Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (85 page)

To some extent, Catholics were like all Germans in their hatred of Jews, with peasants exhibiting the "gutter" antisemitism that stereotyped Jews as moneygrubbers, and with the middle class manifesting the "respectable" antisemitism that shunned "cosmopolitan" Jews as endemic outsiders or socialist inciters. In 1871, at the start of the Kulturkampf, a Catholic priest named August Rohling had begun circulating an anti-Jewish diatribe, "The Talmud Jew," a rehash of the old prejudices.
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And as Catholics sought ways to reestablish ties with the majority culture, many of them, like their coreligionists in France during the Dreyfus era, would ride antisemitism's swift current back into the mainstream. None of this is particularly surprising. What could not have been predicted was the fact that, as the Prussian government pursued its repressive anti-Catholic campaign through the decade of the 1870s, a pro-Jewish countertrend developed among German Catholics, a social equivalent of the theological affirmation we saw from Dûllinger. In fact, this development reinstated the positive side of the chronic Catholic ambivalence toward Jews, which we saw reflected in Augustine's intervention against Ambrose and in the papal tradition of
Sicut Judaeis.
The defense of Jews was part of the Catholic tradition too.

While hardly free of prejudice, German Catholics would prove to be considerably less antisemitic in this pre-fascist period than either German Protestants and liberals or Catholics of Austria and France. The difference was the German Catholic experience of repression at the hands of the state. In imperial Germany, Catholics and Jews alike were branded by the political establishment as sources of decadence. Catholic loyalty to the Vatican was equated with Jewish internationalism as a violation of patriotism. Perhaps despite themselves, Jews and Catholics were thrown together in the same vat of hate—one political party published an exposé showing that eight popes were actually Jews.
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The Catholic politicians of the Center Party would prove themselves capable of exploiting antisemitic stereotypes—for example, in their electoral competitions with the Social Democratic Party—but the Center Party would also distinguish itself by its refusal to join in the legal and political assault on Jews, especially as led by the Anti-Semitic Party. Center members had to take positions on numerous pieces of anti-Jewish "exceptional legislation," and they consistently voted to oppose, even after the Kulturkampf had ended. Referring to the various Catholic constituencies to which the party was primarily responsive, the historian Ellen Lovell Evans showed how the Center, willy-nilly, became an advocate for others. "In defending these minority elements, the Center became a party which championed the civil rights of other minorities as well: of Poles and Alsatians who were discriminated against not primarily as Catholics but as aliens; of Protestant groups like the Danes and Hanoverians; and even the rights of Marxists and Jews threatened by exceptional legislation of the type condemned by the Center. Thus this essentially conservative party was led to a surprisingly liberal position on civil rights in general."
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The Catholic position was summed up by Ernst Lieber, the Center Party leader from 1893 to 1902: "We, as a minority in the Reich, have not forgotten what happened to us, and for that reason, even if more elevated considerations and more fundamental motives did not restrain us, we cannot offer to forge the weapon to be used against the Jews today, the Poles tomorrow and the Catholics the day after that."
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As the years of the Kulturkampf wore on, it became clear to most Germans that the Catholics were not going to yield. In particular, the vast majority of Catholics were not going to distance themselves from the Vatican. On the contrary, the longer the struggle with the repressive Prussian government lasted, the more devoted the German Catholic Church became to the pope. As the conflict continued, Catholic voices critical of the Vatican simply ceased to be heard. Among Germans, the Center Party was making its argument by appealing to Germany's own tradition of suspicion of state absolutism, chipping away at the Protestants' and liberals' assumption that authoritarian oppression would not be directed at them—and chipping away at the solid anti-Catholic alliance in the legislature. In response to increasingly anxious hopes by some in the government that a compromise with the Catholics might originate with a compliant gesture from Rome, the Center deputy Ludwig Windthorst declared in 1875, "Prince Bismarck is the only person who can possibly restore peace, and he will restore it on the day when he is convinced that he is on the wrong track. [Laughter from the house.] And this conviction
will
come to him, believe me, gentlemen, even though he may as yet have no suspicion of it."
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In 1878, the uncompromising Pius IX died, and Berlin hoped that a new pope might accept some of the restrictions on Church life that the German government had imposed. Leo XIII, the pope to whom Lucie Dreyfus would write her pleading letter for support, was a pragmatist compared to his predecessor. Intent on defusing the Kulturkampf, Leo nevertheless joined with the German Church in insisting on a full restoration of its rights and property. In the same period, Bismarck found that, on a number of legislative and budget matters, he needed the support of the by then pivotal Center Party. Gradually, Bismarck yielded. The Church had successfully resisted to his face the man who, according to an admiring Henry Kissinger, was "outmaneuvered" by nobody.
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The restrictive anti-Catholic measures were taken off the books, expelled priests and bishops were allowed to return to Prussia, the Church's de facto supremacy in matters of ecclesiastical discipline and appointments was reestablished, and the vacant sees and pastorates were filled. In 1881, Michael Felix Korum, known as a vigorous defender of the papacy, was consecrated as the bishop of Trier.
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In the end, because of effective Catholic resistance at every level, and because of its own essential injustice, the Kulturkampf proved, in Blackbourn's summary, to be "an embarrassment to Prussian state and liberalism alike. Conversely, the Catholic Church emerged from the conflict unbowed, even with enhanced moral authority."
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In 1882, the Vatican and Berlin resumed diplomatic relations. When Karl Marx died the next year—recall that his international reputation, following his celebration of the Paris Commune, dated to the year of the Kulturkampf's beginning—the tide could seem to have turned in the Church's favor, although in Germany it would take the rest of the decade for remaining anti-Catholic measures to be diluted or lifted altogether.

