamento
within the Church helped stimulate the transformation of cultural attitudes that swept Europe and the United States in the 1960s. The liberalization of Catholic theology reflected that social mutation and advanced it, and that process is not complete. As the forces of religion have become, by the early twenty-first century, ever more fundamentalist, yoked to political reaction and ethnic chauvinism, and as scientific rationalism has proven to be a woefully incomplete ideology, there is more need than ever for a revived Catholicism committed to intellectual rigor, open inquiry, and respect for the other. This seems especially true in recognizing Roman Catholicism as the only world institution that bridges Northern and Southern hemispheres, rich and poor, and disparities between knowledge elites and mass illiteracy. To use a past Vatican Council that humanized the Church as a model of what a future council can be is to put the prospect of progressive societal change before a wide audience. And in nothing is this more true than in relation to the task of ending antisemitism forever.

The Second Vatican Council represented the beginning of the long-overdue demise of a Constantinian imperial Catholicism, as it had been shaped by a medieval papalism hardened in the fires of the Counter-Reformation. Vatican II signaled a truce in the Church's war against modernity, its final desperate revolt against a rapidly changing world. At the time, I thought that improving the Church's relations with Jews was one agenda item among others, some of which seemed more important. The rights of women, the end of patriarchal autocracy, the restoration of simple honesty, the recovery from clericalism, the place of the laity, the abandonment of denominational narcissism in relation to other churches, an affirmation of sexuality—not to mention my hopes as a young priest for the right to marry. What were the Jews among all these issues?

I embraced a first ideal for my elf, defining it con ciou Iy in term of the Church into which I wa born. When I entered the Paulist Father' novitiate in 1962, I lived according to a daily chedule that had been et by the Council of Trent in the ixteenth century, ob erving rubric of contemplation, chola ticism, and manual labor that pre erved a puritanical regimen. And the truth is, I loved it. But al 0, equally con ciou Iy, I had been drawn to that life by my bru h with Pope John XXIII, who had taken me in his arms. When my family had its audience with the pope I wa a ixteen- year-old boy, but I towered above him, and bent to accept hi embrace. I never forgot hi red velvet hoe next to my penny loafer, the oapy aroma of his haven face, hi whi ker craping my cheek. The curl of the words he whi pered remained in my ear; their intimate affection had conscripted me, though I did not under tand what he had aid. What drew me to him, to the Church, and to what I thought of as God was the clear fact of Pope John' being anything but a puritan.
²

The world loved him so, and I did, imply becau e he was not a mi anthrope. We could not have admitted it, but the Catholic Church, with it Constantinian legacy, was in titutionalized and bureaucratized mi anthropy itself.
³
We took the weight of its world hatred so much for granted that a life-loving man like Pope John could seem a miraculous exception. He was not interested in being a museum keeper, he said. Instead, he wanted "to cultivate a flourishing garden of life."
⁴
The enthusiasm with which the Church, and those outside it, took to him was itself a grievous, if implicit, indictment of what we Catholics had allowed ourselves to become.

This was the pope who left for others the question of infallibility, declaring that he, for one, would never speak infallibly.
⁵
He was given to spontaneous remarks and jokes at his own expense. He disliked the pomp of office. To avoid being cheered like a potentate as he entered St. Peter's Basilica, he ordered the choirmaster to lead the throng in singing. When he visited the Regina Coeli prison in Rome, his biographer Peter Hebblethwaite reports, he eschewed the condescending piety that usually marks such encounters, and quietly told the inmates of his own uncle who had served time. In the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in October 1962, he addressed an unprecedented message to the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the rest of the world. His words were reported the next day on the front page of
Pravda
, in Moscow, under the headline, "We Beg All Rulers Not to Be Deaf to the Cry of Humanity." "This was unheard of," Hebblethwaite commented. "John's appeal enabled Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, to back down without losing face."
⁶
Only months later, in his encyclical
Pacem in Terris,
he broke with Cold War orthodoxy and raised the question of whether nuclear weapons could ever be used as an instrument of justice, sowing the seeds of a new Catholic conscientious objection. John XXIII did not exactly initiate the peace movement of the 1960s, but his anticipation of it would serve as a powerful inspiration. Similarly with détente, for he embraced the nephew of Khrushchev at a time when other Western leaders were still demonizing Communists. Equally significant, he was one of the first to recognize the coming power of the women's movement, which he flagged, together with the demise of colonialism and the rise of workers, as one of the welcome signs of the times.
⁷

