Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews by James Carroll Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    When I was a boy of Pat's age the day he rushed toward the Führer-bunker, I was rushing through the woods of Virginia with my buddy Peter Seligman at my side. I knew nothing of his Jewishness, and he and I together knew nothing of the real significance of the Johnny Rebs we emulated. Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, the Gray Ghost, Robert E. Lee—all devoted to keeping in place the right of white people to own black people as chattel slaves. Within a year or two of our discovery of each other as playmates, and our dedication to the lost cause of the South, the U.S. Supreme Court would rule on Brown v. Board of Education. Only by the fluke of my growing up in the era of that decision, instead of, say, the era of the Dred Scott decision, can I indulge the self-affirming integrity of a man devoted to civil rights for all.
    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 Hannah Arendt, with whom we began this book, 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." 3 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, on one of our European adventures, I found myself in Rome with Lexa, Lizzy, and Pat, I took them to St. Peter's Basilica, wanting them to see Michelangelo's Pietà, the work that had so moved me when I saw it as a boy. Entering St. Peter's was a problem, because our daughter, still a child, was wearing a skirt that the guard at the entrance deemed too short. It is hard to convey what witnessing Lizzy's humiliation did to me. I had not drawn attention to the border of Vatican City as we crossed it, and so the question of the Church's alliance—with Anne?—had not come up, a question I could not have answered. But the Vatican functionary, offended by the sight of my little girl's knees, represented every Catholic failure I could think of.
    We retreated, but my savvy, non-Catholic wife was unintimidated. She helped Lizzy pull the skirt down to her hips, hiding the gap at her waist with a sweater, so that her knees were covered. The guard let us pass. St. Peter's had never seemed more like an emperor's palace.
    But soon we were standing before the statue of Mary holding her son, and it still worked a spell on me, and perhaps it did on my family. Despite its subject, there is an unrestrained spirit of optimism in the Pietà, the human form never rendered more lovingly, the possibility of meaning in the midst of anguish never affirmed more directly. The guard at the door could not have approved of the sensuality of the youthful Mary's turned-out wrist, her son's perfect torso. Michelangelo created the Pietà as a young man, and it was as a boy on the threshold of