Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (8 page)

Nostra Aetate
zeroed in on the central pillar, in Richard Rubenstein's phrase, of "supreme hatred," the old charge of deicide. "True, authorities of the Jews and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ ... still, what happened in His passion cannot be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor against the Jews of today."
⁵

When this declaration was mistakenly summarized in news accounts as a Catholic act of absolution for an ancient Jewish sin, some Jews, not surprisingly, took offense. Christians and Jews alike who had been sensitive to the disastrous consequences of the deicide accusation welcomed the council's declaration, but a broader public was simply confused. It was into that group that I fell. The gentle pope had removed the cruel words
perfidis judaeis
("perfidious Jews") from the Good Friday liturgy, and I understood, at that dawn of the ecumenical age, the necessity for civility.
⁶
Yes,
perfidis
is an insult and doesn't belong in church. I saw that.

Years later, scholars would add nuance to my grasp of the origins of the anti-Jewish polemic of the New Testament, but my seminary Scripture courses did no such thing. The historical-critical method, yes. The concordance of the Gospels, yes. Textual and contextual analysis, yes. I learned that in the earliest Gospel, Mark, it is "the crowd" that sets itself against Jesus; then, in Matthew, the antagonist is identified as "all the people"; but those categories I saw through the lens of John, who identified the enemy of Jesus as "the Jews." In John the record is crystal clear, and his account of the crucial events shapes the Christian imagination still:

Pilate said to them [the chief priests and the officers], "Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no crime in him."

The Jews answered him, "We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God..."

He said to the Jews, "Here is your king!"

They cried out, "Away with him, away with him, crucify him!"
⁷

After
Nostra Aetate,
scholars and preachers would try to shift the blame for the death of Jesus to the Romans, who after all invented crucifixion. Jesus would be presented as a peasant revolutionary whose crime was merely political. Or his death would be spiritualized, indicting the generic fault of a sinful human race. In this case, the long-running subtext of Christian piety—Jesus died for
my
sins—would be brought forward as paramount. I would learn these lessons. My question remained, however. What about the Gospels? The enemies of Jesus were Jews, not Romans: "his own people received him not."
⁸
The very structure of the Jesus story required his rejection by the people with whom he first identified. If that wasn't true, what was? If the Jews had not rejected him, even to sponsoring his murder, then Christian religion was based on fiction, and worse. If "the Jews" were innocent of the death of Jesus, then the Gospel writers were guilty of a vicious slander. And not just the Gospels. The Acts of the Apostles tells the story to highlight conflict with the Jewish Temple guard, Jewish high priests, Pharisees, scribes, and Sadducees—an undefined litany that boils down to "the Jews." The Romans? Wasn't Saint Paul's claim to Roman citizenship what rescued him from the Jews? "[The Jews] are enemies of God," he says in Romans, an indictment that hardly seems tempered by the following clause: "but ... they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers."
⁹

To say that the Jews were not in some way the enemy, it seemed to me at the time, undermined the Catholic reading of the New Testament, its composition, divine inspiration, and, as I had recently learned to call it, "indefectibility." I was as yet incapable of asking the basic question: Is hatred of "the Jews" in the Christian Scripture a signal that followers of Jesus, even as mostly Jews themselves, proved all too human not only in their initial response to him—all those Good Friday desertions—but in their subsequent "inspired" interpretations of his message? The idea of the essential reliability of the New Testament witness is so central to Christian faith that even radical contemporary Scripture scholars suggest not that evangelists were wrong in the way they constructed the narrative, but that we are wrong in the way we understand it. Such convoluted thinking only serves to put the question more directly: Are the New Testament writings, twisted by a hatred of Jews that a Church council would later renounce, a betrayal of the message of Jesus? If so, where does that leave us?

