Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (103 page)

That sin, embedded in the Gospel itself, is proof of why the Church needs democracy, for the assumption of democratic politics, in addition to the assumption that all citizens can contribute to the truth-seeking conversation, is that all citizens are constitutionally incapable of consistent truth-seeking and steadfast loving. God may be love, but the
polis
isn't, and neither is the Church. So we come full circle and recall that the language of love is often used by those in power, while the language of justice is used by those who suffer from the abuse of power. The language of love is not enough. Because the language of love does not protect us from our failures to love; only the language of justice does that.

Democracy assumes that a clear-headed assessment of the flaws of members extends to everyone. But even the leaders of democracies, especially in the United States, salt their speeches with Christian chauvinism or an excluding religiosity, assuming that a democratic polity could be called univocal—no voices, that is, for religious minorities or those of no religion. And that, finally, is why a democracy assumes that everyone must be protected from the unchecked, uncriticized, and unregulated power of every other, including the well-meaning leader. The universal experience of imperfection, finitude, and self-centeredness is the pessimistic ground of democratic hope. We saw that in Spinoza's story,
¹⁹
which was, after all, the story of a man constructing the democratic ideal out of the cruelties inflicted in the name of God. The Church's own experience—in particular, of its grievous sin in relation to the Jews—proves how desperately in need of democratic reform the Church is.

Vatican III must therefore turn the Church away from monarchy and toward democracy, as the Catholic people have in fact already done. Vatican III must restore the broken authority of the Church by locating authority in the place where it belongs, which is with the people through whom the Spirit breathes. Vatican III must affirm that democracy itself is the latest gift from a God who operates in history, and the only way for the Church to affirm democracy is by embracing it. The old dispute between popes and kings over who appoints bishops was resolved in favor of the pope, but bishops now should be chosen by the people they serve. The clerical caste, a vestige of the medieval court, should be eliminated. Vatican III must establish equal rights for women in every sphere. A system of checks and balances, due process, legislative norms designed to assure equality for all instead of superiority for some, freedom of expression, and above all freedom of conscience must be established within the Church—not because the time of liberalism has arrived, but because this long and sorry story of Church hatred of Jews only lays bare the structures of oppression that must be dismantled once and for all.

Vatican III must finish the work that Vatican II began in its implicit, but ever more clear, reaction to the events of 1933–1945. Otherwise, we Catholics are condemned to ask, with David Tracy, "How can we stand by and continue to develop theologies of the church and the tradition as if the Holocaust did not happen?"
²⁰

60. Agenda Item 5: Repentance

P
ULL OUT HIS EYES,
" the children chant in the mind of Stephen Dedalus. "Apologise, / Apologise, / Pull out his eyes."
¹
The impulse to apologize for the Holocaust is properly distrusted, because words are cheap and apology has become an arrow in the well-equipped politician's quiver. An American president apologizes to Africans for failing to stop a genocide, while the United States, the richest nation in the world, ranks ninth in the percentage of national wealth given to combat worldwide AIDS, which kills more Africans than all the continent's wars put together. British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledges the failure of "those who governed in London at the time" to avert the famine known to the Irish as the Great Hunger, but Blair was hooted at by Ulster Unionists who said, "The Irish mentality is one of victimhood—and to ask for one apology one week, and another on a different subject the next."
²
The Vatican issues "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" as an "act of repentance," yet puts responsibility for failure on the Church's children, not the Church; it never mentions the Inquisition, and it praises the diplomacy of Pius XII. John Paul II offers a millennial mea culpa early in the year 2000, and while, as we have noted, there was a profound significance in that apology, as far as it went, it revealed how far is the distance that must be traveled yet.

As the document "Memory and Reconciliation" put it, "Memory becomes capable of giving rise to a new future."
³
But the current leadership of the Church seems interested only in partial memory and a limited reckoning with the past. Otherwise John Paul II would not have devoted so much of his papacy to maintaining the very modes of thought and governance that were the historic sources of Church failure. Apologies offered too glibly, in other words, can be a sly way of asserting one's own moral superiority while reifying the victim status of the group to whom apologies are offered. This is especially so if the structures of that victimization remain in place.

"When Willy Brandt fell on his knees on the site of the Warsaw ghetto in 1970," the scholar Ian Buruma has written, "it was a moving and necessary acknowledgment of a great crime. But such symbolic gestures are too precious to become routine. Official tears have become too cheap, too ritualistic. Piety is often a substitute for knowledge and understanding."
⁴
Knowledge and understanding have been our purposes here, and the next council will accomplish nothing if it falls back, as the Church has so regularly done, on piety. But something else seems possible now, in the aftermath of John Paul I Is millennial call for "the purification of memory."

That is more than a matter of mere words. Far more important than uttered apology, for example, was his momentous act in Israel only two weeks after the liturgy of repentance, an event that transcended the routine symbolic gestures of which Buruma warns. In Jerusalem, John Paul II left his wheeled conveyance to walk haltingly across the vast plaza before the Western Wall. For two thousand years, beginning with the Gospels, Christian theology has depended on the destruction of the Temple as a proof for claims made in the name of Jesus, the new Temple. Nothing signifies Christian anti-Judaism more fully than this attachment to the Temple in ruins, which prompted the pagan emperor Julian to order it rebuilt in the fourth century, and which underlies Vatican ambivalence toward the state of Israel in the twentieth. So when John Paul II devotedly approached the last vestige of that Temple, and when he placed in a crevice of that wall a piece of paper containing words from his previously offered prayer for forgiveness—"We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer"—more than an apology occurred.

