Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (83 page)

The idea that the Virgin Mary was conceived free from original sin (the dogma does not refer to Mary's conception of Jesus) was long believed by the Church, but the pope here brought it forward as a way of elevating the cultic and theological status of Mary, a move that served, not incidentally, to identify the pope with her. Mary's celebrated primacy among creatures would enhance the pope's primacy, but even more to the point, the Virgin would now be a figure around whom an insecure, alienated, and defensive Catholic population could rally.

That the apparently religious act of promulgating this dogma was equally an ingenious political response to the assault the pope had experienced only four years before became clear when, four years later, the Virgin herself "interceded" to affirm it. On February 11, 1858, the mother of Jesus is reported to have made herself visible to a peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous in a French town named Lourdes. Over the next six months, Saint Mary is said to have shown herself to the girl another seventeen times. Within weeks of the first apparition, twenty thousand pious Catholics had converged on the village, although only Bernadette could see the Blessed Mother.
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Most significantly, the girl reported that, in the Virgin's first appearance, she had identified herself by saying, "I am the Immaculate Conception." Pius IX made it clear that he regarded this as "a sign that vindicated his promulgation,"
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and that confirmed his dominion as sole authority above all others in the Church. Catholics began showing up in Lourdes by the tens of thousands; even now, two million visitors a year make the pilgrimage,
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and the miraculous stream flowing nearby has by now been credited as the source of thousands of cures. (Fifty-eight "healings" have been officially recognized as miracles by the Church. In 1999, the Church recognized a 1987 healing as having been "accomplished through the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.")
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A renewed and widely sung emphasis on the miraculous could only have been seen in the mid nineteenth century as a resounding rebuttal to the science-minded naturalism of modernity. Catholics responded to the sneering liberals' dismissal of their religion as primitive superstition by elevating in an unprecedented way what outsiders could see only as superstition. Apparitions of the Virgin suddenly became a feature of Catholic life in Europe, with hundreds
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of her appearances reported across the continent. To keep such popular enthusiasm in hand, and to channel it in ways designed to serve the Church's social and political purposes, prelates were careful to impose standards of credibility on the phenomena, which helped maintain clerical control over the powerful manifestations of a new kind of Roman Catholicism.

In addition to Lourdes, and beginning about then, officially sanctioned apparitions over the next several decades drew thousands of Catholic pilgrims to La Salette and Pontmain in France, Pompeii in Italy, and Knock in Ireland, to name only the most famous.
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That the background of social anxiety caused by political upheaval is an important element in such a trend is perhaps best revealed in the apparition of Mary at Fátima, Portugal, which occurred in 1917. The Virgin's prophecy, made to three child shepherds, that Russia would be "reconverted" after spreading "errors" around the globe
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was instrumental in rallying Catholics against the nascent forces of Communism. At the Fátima Virgin's behest, every Catholic Mass would now be concluded with a special prayer for the conversion of Russia, a tradition maintained until the 1960s. It was a coincidence when a would-be assassin gunned down John Paul II in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, the Feast of Our Lady of Fátima, the anniversary of her first apparition, but this pope, too, would make powerful political use of his association with the Virgin. He made it clear that the timing of the event was no coincidence to him, and that he regarded his survival as a miracle of Mary's intervention.
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After that, his efforts to "reconvert" Russia would prove unstoppable.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, the threats to the Church were the various nationalisms, with their own "names, battle slogans and costumes," in Marx's phrase. According to the Harvard historian David Blackbourn, whose study of the religious situation in Bismarck's Germany informs much of what follows, "The pilgrimage badges, Marian hymns, and miraculous spring-waters of the apparition crowds were a rival set of emblems."
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More to the point, intensely felt piety among Catholics became a vital source of identity that rivaled the identity others—the Church's enemies—were finding in the intensely felt patriotisms of the newly emerging states. And though the new Catholic piety was focused on Mary, its immediate political beneficiary was the pope, who had made Mary's cause his own. The pope could use the forces generated by the apparitions to advance his own position. As Blackbourn puts it, "The pontificate of Pius IX showed that the church could successfully channel powerful currents of popular piety; that it could take up the fears and aspirations unleashed by the apparitions of the Virgin and give them institutional shape. In a period bounded by the anticlerical challenge of 1848 and the European-wide church-state struggles of the 1870s, Marian apparitions were a symptom of popular Catholic sentiment; they were also a potentially powerful weapon in the hands of the church."
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In discussing the Dreyfus affair, we noted that one group behind the resurgence of Catholic antisemitism in France were priests of the religious order that published
La Croix,
the Assumptionists. We also noted that those priests were among the most active in promoting Lourdes as a pilgrimage site. They established the French Pilgrimage Committee, and under its auspices, more than three million pilgrims visited shrines in France in one year, 1873.
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It is probably not by chance that such an outpouring of Catholic piety followed close on the heels of the Communards' murder of the Paris archbishop, and, for that matter, of Karl Marx's celebration of it.