There was no escaping the source of conflict: Jesus was the Messiah, and Jews
as Jews
rejected him. That happened in the beginning, and it was still happening. I knew, by the time I was a seminarian, to say no in principle to antisemitism, with its crude sweeping racism, but Christian religious opposition to Jews was something else. In Scripture class we were taught to distinguish between antisemitism and anti-Judaism, with the clear meaning that the latter was an appropriate part of the defense of the faith. Love the sinner but hate the sin—hate the sin, that is, of the Jews' rejection of the Lord. The exonerated Pilate, washing his hands of the crucifixion, carried more dramatic weight in the Passion narrative than did Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. That Pilate, not the Jews, was charged with the death of Jesus by the creed we daily recited at Mass—"For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate"—carried weight, but the creed was composed at Nicaea three centuries later, and it did not cancel the Gospels' assertions. I remember how the question was finally put to our professor one day: Either the Jews are guilty or the Gospels falsify history—which is it? Our professor could not answer us.

Nostra Aetate,
in other words, raised more questions than it answered. "Although the Church is the new People of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God ... Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church ... decries hatred, persecution, displays of anti-Semitism directed against Jews at any time and by anyone." Contradictions notwithstanding, the meaning of the Vatican Council declaration was clear. It was considered antisemitism now to say that the Jews killed Jesus. The date of this pronouncement was October 28, 1965—well away, fortunately, from the springtime liturgical cycle in which, to the ears of those in pews, the Church's solemn Holy Week lectionary would simply defy it. The questions raised by
Nostra Aetate—
from the meaning of corporate guilt, to the interplay of Old Testament prophecy and Christian revelation, to the "inerrancy" of the Church—gave shape not only to our classroom discussions but to those of our dinner table and common room as well.

I, for one, had to face the way in which a fiercely negative image of the Jew served as a girder of my religious imagination. What could move it, much less remove it? I could not have directed you to a synagogue in Washington, my native city. I knew no Jews by then, and I knew nothing of Jewish piety as it had developed over the nearly two thousand years since Caiaphas. Even Peter Seligman was a distant memory.

The year 1965 was the twentieth anniversary of the liberation of the camps in Europe. While the council fathers had debated their text, the cult of Anne Frank had swept the West and the trial of Adolf Eichmann had reached a climax. The news in Europe had been dominated by jurists' efforts to extend the statute of limitations on war crimes, as the broad society finally acknowledged that some key figures of the Third Reich had yet to be brought to justice. In other words, the first phase of a culture-wide Holocaust denial was coming to an end. No one in Rome described
Nostra Aetate
as an effort to reckon with the Church's relationship to these events, but what else accounts for the jubilation with which it was promulgated?

My beloved John XXIII had died in 1963, but his successor, Paul VI, seemed as committed to this transformation as Roncalli had been. Pope Paul's speech is still vividly in my mind. I remember staring up at the common room Philco, one of a hushed group of robust American men in their twenties, how we stretched to understand the Latin, falling back gratefully on the
sotto voce
of the papal translator. The pope declared, "The Church is alive! Well, then, here is the proof!" For us Catholics, there was always proof. His Holiness held up the pages of the declaration. "Here is the breath, the voice, the song..."

Nostra Aetate was
being taken as an absolution of the Jews, yes, but did this exuberance hint that it was, at a deeper level, an absolution of the Church? There was the necessary rejection of the deicide charge, that Jews as a group could not be indicted for the murder of Jesus, but there was also the unexplained assertion that the charge was not grounded in Christian Scripture. Wasn't this a moving away from accountability instead of toward it? And precisely what did it mean to say that the Jewish religion continued to have validity if, in fact, Christian claims about Jesus as the Jewish Messiah were true?
Nostra Aetate
read, in other words, like a post-Shoah attempt to disassociate the Church from the diabolical effects of its own teaching without really addressing the problem of that teaching.

