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Saints & sinners

In calling upon the Catholic Church to acknowledge its longstanding anti-semitism, the writer finds himself in a crisis of conscience.

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews traces the 2,000-year conflict between the Catholic Church and the Jews and explores the crisis of faith it has provoked in the writer's own life as a Catholic.

Hindsight often opens us to hubris because we imagine, in looking back over the wrecked landscape of the past, that we ourselves, had we been there, would have done things differently. We would certainly never have owned slaves. We would certainly never have stormed into a Jewish district wielding a club. But such certainty presumes that we would have occupied our places in the past knowing what we know now. The moral meaning of behavior is understood completely only after the connection between choice and consequence has revealed itself. Or, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, put it, "Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller, that is, to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants." For that reason, one comes to the end of a story like this purged of any feeling of moral superiority one might have begun with. The shame I feel as a Catholic Christian, aware in detail of the ways that the Church sanctified the hatred of Jews, not only betraying Jesus but tilling the soil out of which would come the worst crime in history, is shame not only at what my people did but at what I can now admit I might well have done myself.

When our children were young, my wife, Lexa, and I traveled with them through Europe on a Eurail pass, which let us hop on and off trains with abandon. It was 1989. Lizzy was 9, and Pat was 7. Beginning in Amsterdam, we passed through Brussels, then made our way to Paris for the centenary celebration of the Eiffel Tower, which our children dubbed the birthday tower. In that pre-euro era, what we loved most was crossing borders, and we decided to cross as many as we could.

Lizzy had a preoccupation that tracked us like a cloud. In Amsterdam, we had visited the Anne Frank House. The small rooms of the hidden annex had left us all short of breath, but it was our daughter who carried away the image of Anne as a locating compass rose. Lizzy's identification with the young girl, whose diary she had begun to read, was complete. When our train crossed from Holland into Belgium, Lizzy asked, "Whose side were these on?" The Belgians, she meant. Were they on Anne's side or Hitler's? Anne's, we answered. Then when we said, at the crossing from Switzerland, that Italy had been on Hitler's side, we could see judgment seize her gaze as she turned to look out the train window, as if surely the landscape itself would tell her how such a thing had been possible. All of history was present to her as she stared out at the Italian countryside. For the first time, regarding the fate of Anne Frank and her people, I felt completely ashamed.

The next summer, we began in Amsterdam again, but now we went where we hadn't gone the year before, which was Germany. I had to overcome Lizzy's implicit objection - I wanted my family to see Wiesbaden, where I had been as a boy. The previous November, the Berlin Wall had been breached. Large vestiges of it still stood, and Lexa and I agreed that for history's sake we should all see it. We began our tour of Germany with a dreamy cruise down the Rhine. When we disembarked directly across from Mainz, we turned our backs on that "Rome of the North" to go the short way to Wiesbaden. Its elegance no longer stood out from the ruins of the rest of the Rhineland's cities, as it had in my day, and so neither Lexa nor the children could see it. When I showed my family the mansion in which my parents, brothers, and I had stayed, no one was impressed.

We took the train from Frankfurt to Berlin, as I had in 1959 with a group of chums traveling on a US Army train with gun mounts. On that trip, at the East-West border, we had seen Soviet tanks, and the train had been searched by "Vopos," East German police, carrying machine guns. Even in 1990, the trip felt adventurous. The German Democratic Republic was not quite dismantled, and at the old border between East and West Germany our train was halted. I told Lizzy and Pat about the tanks I'd seen there once, explaining about the Iron Curtain. A new crew got on the train, and their shabby blue uniforms and peaked hats marked them as last-gasp functionaries of the GDR. One was a ticket-checking conductor who, when we showed him our Eurail passes, snorted, "Nein, nein." He seemed to be threatening to throw us off the train, and for a minute I felt the blast of Cold War fear. I gestured pathetically at my wife and children, asking for mercy. The East German waved me away in disgust, and soon the train was moving again. I looked out the window from then on with a feeling of relief and wonder.