Though the news media missed its significance, this moment outweighed even the pope's later, emotional visit to Yad Vashem. By bending in prayer at the Western Wall, the Kotel, the pope symbolically created a new future. The Church was honoring the Temple it had denigrated. It was affirming the presence of the Jewish people at home in Jerusalem. The pope reversed an ancient current of Jew hatred with that act, and the Church's relationship to Israel, present as well as past, would never be the same. Referring to the sight of the stooped man in white with his trembling hand on the sacred stones of the wall, a senior Israeli official said, "This is a picture that will appear in the history books—both Catholic and Jewish."
⁵

***

An authentic confrontation with history results in the opposite of self-exoneration. That is why the members of Vatican III, in taking up repentance as an agenda item, must do so only after having confronted the questions embedded in this narrative, and the consequent questions of antisemitic texts, power, Christology, and democracy, all of which point to attitudes and structures of denigration that must be uprooted if the Church is truly going to turn toward Jews with a new face. Remorse over the silence of the Church in the face of the Shoah—the
faute
to which the French bishops confessed—is not enough. Neither is guilt over the ways two millennia of Church antisemitism prepared for the Shoah.

Authentic repentance presumes what we Catholics used to call "a firm purpose of amendment," which Jews call "desisting" from what led to sin.
⁶
Simply put, repentance presumes change—at every level of the Church's life, because it is at every level that the poison of antisemitism has had its effect.
Teshuva
is the word Jews use to describe the process by which repentance and forgiveness take place. The word means "return," and here is Rabbi David R. Blumenthal's summary of what
teshuva,
in this context, implies: "All the words, documents, and genuine expressions of contrition will avail naught without concrete actions ... The way the Church deals with terrorist incidents, antisemitism, Church files on the period of the Shoah, Judaica deposited with various Church entities and not returned, Catholic education about Jews and Judaism, the nature of Catholic mission, relations with the State of Israel, relations with local Jewish communities everywhere, etc. are, thus, the action-yardsticks by which Catholic teshuva is measured."
⁷
Such changes—education, mission, relations—require the changes in doctrine and structure I have indicated. I call for those changes as a Catholic, but in fact I am following, as Tracy put it, "Jewish theology [which], in its reflections on the reality of God since the
Tremendum
of the Holocaust, has led the way for all serious theological reflection."
⁸

Why would it take a Vatican Council to accomplish Catholic
teshuva?
Because more than one moral failure is at issue here. How do we measure the offense of the Church against the Jews? Perhaps by returning to a figure cited early in this book—that, since Jews made up about 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire when this story began, their world-wide population today—but for intervening tragic factors—would have been, as a percentage of the total, about 200 million, instead of 13 million.
⁹
The Church, while not the sum of those factors, was their driving spirit, their engine, their sanctification. And the symbol of that sanctification was the cross. From Constantine forward, the cross became the symbol of all that Christians must repent in relation to the Jewish people. Mary Boys, a Catholic theologian and veteran of the Jewish-Christian dialogue, wrote, "The cross is a symbol Christians have been given to image their hope that God is with them even in pain and tragedy and ambiguity. It is a symbol of the longing to give themselves over to a project larger than their own self-interest ... Yet it is not a symbol that can be re-appropriated without repentance."
¹⁰

Thus we "arrive where we started," in'T. S. Eliot's line, "and know the place for the first time." The cross at Auschwitz, when I beheld it on a dark November day in 1996, was what inspired this long examination of a Catholic conscience. I vaguely grasped the necessity of learning, as Paul van Buren put it, "to speak of Auschwitz from the perspective of the cross ... by first learning to speak of the cross from the perspective of Auschwitz."
¹¹
And how does that cross look now? I have in front of me a pair of maps, "The Auschwitz Region" and "Auschwitz I." The first offers a diagram of the locality. The Vistula and the Sola Rivers, indicated by wavy channels, intersect above the center of the map. Railroad tracks, black lines with teeth running in four directions, intersect just below the center. These intersections, I confess, look like crosses to me. There are symbols for houses and factories, and the three camps are indicated by hash-marked rectangles: Auschwitz III, the Monowitz Labor Camp; Auschwitz II, Birkenau; and Auschwitz I, the main camp.

The Auschwitz I map shows a carefully drawn compound with guardhouses, sentry towers, a crematorium recognizable by its chimney, and twenty-eight barracks buildings, arranged like peaked-roofed dominoes around three avenues. The camp wall is indicated by tiny crosses on a line, like barbed wire. At one end of the camp is the largest building of all, identified in the map key as the "Old Theater, then storehouse for valuables removed from bodies, site of the Carmelite Convent." Next to that building, along the wall that abuts Barracks 15, the starvation bunker, is an unmarked area that I recognize as the field in which the cross now stands.

I began this book at the mercy of an instinctive wish that the cross at Auschwitz could be made simply to disappear. I would have been relieved to learn that it had been spirited away in the middle of the night by anonymous agents of some Vatican commission or the World Jewish Congress. The cross at Auschwitz: the object of furious controversy, not only between Jews and Christians but among Christians themselves; a new symbol of Polish national revival; the vestige of argument over the convent, which has been moved, and over other crosses, which have been removed; the symbol of the practical impossibility of reconciliation among conflicting claims that are all absolute. And the cross there is a heartbreaking symbol of Pope John Paul II's tragic ambivalence, his longing to identify with the Jews who were crushed around him when he was young, his blindness to the weight of a Catholic past that helped make that crushing lethal. We return to our basic idea, that Catholic history, while not causing the Shoah, was a necessary, unbroken thread in the rise of genocidal antisemitism as well as the source of the Church's failure to openly oppose it. The Catholic past and the cross at Auschwitz are profoundly connected.