By 1891, the Catholic Church in Germany was secure, and a great celebration occurred in Trier, presided over by Bishop Korum. As one of two dioceses whose bishop had actually been jailed (the other was Cologne), the prestige of Trier was high. The solemnities evoked the former glories of Constantine's northern capital and of the seat of the senior elector of the Holy Roman Emperor. For only the second time in the nineteenth century, the Seamless Robe was taken out of the
Hedtumskamnier,
the hidden chamber that floats above the high altar of the cathedral, and put on display. The last time the sacred relic had been shown, in 1844, half a million pilgrims had come to Trier to venerate it, but now more than four times that number came.
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This outpouring of publicly expressed and massively organized devotion amounted, of course, to far more than a religious affirmation. Because of all that the Church had suffered, and in light of its unmitigated triumph, the cultic celebration of the Seamless Robe that brought throngs into the squares and streets of Trier, at the feet of one of the most ultramontane bishops of Germany, was nothing less than an ongoing political victory rally, an unforgettable revelation of how the Church, when it wants to, can resist.

49. Eugenio Pacelli and the Surrender of German Catholicism

E
UGENIO PACELLI WAS
born in 1876, the year after Pius IX's encyclical challenging Bismarck. Raised in a family closely tied to the Vatican, he entered the seminary as a young man, but instead of being trained in theology, his education concentrated on canon law. He was ordained in 1899, the year after Leo XIII had condemned the heresy of "Americanism,"
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the latest in the papacy's salvos against what it perceived as the corruptions of the modern world. Leo XIII is remembered as a social liberal (his 1891 encyclical
Rerum Novarum
was read as an endorsement of the labor movement), and he successfully defused various anticlerical campaigns like the Kulturkampf, but he regarded the Church as "a perfect society," and the Vatican was to be the living embodiment of that perfection. Thus he ruled the Church as a rigid authoritarian. He devoted his time as pope to marshaling a spiritual and ecclesiastical dominance of the Vatican to replace its loss of temporal sovereignty over the Papal States. The young Pacelli was tapped to play a role in the next phase of that effort.