In Berlin, we checked into our hotel on the Kurfurstendamm, then went right away to what I remembered of Checkpoint Charlie. The infamous wall - cinder blocks and cement with a large concrete sewer tunnel on top - was still standing but in ragged, graffiti-covered pieces. Huge gaps had been opened in the wall, and across the way lay a wasteland several hundred yards wide, stretching half a mile or more between the Brandenburg Gate at one end and Potsdamer Platz at the other. This dusty vacancy was what remained of no man's land, the barrier zone between East and West Berlin that had, until the previous fall, been spiked with tank obstacles, laced with barbed wire, and studded with concrete pillboxes from which unmanned machine guns were trained at the level of the human heart.

Berliners, tourists, refugees from the East, military personnel variously uniformed, punk rockers, hawkers in purloined Soviet officer caps with sleeves full of Red Army pins and medals for sale, and waif-like girls smoking cigarettes - a defiant chaos of strangers milled about in the acreage once known as the death strip. I saw the remnant of an isolated wooden platform and recognized it as the lookout staging onto which Westerners had once climbed to gaze out over the wall. Bellevue, it had been called, I remembered suddenly. I had mounted that platform myself, in 1980, when I had come here to write an article for The Boston Globe Magazine. But now the section of wall in front of the platform was entirely gone, and the platform looked like a beached wreck.

Lizzy and Pat had run ahead, and I called after them. They ignored me, cavorting away, taking no man's land to be a playground. I began to be afraid even before I realized there was a reason. It was not the ghosts of Soviet machine guns that frightened me, the Vopos' klieg lights, the dogs. It was the shadow of a memory of what my guide had told me for that article in 1980. We had been standing on the lookout platform at Bellevue. Here is how I recounted it then:

"Do you see that mound?" Jorg asked me. He pointed to a low dark hill, a weathered pile of dirt, really, halfway across the forbidden strip. "That is what remains of his bunker."

"Whose bunker?" I stared at it.

"It's where he killed himself," Jorg said.

The memory brought my head up, and my eyes went right to a low hill in the middle of the death strip. The mound that my official guide had pointed to in 1980 was still there. And now so were my children. There they were, Pat in his flashing Michael Jordans, Lizzy in her barrettes. My children were heading right for Adolf Hitler's bunker. I screamed "No!" and began to run. Lexa called after me, then began to run, too.

The Fuhrerbunker was a tunnel complex below the Reichskanzlei. Hitler, his new wife, Eva Braun, a few trusted aides, and a guard made up of an elite SS unit had watched American movies while the city above them was battered and torched by the storming Russians. The rooms were well furnished. There was a wine cellar. Precious paintings lined the concrete walls. I knew all of this. But to me the Fuhrerbunker was a chamber of hell. And like hell, I hadn't been sure until now that it existed.

"No!" I screamed again, and I closed on them. They were at the mound, and like beagles going after prey, they had zeroed in on a small opening at the base of the low hill. Pat was already nosing into the hole. I saw a slab of concrete protruding from the dirt, and I thought, Pat is now going to touch what Hitler touched. "Get away from there," I ordered, swooping down on them, grabbing each one by an elbow and dragging them back.

"What's wrong with you?" Lexa demanded. My children looked at me, mystified. And it seemed ridiculous, what I had to say by way of explanation. I said it, hardly believing it myself. "This was Hitler's place!" And I led them away.

What was I afraid of? My children falling into the hole? My children sucked into the vortex of an abyss? Why is it that the innocence of our children is what finally forces us to face the flawed condition of our lives? In the former death strip of Berlin, I saw that I had brought my children into the zone of evil from which I had always assumed I would protect them.

