Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (95 page)

Pope John died of stomach cancer in June 1963, not long after the promulgation of
Pacem in Terris
and after presiding at the first session of Vatican II. There would be three more sessions, presided over by Pope Paul VI (1963–1978). As Giovanni Battista Montini, he had worked as a devoted factotum to Pius XII, and that background showed in his pontificate. Pressed to establish the "cause" of John XXIII's candidacy for sainthood, Paul VI at the same time established that of Pius XII, as if the two men were in any way comparable. Acting out of the old (but not that old) instinct of papal primacy, Paul VI undercut the council when he refused to let its members consider the pressing questions of priestly celibacy and birth control. Defying what could easily have been opposite outcomes if the council fathers had taken up those questions, he issued independent encyclicals upholding the traditional requirement that priests not marry (
Sacerdotalis Caelibatus,
1967) and banning contraception
(Humanae Vitae,
1968). I was ordained to the priesthood in 1969, not appreciating yet the damage the pronouncements had done. I was then one of many thousands of Catholic priests who left the priesthood once that damage became clear. The disconnect between the teachings of these encyclicals and the lives Catholics were leading was too great, and the blow that the condemnation of birth control was to Church authority and integrity is well known.
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Given the ideology of papal absolutism that he inherited from his mentor Pius XII, Paul VI thought he had no choice but to reaffirm teachings that had been firmly adhered to by popes for a thousand years or more. His was the first effort to turn back the tide of Church reform that the Vatican Council initiated, and that program of medieval restoration has been vigorously continued by Pope John Paul II. The question of the Church's relations with Jews was far more fundamental than these matters of sexuality, but on that the council was able to take only the smallest step. I have already described the perplexity with which we seminarians greeted
Nostra Aetate,
the council document approved in October 1965, which stated that "what happened in his [Christ's] passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today." I say perplexity because, while
Nostra Aetate
was put forward as if it were rebutting a marginal slander of gutter antisemitism, we young students of the New Testament knew that the sacred texts of the Church placed just such blame on the Jews then living and "on [their] children."
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We knew that, from what we thought of as its origins, the Church had defined itself as the replacement of Judaism, and that because Judaism had refused to yield to that claim, the Church had further defined itself as the enemy of Judaism.
Nostra Aetate
took up none of this, but by defining as a lie an affirmation at the center of the Gospel, it clearly put such basic questions on the Church's near-term agenda. Indeed,
Nostra Aetate
implicitly raised the issue of whether, in its first generation, the Church had already betrayed its master.

We did not know it at the time, but
Nostra Aetate,
as promulgated by the council, was a considerably watered-down document when compared to earlier drafts. It probably fell far short of what John XXIII, responding to Jules Isaac, had wanted. For example, the first thought was that the council would make a stand-alone statement, entitled
Decretum de Judaeis,
about relations between the Church and Judaism, but
Nostra Aetate
is a declaration on all non-Christian religions, with only one small section devoted to Judaism. In the initiating spirit of Pope John, many council fathers expected the statement to include an acknowledgment of Church culpability. "Why can we not draw from the Gospel," one bishop asked during debate in the nave of St. Peter's, "the magnanimity to beg for forgiveness, in the name of so many Christians, for so many and so great injustices?"
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But it was not to be.
Nostra Aetate
"deplores the hatred, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source,"
¹⁸
but, of course, it seems not to know what the main source of the hatred, persecutions, and displays had been. As with the rejection of the deicide charge, the declaration here seems oddly incomplete, as if saying. We can go into this so far, but no farther. And sadly, the apology for sins against the people of Israel that Pope John Paul II offered in the momentous ceremony in St. Peter's on March 12, 2000, also avoided a direct confrontation with the source of antisemitism. We will turn to that apology's positive aspect later, but here we must note its shortfall. "We are deeply saddened," the pope prayed on that occasion, "by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours [Jews] to suffer." It was possible to hear that apology as regret for behavior that was inconsistent with core Church teaching, instead of set in motion by it.

In such difficult matters, any step toward authentic reckoning is to be welcomed. The papal apology in March 2000 built on what was said at the council, but honesty requires the acknowledgment that the early pattern of deflection has been continued. Here is how one historian of the council sums up what happened. "The Declaration
Nostra Aetate
had a very difficult and troubled development in the council, which recalls in many ways the tragic bimillennial history of relations between Christians and Jews and makes it seem almost miraculous that the declaration ever appeared. Indiscretions, intrigues, near-eastern misunderstandings and fears, especially of a political nature, all became entangled. In addition to this, there was what could be called 'Christian obstinacy,' a certain inability to understand, found among some Christians at the council. They were mentally unprepared for the topic."
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Or perhaps not. Maybe the council fathers had such difficulty because they grasped, if only subliminally, how far into the ground of theology the spike of this question goes. And perhaps that still accounts for the Church's inability to face this history more directly. The "topic" of the Jews, unlike most other topics, has truly far-reaching implications. Neither the fathers of Vatican II nor Pope Paul VI was prepared to examine the foundational assumptions of Christian faith, the prophecy-fulfillment structure of salvation history, the construction of a Passion narrative requiring the Messiah to be rejected by "his own," and atonement Christology itself, as this all implied a denigration of the Jews. Instead, acting from good intentions, Church fathers hoped to renounce the denigration, but without facing what made it inevitable.

