Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (98 page)

Specifically, in moving beyond
Nostra Aetate,
the distortions that appear in the New Testament, whether of the behavior of "the Jews" or of the theology of Torah, would be flagged as such—and confessed as such. Vatican III must help Christians learn to read anti-Jewish texts as if they were themselves Jews (and anti-female texts as if they were women, and, for that matter, as I heard a Jewish scholar say, anti-Canaanite texts as if they were Canaanites).
¹⁶
The texts themselves call the Church to this, because finally they do enshrine the authentic presence of Jesus Christ—not the "historical" Jesus exactly, but the real and living Jesus as confessed by those who knew him, confessed above all as the embodiment of love. Remembered as one who called every act of hatred into question, therefore including hatred of "the Jews," Jesus is nevertheless remembered also as one who never assumed that his adherents would follow his example perfectly. The Church's memory of Jesus Christ "releases the theological knowledge that there is no innocent tradition," as David Tracy puts it, "no innocent classic, no innocent reading."
¹⁷
Indeed, the figure of Jesus presented by the Gospels, the one who forgives not once, not seven times, but seventy times seven, is dear on the point that all humans, and therefore all human texts, stand equally in need of forgiveness.

Jesus is never more "Jewish" than here, never more faithful to the one covenant with the One God. Vatican III could call as a witness Rabbi David Hartman. "The confirmation of human beings in their human limitation is the soul of the covenantal message," Hartman says. "The covenant is not God's desire for humanity to escape from history, but God's gracious love saying that humanity in its finite temporal condition is fully accepted by the eternal God ... Can we love God in an imperfect way and in an imperfect world?...History is not the revelation of eternal truth, but God's ability to love us in our imperfection."
¹⁸

The fear, envy, insecurity, despair, grief, and, finally, hatred that corrupted the authors of the New Testament do not destroy the Church. The marvel is, they establish it.

57. Agenda Item 2: The Church and Power

T
HERE ARE FEW
things we can say with more certainty about Jesus than that he defined his mission in opposition not to Judaism but to the imperium of Rome. Rome's contempt for the peoples it had subjugated, Rome's ruthless violence, Rome's worship of itself, Rome's substitution of Caesar for God—Jesus said no to it all. Whether his message is understood to have been messianic, apocalyptic, magical, cynical, revolutionary, or "merely" spiritual, it is clear that he invited his followers to join him in rejecting Rome. The ambiguous nature of the early Church's relationship to Rome—one reason the Gospels highlighted Jews, instead of Romans, as enemies of Jesus was to avoid trouble with the empire, perhaps especially after Nero's brutal scapegoating of Christians in the decade of the 60s—takes nothing, finally, from the primal Christian critique of power. Once Paul turned the tragic fate of Jesus against those who had caused it—turned the cross, that is, against the legion's standard—the story of Jesus swept the world over which Caesar held sway because it spoke intimately to those whose throats were under Rome's heel. The Gospel took root in the soul of powerlessness, which is why, to this day, it beckons the dispossessed in ways it does no other group.

If the history traced in this book shows anything, it is that the Church has never come fully to terms with the contradiction it embraced when the Roman imperium and Roman Catholicism became the same thing. That tremendous reversal, as we saw, occurred when Constantine accepted the Christian faith and used it as the unifying ideology underwriting the extension of his imperial sway from Trier to the Levant. He ordered the abolition of crucifixion as a means of capital punishment, thinking of Jesus, but he also taught his soldiers to shape the cross by tying their knives to their spears. And his mother, just then finding the True Cross, led to it by a treasonous Jew, helped to put that symbol where Caesar's eagle had been. The transformation of the cross was complete—not a sign of real suffering any longer, nor even, with Paul, of spiritualized victory, but a sign of power in the world. "The power of the cross of Christ," Athanasius of Alexandria declared, "has filled the world."
¹