Hitler is our Prince of Darkness. We would have liked to go on thinking that he alone was responsible for the monstrous crimes committed in Europe between 1933 and 1945. When I inadvertently took Lizzy, Pat, and Lexa to the very threshold of his lair, I think I still hoped to protect the illusion into which I had been initiated as a conqueror's son in the Rhineland, that the Nazis were of another species entire. I think that was why I screamed so, to keep my children on this side of the other Berlin Wall, the one that I wanted to remain intact forever, the one that ran between the innocent and the guilty, the good and the bad. The Cold War had imposed its dualism on our minds, and we could still think that way even though it was already clear that Mikhail Gorbachev was no Joseph Stalin. Perhaps in 1990, I needed Hitler's isolation from humanity more than ever, his abject evil as proof of our relative virtue. The virtue of my children was absolute, of course. Part of what I wanted to protect us all from in my panic was the threshold of knowing that my own virtue was anything but. Now I see what I was afraid of that day: the shock of my own complicity with evil. How to protect them from that? I do not mean here to wrap myself in a blurring guilt, as if the perpetrators of the Jewish genocide are not uniquely to be condemned. I have taken pains throughout this work to observe the distinction between the crime of the Nazis and the attitudes of the Christians that prepared for it. But to accept responsibility for those attitudes, as a Christian, is to go much farther along the road of moral reckoning than I ever imagined I would have to. Having faced the anti-Jewish content of beliefs in which I was raised, and in which my church is still entangled despite itself, I have had yanked away from me the right to imagine that I would have certainly behaved "virtuously" if confronted with choices at almost any point in this long chain of consequence.

If the past is irreversible, then we are all doomed. No one can be saved. Is the history of Christian anti-Judaism reversible? That is a far more potent question than: Is it forgivable? But only apparently so. For as Arendt points out, "Forgiving serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose 'sins' hang like Damocles's sword over every new generation. ... Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victim of its consequences forever."

Arendt is not talking here about easy forgiveness nor, in the context of the ancient crime of anti-Semitism, does forgiveness like this necessarily come from Jews, for whom forgiveness may equate with denial. The premature request for forgiveness, made by a Christian to a Jew, may constitute presumption at best, a further oppression at worst. That is why the act of repentance offered to the Jewish people by the Catholic Church must carry no hint of a required or expected response, as if Jews have to accept it for the act to be complete. But there is another problem. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, among others, has warned that the erasure of the past through cheap forgiveness, whereby the soul can "free itself from what has been," can slide all too easily into a valueless individualism according to which "no attachment is ultimately definitive."

In Arendt's view, the human disposition to seek forgiveness, which responds to the otherwise irreversible predicament of the past, is protected from presumption and from irresponsibility when it is paired with the quest for a "remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, [which] is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises." In other words, there is no recovery from the past without a commitment for the future. More concretely, there is no apology for Holy Week preaching that prompted pogroms until Holy Week liturgies, sermons, and readings have been purged of the Jewish slanders that sent the mobs rushing out of church. The capacity to be forgiven resides in the simultaneous capacity to make and keep a promise that in Arendt's words "serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men." Forgiveness for the sin of anti-Semitism presumes a promise to dismantle all that makes it possible. Holy Week, that is, must become an island of Jewish security.

What does it mean for me? To be suspended between past and future, in Arendt's phrase, is to stand between the world into which my beloved parents brought me and the world to which I am sending my beloved children. How do I get out from under the irreversibility of my past, which is another way of asking: How do I get out from under the sword of my self-doubt? How is the chaotic uncertainty of the future to be tamed? The most deadly prospect at this point would be to find myself alienated from the community that has been the focus of my "backward glance." Instead of telling this story from the position of moral purity I may once have imagined myself occupying, I have felt flayed by every word.

Seeing the action of this awful narrative from the point of view of the participants, even while recounting it from the detached point of view of the storyteller, has left me readier than ever before to claim membership in this community.

"Do we really have the right to cast the first stone at the sinful woman who stands accused before the Lord and is called the Church?" the great Catholic theologian Karl Rahner asks. "Or are we now accused in her and with her, and delivered up to Mercy for good or ill?" It is only through this communion of saints and sinners that I have my connection to the biblical people for whom judgment, forgiveness, and the promise-making of covenant are all the same thing.

This has been the story of the worst thing about my church, which is the worst thing about myself. I offer it as my personal penance to God, to the Jewish dead, and to my children, whom I led, by accident, to the threshold of Hitler's pit. Nietzsche warned that if we stare into the abyss, it may stare back, and this book proves Nietzsche right. My faith is forever shaken, and I will always tremble. The Christian conscience - mine - can never be at peace. But that does not say it all. This tragic story offers a confirmation of faith, too. God sees us as we are and loves us nevertheless. When the Lord now turns to me to ask, "Will you also go away?" I answer, this, too, with Simon Peter, "Lord, to whom shall I go?"