And so with Pope John Paul II. Continuing the pattern, he seems to have assumed that heartfelt gestures of friendship toward Jews, combined with sincere sympathy for Jewish suffering and abstract acts of repentance, would suffice. When Jews seemed to say otherwise, they were slapped down for being ungrateful. And always, from discussions of Holy Week pogroms to the Inquisition to the Final Solution, there has been the commitment to keep any shadow of moral culpability or accusation of sin away from, in John Paul II's phrase, "the Church as such." Thus, as we saw, the 1998 "confession," "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah," acknowledges the failures of some of the Church's children, but not of the Church. Similarly with the subsequent declaration, "Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past," issued just before the repentance ceremony in St. Peter's.

The examination of conscience for which John XXIII had called required more than was possible at the time, probably more than even he envisaged. It is one thing to consider allowing priests to marry or couples to practice contraception—and the Church has so far proved itself incapable of doing even that—but really to eliminate the contempt for Jews that lives not in the hearts of prejudiced Christians but in the heart of "the Church as such" requires fundamental changes in the way history has been written, theology has been taught, and Scripture has been interpreted. Indeed, in this context, the very character of Scripture as sacred text becomes an issue. Not even the Reformation, as traumatic as it was, sought to go this deeply into the meaning of the tradition, as is clear from Martin Luther's masterly appropriation of the tradition's antisemitism. So, yes, the reforming impulse of Vatican II fell far short of what was needed, and yes, in the years since, the authorities of the Church have done their best to dampen any return of that impulse within Catholicism. How, given this history, could it have been otherwise?

But the reforming impulse refuses to die, even in the Church, because the event that set it moving has only continued to grow in force in the conscience of the West. This is what it means that, at the most basic level, Pope John XXIII was responding to the Holocaust. The Final Solution has refused to remain unadjudicated in institutions everywhere. If Bayer, Swiss banks, the Louvre, owners of apartments in the Eighth Arrondissement, the Ford Motor Company, the U.S. Treasury Department, and the
New York Times
are made to confront their relationship to this unfinished business of the twentieth century, so with the Catholic Church. If Argentina can repent, as its president did in June 2000, of having offered refuge to Nazi war criminals, why can't the Vatican repent of having helped some of those same war criminals escape to Argentina? As a Catholic, I have been raised with the intuition that such moral reckoning is essential to the life of conscience, whether the individual's or the community's. I now understand better than I did before that Church history is itself the record of such moral reckoning, if accomplished in fits and starts.

In reaction to the Protestant Reformation, a defensive Catholicism adopted the attitude that, sinless in itself, "the Church as such" had no need of reformation, yet that was an anomalous mistake, in violation of a much older Catholic tradition. Ironically, in rejecting the spirit of modernity, the Roman Catholic Church, with a certitude to rival that of the crassest sort of Enlightenment science, had perfectly embodied that spirit. John XXIII's greatest achievement was to declare the time over when the Church could so blithely stand as a monument of self-contradiction, if decidedly not of self-criticism. The council he called was the twenty-first "ecumenical" gathering of Church leaders, and though that means such an event had happened, on average, more than once each century, the only council that had met since the defensive Trent was the hyperdefensive Vatican I, where papal primacy and papal infallibility were defined as dogmas. But the tradition of the councils itself was a proclamation of the Church's ongoing fallibility, its permanent need for reformation. That charged word was introduced into Church parlance not by Martin Luther but by the fathers of the Council of Constance (1414–1418), which called for "reform in faith and practice, in head and members."
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Ecclesia semper reformanda,
the Church forever being reformed, is another old slogan. The hope that resides in this enterprise, "firmly grounded in the Catholic tradition," is caught by Hans Küng when he points out that the Latin
reformare
means "to shape something according to its own essential being."
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The first General Council was the one we considered near the beginning of this book, at Nicaea in 325, and it was nothing but an effort to overcome disputes, factions, and fractures—notes of a community that saw itself as anything but perfect. Subsequent councils were called to heal schisms, to settle feuds, and to resolve absolutely contradictory claims made absolutely. The councils always took up the business of the Church's imperfections, and they often had to respond to the imperfections of the popes. The Council of Constantinople (680–681) condemned Pope Honorius I as a heretic. The Council of Constance, just referred to, when confronted with three claimants to the papacy, forced the resignation of one, deposed the other two, and elected a new pope of its own. Constance issued the proclamation
Sacrasancta,
which established the superiority of council over pope. The assumption took hold that the Church council exercised ultimate authority in the Church, and so there is something wonderfully absurd—something "modern" despite itself—about a council vesting just such authority in the figure of the pope. (How do we know that pope is above council? The council says so!) After Vatican I, with its decree of papal primacy and infallibility, the operative assumption of the papal absolutists was that there would never be a need for another council, which is why John XXIII's convening of Vatican II was itself seen at the time as such a revolutionary act. In fact, it was deeply traditional. The Church lives through the self-criticism implied in the conciliar process, and not only self-criticism, but self-criticism in response to history. John XXIII's summons was, ipso facto, the call to conscience, and it was an act of hope that I am only now able to appreciate as such.

John Henry Newman (1801–1890), the brilliant Englishman who made his name as an Anglican but converted to Catholicism in middle age (1845), was one of those who opposed the move to define papal infallibility as doctrine at Vatican I. When his faction lost out, he found in this long conciliar tradition the reason to remain a Catholic. "Let us have a little faith in her [the Church] I say. Pius is not the last of the popes. The fourth Council modified the third, the fifth the fourth ... Let us be patient, let us have faith, and a new Pope, and a reassembled Council, may trim the boat."
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Newman embodied the central Catholic idea that the faith is reasonable, which means that the faith is always subject to reconsideration, and doctrine always subject to development. Hence the conciliar tradition.