The fact that the Assumptionists were organizers of massive exhibitions of Marian piety as well as sponsors of a virulent campaign of Jew hatred indicates that antisemitism bubbled beneath all this. As the Vatican, through the century, had repeatedly restored the ghetto of Rome as a way of resisting modernism, and as the Church in France appealed to ancient suspicions and new prejudices against the Jews as a way of reasserting its ties with an alienated population, so the entire movement of ultramontanism, which aimed at solidifying the papacy's central place in the Catholic imagination—and over the levers of Catholic control—exploited antisemitism as part of its strategy. As I first learned from the University of Toronto historian Jacques Kornberg, this was a charge made at the time, in fact, by a leading theologian of the German Catholic Church, Johann Ignaz von Dóllinger (1799–1890). A professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Munich, Döllinger first gained a reputation as a vigorous critic of Luther and the Reformation.
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Later, in articles and speeches, especially after Pius IX's campaign against modernism was in full swing, Döllinger condemned the ways that the modern errors against which the pope had set the Church were so cavalierly identified with Jews. Döllinger shrewdly analyzed the long history of Church abuse of Jews, drawing the connection between antisemitism and a Christian pursuit of power. "The fate of the Jewish people," he wrote, "is perhaps the most moving drama in the history of the world."
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Reflecting on his own era, Döllinger set himself against the dominant twin motif of Church resistance to revolution defined as Jewish socialism and Church resistance to materialism defined as Jewish greed.

Döllinger railed against Pius IX's decision in 1867 to raise to sainthood one of sixteenth-century Spain's notorious grand inquisitors, Don Pedro Arbues de Epilae. According to Romberg, it was Döllinger's conviction that canonizing the inquisitor "served the pope's campaign of riding roughshod over liberal Catholics. The pope was celebrating a man who had sanctioned compulsory baptism of Jews, then inflicted judicial torture to make sure these conversions were sincere. Döllinger saw the origins of the Inquisition in a drive to enhance the papacy's 'worldly dominion and compulsory power over the lives and property of men.'...In this sense, the decree on Papal Infallibility was the logical culminating point of the Inquisition."
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Not surprisingly, given such an attitude, Döllinger openly opposed the Vatican Council's decree on infallibility, and was promptly excommunicated (in 1871) for doing so.
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His position, however, was clear. As Romberg sums it up, "Döllinger had linked medieval anti-Jewish hostility to the papacy's coercive temporal and religious dominion as well, thus emphasizing that Jews and liberal Catholics had a common enemy. Hatred of Jews was nourished by the same survivals of the Middle Ages that had produced the triumphs of Ultramontanism, the Syllabus of Errors (1864) and the decree on Papal Infallibility (1870), namely the belief that 'we alone are in possession of the full saving truth,' coupled with a lack of respect for the 'right of independent action' of others."
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One of the things that makes the Döllinger episode another of those all too rare sanctuaries of a better way in this otherwise unrelieved narrative is the fact, as Romberg puts it, that this German Catholic theologian "considered nineteenth-century Catholic anti-Jewish hostility no inevitable outcome of Catholic doctrine, but rather the result of Ultramontanism's fortress mentality. Not 'essential' Catholicism, but those who wished to prevent Catholics from being contaminated by modern ideas, had made an unholy alliance with antisemitism."
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In 1881, Döllinger delivered an address to the "festal meeting" of the Academy of Munich, a major convocation of German Catholic intellectuals. His subject was "The Jews in Europe," and his purpose, as he said at the beginning of his remarks, was "to show how the skein [of Jew hatred] was gradually twisted which none at the present day can hope to unravel."
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But attempt to unravel it he did. After a long description of the very history we have traced in this book, Döllinger returned to the baseline source of Christian antisemitism: "The false and repulsive precept that mankind is perpetually called upon to avenge the sins and errors of the forefathers upon the innocent descendants, has ruled the world far too long, and has blotted the countries of Europe with shameful and abominable deeds, from which we turn away in horror."
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As a historian, he had set for himself a purpose I attempt to emulate here, to show "how History, the guide of life, points to her mirror in which past errors are reflected as warnings against fresh mistakes which may be impending."
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Little did he know.