The point is not to wish sentimentally that the Christian religion, in order to maintain its purity, had remained the marginal cult of a despised minority, with an ad hoc organization; more charismatic than catholic; possessing nothing; being more acted upon than a spur to action; and innocent, not in the sense of sinless but in the sense of untested, untouched. The glory of the Church includes what its institutionalization has enabled—a transcending of time and culture, a triumph over history that stands alone. Every Catholic is proud to be part of a two-thousand-year-old tradition that still lives. But such longevity presumes a weighty bureaucracy. It presumes possession, even wealth. It presumes the great contests of will between rulers and popes, princes and bishops, masters and monks. It presumes the wily strategies that survival required. It presumes the yoking of intellect to piety, and the adaptation of faith to Plato's separation of form and matter, to Aristotle's rational quest for universal order, and ultimately to Kierkegaard's leap into the arbitrary. It even presumes the admission of politics to pulpits, and perhaps the conscription of cloisters into service as bastions. The ruins of Europe, the museums of Europe, the cathedrals and castles and Gothic-towered universities of Europe, are the stone record of this story, and though there is cold shame in it, there is carved beauty too. The history of the Church, not above the world but in it, only continues what we just saw revealed by the Church's troubling foundational texts—that the Church is of the human condition, not against it.

But a Vatican III could ask the question of whether the Church, responding to an emperor's self-interest, assumed too much the emperor's ethos. Assumed it so much, in fact, that the emperor's ethos—more, say, than Augustine's adaptation of Plato, Aquinas's of Aristotle, Francis's of Jesus—is what most indelibly stamps the soul of Catholicism. Why is that? Pope John Paul II took a first stab at asking this troubling question when, at his millennial Mass of repentance in March 2000, he acknowledged that "Christians have often denied the Gospel, yielding to a mentality of power."
²
That confession, strong as it is, points beyond itself to what has not been confessed yet. Obviously, more than the behavior of "Christians" is at issue here, and, for that matter, more than a "mentality" is too.

A Vatican III could push further into this problem, asking if it is at last possible to reverse Constantine and reclaim the cross for Jesus Christ, and for those who are left out of every imperial victory, or rather, defeated by it.

Regardless of whether such a council would take up the question, history does. That is the meaning, finally, of the "interruption" of history experienced during the Holocaust. In light of that event as the outcome of the long narrative begun at Milvian Bridge, heretofore unquestioned Christian assumptions suddenly seem tragically problematic—and not only in relation to Jews. "Christian biblical theology must recognize," the Catholic feminist theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza has written, "that its articulation of anti-Judaism in the New Testament goes hand in hand with its gradual adaptation to Greco-Roman patriarchal society. Christian as well as Jewish theology must cease to proclaim a God made in the image and likeness of Man. It can do so only when it mourns the 'loss' of women's contributions in the past and present and rejects our theological 'dehumanization.' Moreover, white Christian and Jewish theology must promote the full humanity of all non-Western peoples and at the same time struggle against racism wherever it is at work. In short the memory of the Holocaust must 'interrupt' all forms of Western patriarchal theology if the legacies of the dead are not to be in vain."
³

Altering the Church's "mentality of power" presumes a fundamental shift in its attitude toward the other, which in turn involves the issue of women's equality. A power structure that denigrates women is the most basic manifestation of the binary opposition that has so blatantly oppressed Jews. While it may seem unrelated to Jewish-Christian conflict, a feminist critique of theology and practice is central to it, because feminism seeks not a mere substitution of female privilege for male privilege, but a dismantling of the entire structure of binary opposition in favor of authentic mutuality. Specifically, a feminist reading of the New Testament, as we have in a scholar like Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, reveals, for example, that the women who followed Jesus, unlike the men, "understood that his ministry was not rule and kingly glory but
diakonia,
'service' (Mark 15:41). Thus the women emerge as the true Christian ministers and witnesses."
⁴
The mentality of power is the issue, and as the Gospels display a treasonous anti-Judaism, they also reveal, in the anonymity of these very women, assumptions of male dominance that must equally be rejected.