All of that, and the steady work of practical change within the institution over which he presided. When he issued his surprising summons to the Vatican Council, barely six months after being elected, he said it was not for the purpose of condemning errors. The world didn't need the Church for that, he said, for "nowadays men are condemning them of their own accord."
⁸
When, at the beginning of Vatican II, he denounced the "prophets of doom," everyone knew that he was speaking of those who had set the tone in his own Church for generations. He was himself an alternative example of what the Church could now become. "As unforgettable as his person was," Hans Küng wrote of Pope John, "what he achieved for the Catholic Church was unforgettable too. In five years he renewed the Catholic Church more than his predecessors had in five hundred years ... Only with John did the Middle Ages come to an end in the Catholic Church."
⁹

But now I see all this in a different light. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was just turning seventy-seven when he assumed the papacy in 1958, elected as a compromise candidate whose great age was expected to keep him from doing much as pope. But he came to the office from a particular experience. For the previous six years, he had been the archbishop of Venice, but for the quarter of a century before that he had served as a Vatican diplomat in Bulgaria, Turkey, and France. The dominant experience he had had as a priest was of the devastation of World War II. He saw it not from the perspective of the sacristy, or for that matter of Vatican City, but of ruined cities, refugee centers, the camps. Roncalli, as we saw, was one of the only Catholic prelates in Europe who, as a legate in Bulgaria and in Turkey providing counterfeit baptismal records to thousands of fugitive Jews, had actively resisted the Holocaust.
¹⁰
Hence the relevance of Hannah Arendt's anecdote, cited earlier, about Hochhuth's play
The Deputy.
When asked what should be done against the play, with its devastating portrait of Pius XII, Arendt reported, Pope John allegedly replied, "Do against it? What can you do against the truth?"
¹¹

The Church's failure in relation to Adolf Hitler was only a symptom of the ecclesiastical cancer Pope John was attempting to treat. The long tradition of Christian Jew-hatred, on which Hitler had so efficiently built, was the malignant tumor that had metastasized in the mystical body. John XXIII had instinctively grasped this. Hence his open-hearted response to the Jewish historian Jules Isaac (in June 1960), who traced the Church's antisemitism to the Gospels, and John's subsequent charge (in September) to those preparing for the council that it take up the Church's relations with Judaism as a matter of priority.
¹²
Hence his elimination from the Good Friday liturgy of the modifiers "faithless" and "perfidious" as applied to Jews,
¹³
an implicit rejection of supersessionism. Hence his greeting to a first Jewish delegation at the Vatican: "I am Joseph, your brother," he said, then came down from his throne to sit with them in a simple chair.
¹⁴
To appreciate such a gesture, one need only think of the "pope's Jews" kissing the ground trod by the velvet slipper before returning to their "hole," as Pius IX, speaking not long before Roncalli was born, had called the ghetto at the foot of Vatican Hill.

As we have seen, for hundreds of years popes had defined their power in terms of their sovereignty over Jews, and for nearly two thousand years Catholic theology had projected almost every affirmation of the Church against the negative screen of a detested Judaism. Here was the Church's first, and permanent, mistake—an unbroken chain of choice and consequence that crossed the centuries. That narrative arc, traced here, cuts through time as a refutation of the core idea, expressed in various ways, that the Church is a "perfect society," that as the Bride of Christ it is spotless, that the claim to infallibility in matters of faith and morals is more than wishful thinking or rank denial. It is not too much to assume that for John XXIII, the Holocaust, which he saw up close and experienced as a trauma of his own, exposed this deeply entrenched assumption to profound questioning.

At bottom, what was so urgently required of the Catholic Church was a change in what it said, thought, and believed about Jews. A reform that addressed the problem of Catholic antisemitism could be anything but peripheral, and the Church's relations with Jews could be anything but just one more item on the council's agenda. This was so not only because the ongoing faith of Jews called into question absolutist claims made for Jesus Christ, not only because steady Jewish affirmation of the Shema apparently contradicted central tenets of the Christian creed, and not only because the universalist exclusivism of the Catholic Church was incompatible with authentic respect for Israel's unbroken covenant with God. The council's mandate to reform the Church was rooted in the history of its relations with Jews because that history, more than anything else, established the Church's radical sinfulness. And Pope John saw it.