Döllinger was unusual. Far more than from within the Church, opposition to Pius IX's absolutist claims came from outside, and nowhere more violently than in Germany, where the complaint had nothing to do with the Church's antisemitism. In Germany's story, the nineteenth century had begun, in 1805, during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, with the Austrian emperor Francis II putting aside the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor. This effectively abolished the last vestige of a dynastic tie to the medieval kings of Germany, a line that had held, however unevenly, from the time of Frederick Barbarossa, six hundred years earlier. As the century unfolded, the various Germanic states vied with one another until Prussia's decisive victory over France in 1870 put Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the position to establish a new German empire. Bismarck, born in 1815, the pivotal year of the Congress of Vienna, was the son of Prussian aristocrats. He was a cynical visionary who put everything second to the restoration of German glory. On January 18, 1871, with Bismarck calling the shots, the king of Prussia, William I, was crowned emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. A new Reichstag was convened in Berlin. It would be an elected body, drawing representatives from the more than two dozen states, kingdoms, duchies, and free cities that Bismarck would now begin to stitch together into one nation.

He immediately hit upon a way to do that, by uniting the various political and regional factions against what he called "the enemy within," which was the Catholic Church. Recall that the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had ended the religious wars of the Reformation by drawing clear lines between Protestant and Catholic states within the German world, and those divisions were still rigidly observed. Prussia was the Protestant stronghold and Austria the Catholic stronghold, but Bismarck had deliberately kept Austria out of the new empire, to keep Catholics a decided minority in his Germany. The proportion was two-thirds Protestant, one-third Catholic, most of whom were concentrated in border regions like the Saar, the Rhineland, Alsace and Lorraine, all of which had been in dispute with France, and in Silesia, which was culturally attached to Catholic Poland. The Germanic patriotism of border Catholics was readily called into question, and indeed, many of them hated Prussia. Bismarck already controlled the Protestant churches, and he knew that in order to control his empire, he was going to have to control the Catholics.

Bismarck was a conservative, and much of his appeal was as a defender of the old order against the "decadence" of liberalism, yet he needed the support of liberals in the new Reichstag, so he had to find a way to make common cause with them—which was another reason to define the Catholics as an enemy. Since Pius IX had so resolutely defined the Church as a bulwark against modernism, that was easily done. Liberals, for their part, were looking to restrain Bismarck's authoritarianism, and despite this campaign's violation of the basic liberal principle of tolerance, it served their purpose to have the Iron Chancellor direct his domineering will away from them. Thus liberal and conservative elements in the new Germany joined together in attacking Catholics.
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