The readiness with which the Church put itself at the service of the self-preserving and patriarchal imperium remains an untied knot of the Catholic conscience, from Constantine in his wars against his rivals, to the brown robes at the side of Spanish conquistadors, to the priests who blessed King Leopold's African loot, to the display in Trier of the Seamless Robe in honor of Adolf Hider. Recall the conclusion of Part Seven—that central to the Church's failure to oppose Nazism was, in John Cornwell's phrase, "something in the modern ideology of papal power."

Again, if the long history we have seen demonstrates anything, it is that the "modern" pursuit of such power drives relentlessly along the unbroken shaft of apostolic succession, from Leo I (440–461), with his initiating universal claims; to Gregory VII (1073–1085), who bested the emperor at Canossa and, against the Greeks, claimed sovereignty over the whole Church; to Urban II (1088–1099), who started a holy war, launching Europe's first pogrom and sacralizing violence with the cry "God wills it!"; to Innocent III (1198–1216), who extended the claim of papal sovereignty to the whole world (and imposed the yellow star on Jews); to Boniface VIII (1294–1303), who decreed that every king, indeed every creature, is a vassal of the pope; to Paul IV (1555–1559), who, asserting authority over the human mind, established the Index (and the Roman ghetto); to Pius IX (1846–1878), who claimed papal primacy over the council, and papal infallibility over "faith and morals" (while kidnapping a Jewish child); to Pius XII (1939–1958), who put papal power above the fate of the German Catholic Church, to say nothing of the fate of the Jews; to John Paul II (1978– ), who, against the great exception John XXIII, and despite his own evident good will, devotes himself to the continuation of this tradition. "Power corrupts," Lord Acton is well known for saying, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely." What is less well known, as Garry Wills points out, is that the British aristocrat was a Catholic opposed, in 1870, to the dogma of papal infallibility, and the power he was warning of was the pope's.
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Let us suppose that the members of Vatican III meet in St. Peter's Basilica, as the fathers of Vatican I and Vatican II did. On the subject of power, the place itself can be a prod to action. In my dictionary, "basilica" is defined as "a privileged Catholic church," but the word comes from
basileus,
for "king," and among Romans it referred to Caesar's palace—quite literally, as we saw, to Constantine's palace, the
Konstantin-basilika.
The soaring central nave of St. Peter's, with the semicircular apse at the far end, is modeled after the palaces Constantine built for himself. The design is perfect for enhancing the stature of the figure who occupies the throne in the distant apse, and in St. Peter's that throne, behind and above the altar, belongs not to God but to the popes. Lining both side aisles of the mammoth hall are the massive imperial tombs in which Roman popes are buried, sarcophagi worthy of the potentates so many of them aspired to be. In the towering cupola above the transept is the mythic inscription
Tu es Petrus
... as if the peasant Jesus ordained all this.

Whatever historical contingencies led to the cult of papal omnipotence—from the empire of antiquity to the investiture disputes with medieval kings, from the Renaissance glorification of genius to the assaults of reformation and revolution—can a member of Vatican III cast his or her eyes around this shrine to the imperium and ask if its time has finally gone? When John XXIII stepped down from his throne to sit as an equal among a delegation of Jewish visitors, was he hinting at the necessary shift? And when his council transformed the Catholic liturgy by eliminating the secret language of the court in favor of the language spoken by all, and by replacing the high altar with a simple table, which required the priest to come down as Pope John himself had done, was the shift being further prepared for? "Power to the people," we learned to say in our youth, and because of a revolution begun at the Church's top, we Catholics had a first taste of the "popular" religion that subsequent popes would try to turn back. But how do you turn back a tide? "It is quite clear," David Tracy told the
New York Times
in 1986, "that Catholicism is going through the greatest change since its passage from a Jewish sect to a Greco-Roman religion. The ways of being a Catholic will necessarily multiply and the Church will be more diverse; pluralism in religious expression will increase, not decrease."
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Vatican II defined the Church as the People of God, and Vatican III must make the definition real by reordering the Church according to its new self-understanding.