Instead of reexamining the oppositional habit of mind according to which Jews were defined as the Church's negative other, the council fathers seemed to think it was enough to say of Jesus that he was from the Jews. Wasn't he "the son of the Virgin Mary,"
¹⁰
who with the apostles and most of the disciples "sprang from the Jewish people"? Was this more than saying, "Some of our best friends are Jewish"? Jesus, Mary, Peter, John, even the "convert" Paul—Jews all! How could that pronouncement seem an illumination? Yet it was. Basic questions about Christian assumptions of superiority were sidestepped, perhaps, and a definition of Jewishness keyed to suffering was left intact, but the council document still blasted the lid off Christian prejudice. It was far from nothing that the most savage antisemitic stereotypes, which were also the most ingrained, were roundly repudiated by the Church. For example, imagine Mary in a conical hat. Imagine Mary as guilty of the murder of her son. Roman Catholicism's absolute reverence for the mother of Jesus, once she was seen to be a Jew, could open the way to a new realm of religious imagination. Thus Paul VI saluted "especially the Jews, of whom we ought never to disapprove and whom we ought never to mistrust, but to whom we must show reverence and love, and in whom we must place our hope."
¹¹

What could such words have meant to that focused yet confused twenty-two-year-old man, with the freckles and big ears, whom I see in the photographs taken of me then?
Nostra Aetate
still proclaimed "the burden of the Church's preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ," so the spine of my vocation was intact, if not stiffened. It was the cross, the document said, that "reconciled Jews and gentiles, making both one in Himself." "No salvation outside the Church" was entirely passé by then, but there would still be no salvation outside the cross. So whether Jews knew it or not—liked it or not—the cross itself, whoever hammered its nails, would one day be revealed to them, too, as "the fountain from which every grace flows." Jews, I told myself, would one day know what I already knew. We Christians would never again kill them for it, and in the new spirit of ecumenism we might not refer to it, but eventually Jews would know that they were wrong. If one pope could speak of Jews as our hope, why should not another speak of Auschwitz as a contemporary Golgotha?

A few days after watching the pope's
Nostra Aetate
speech on television, we saw news coverage of a young Quaker named Norman Morrison protesting the war in Vietnam by immolating himself on the pavement outside the Pentagon. "A column of orange flame leapt twelve feet high as the clothes and flesh burned," Robert McNamara's biographer would later write.
¹²
Compared to the eruption of the Vietnam War as a source of my personal turmoil, the reshaping of Catholic attitudes toward Jews,
Nostra Aetate
notwithstanding, should have induced a subtler shift, but something else cracked the bedrock of Roman Catholic certainty around that time. In 1965, a play by Rolf Hochhuth, a German Protestant, was charging Pope Pius XII with a primary responsibility for the Holocaust. Known as
The Deputy
in the United States and
The Representative
in Britain—both titles rendered a word usually given in English as "Vicar," as in "the Vicar of Christ"—the play accounted for the pope's refusal to condemn openly the Nazi anti-Jewish genocide by implying that he cynically played a game of realpolitik, sympathizing with Germany and narrowly seeking only the Vatican's welfare.
¹³

Pius XII was my first pope. When they had told me at St. Mary's School in Alexandria that His Holiness could not make a mistake, I had no trouble believing it. His bespectacled profile adorned the covers of
The Pope Speaks,
the periodical pamphlet that was often in our house. The same profile was etched within a wooden frame inside our front door, and a larger, more colorful photograph of the same face hung above the blackboards at our school. That face functioned as a Catholic icon, and loyalty to the pope was the way we measured our religious faith. The doctrine of papal infallibility was always hedged by the restriction that it was limited to "matters of faith and morals," but I grew up taking the broad perfection of Pius XII for granted. He was our living saint.

And then
The Deputy.
"Whoever wants to help must not provoke Hitler," Hochhuth's pope says. "Secretly ... silently, cunning as serpents—that is how the SS must be met."
¹⁴
But an old Jesuit advisor, Fontana, says, "Your Holiness, may I ask in all humility: Warn Hitler that you will
compel
five hundred million Catholics to make Christian protest if he goes on with these mass killings!" To which the pope replies, "Fontana! An advisor of your insight! How bitter that you too misunderstand Us. Do you not see that disaster looms for Christian Europe unless God makes Us, the Holy See, the
mediator?
"
¹⁵