Leo died in 1903. His successor, Pius X (1903–1914), continued the campaign to make the papacy spiritually sovereign over the religious lives of Catholics everywhere. But more than that, the aim was to control Church activities in every nation, from the licensing of schools to the appointment of bishops. Such a vision required nation-states to deal with the Church through the Vatican rather than through local institutions, many of which had, in any case, been weakened by the property seizures and clergy expulsions that had marred church-state relations during much of the nineteenth century. Key to Pius X's program of centralizing Church authority in an absolutist papacy was a new Code of Canon Law that would give the pope unprecedented power over every aspect of Church life. (Other popes, like Innocent III, had made absolutist claims, of course, but not over the minutiae of Catholic ritual, practice, and piety.) Pacelli was one of two Vatican priests who spent more than a decade developing the code, which was finally promulgated in 1917. Canon 218 defines the pope's authority as "the supreme and most complete jurisdiction throughout the Church, both in matters of faith and morals and in those that affect discipline and Church government throughout the world."
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In Europe, where church and state were traditionally intermingled, with much overlap of political and religious authority (schools, the appointment of those bishops), the implementation of the new code required the cooperation of governments, which led to Pacelli's next assignment. John Cornwell, Pacelli's biographer, points out that the task of negotiating treaties (concordats) that recognized the freshly claimed prerogatives of the papacy fell to Pacelli. In 1917, shortly after his consecration as bishop, and after having successfully concluded treaties with Serbia and other countries, Pacelli went to Munich as papal nuncio. Cornwell writes that his "principal task in Germany was now nothing less than the imposition, through the 1917 Code of Canon Law, of supreme papal authority over the Catholic bishops, clergy, and faithful."
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To that end, he set out to renegotiate existing concordats with the German regional states. Ultimately he hoped for a concordat with the German nation itself, one that would solidify Vatican power, especially in the matter of the appointment of bishops, which, as we have seen, had dogged papal-German relations going back to the eleventh century.

The anti-Catholic suspicions of Protestants and liberals of the Weimar Republic, which governed Germany from 1919 until 1933, were not the only obstacle to the new definition of Church authority. Even taking into account the legacy of ultramontanism, Germany's bishops were accustomed to holding sway in their own sphere, and the Catholic Center Party, soon to be one of the most powerful institutions in Weimar, had always defined itself as a defender of the Catholic people, not simply of the institutional Catholic Church
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—a distinction that might not serve the Vatican's purposes under the new code.

Since the Kulturkampf, the Center Party had become a truly successful political organization. In 1919, it drew six million votes, second only to the Social Democrats. Occupying the contested middle ground in the mounting chaos of the Weimar era, the Center would provide five chancellors in the ten governments that came and went from 1919 to 1933.
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Alas, this rise to influence in forming coalitions was accompanied by a lessening of the party's need, and readiness, to see its fate linked with that of other vulnerable groups, in particular the Jews. The responses of the period are complex. The Center Party had continued to oppose legislation aimed at Jews, and its leaders consistently rejected the gutter antisemitism that began more and more to infect public discourse as Weimar's economy faltered. Indeed, these manifestations of more bitter Jew hatred drew criticism from the Vatican, too, in ways that would not happen after 1933.

But at the local level, in the crisis years of the 1920s, Center politicians proved as capable of exploiting the antisemitic prejudices of Catholics as the party's rivals did of their constituents, and the Center press was increasingly given to appealing to the anti-Jewish instincts of readers, with emphasis, say, on "usurious Jewry."
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Nevertheless, throughout the twenties, the Center Party was a moderating influence on German politics, and Catholics concentrated in rural areas and smaller cities kept their distance from the kind of rabble-rousing antisemitism that began to appear in big cities like Berlin.
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Still, many Catholics, especially among the peasantry, the workers, and the petty bourgeois, were increasingly drawn into the scapegoating of Jews, and more and more local Catholic priests began featuring attacks on Jews in their sermons. Such manifestations were, in Blackbourn's words, a "serious embarrassment" to the Center leadership, and eventually, as the antisemitic political parties gained power and began openly to seek Catholic support, they became a serious threat to the Center as well. Yet it successfully maintained its base through this crucial period. As Adolf Hitler emerged in Germany, but before he took control, he and his party could count hardly at all on Catholics for their votes.
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