Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews Read Online Free PDF Page A

was my brother's. That was no offense to me by then. She had her grief, I had mine. I would be a man someday. I would always be her son. So being next to her before such a thing was enough. Behind the Pietà was a huge cross, the naked wood of which seemed to miss him. Jesus had just been lowered from its arms into his mother's. The name of the Pietà chapel was Cappella del Crocifisso. The cross was a permanent presence behind us, too. It had focused the religious landscape through which Mom and I had moved the last two years, on those preliminary pilgrimages ahead of the military women. Our day trips through the Rhineland brought to a kind of climax our custom of intimate sojourn to various churches. By sheer coincidence, they gave me a personal stake, which I only now see, in the field of battle between the Church and the Jews. This reminiscence of my mother may seem a long way from that, but it is not.
    ***
    Our house in Germany was about a mile from the Rhine, but decidedly, for us Catholics, on its wrong side. We lived in the town of Wiesbaden, directly across the river from Mainz, which, as the metropolitan see of the largest ecclesiastical province of the Holy Roman Empire and as home of the most powerful archbishop elector, was once known as "the Rome of the North." The Mainz Cathedral, dating to the eleventh century, dramatically displayed the transition from Romanesque to Gothic to Baroque style, and its towers were long famous for stamping the city with Roman Catholic primacy. The several churches of Wiesbaden, on the other hand, were showily Protestant—brick instead of stone, solitary steeples instead of twin or triple towers, crosses without corpses. Our city's Dom ("cathedral"), in effect, was the Spielbank, or casino, which, with the Kurhaus, or hot spring baths, had made Wiesbaden a favorite resort of the Prussian nobility. The architect of the lavish Kurhaus designed several other notable buildings in Wiesbaden, including the requisitioned mansion that the U.S. Air Force assigned to my father as his family quarters. One of the kaiser's marshals had built it, we were told. The opulent digs were ours because of my father's rank, but also because of my mother's fertility: With five sons, our Irish Catholic family was too big for the houses on Generals' Row at the air base. Unlike Mainz, a mere two miles away, Wiesbaden had not been bombed, which is why Eisenhower had made it his headquarters after crossing the Rhine in 1944. It had evolved into the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force in Europe ("U-Safe," we said) when my father was named its chief of staff.
    There were three places in the Rhineland to which our mother took us, all across the river: Cologne, for its cathedral and its precious relics; Koblenz, for nearby Maria Laach, the ancient Benedictine abbey; and Trier, which was significant to us as the site of the exquisite thirteenth-century Liebfrauen-kirche, but not even that was what brought us there.
    The first major purchase my parents made in Germany was a tan VW convertible. My father was chauffeured in a blue Lincoln staff car with stars on the bumper, but the thrill of his status was matched by that of having a suddenly racy mother, liberated from the musty old Studebaker by that roadster Beetle. I still remember with pleasure my mother at the wheel of that car, with wisps of hair feathering out from her scarf as we bombed along the autobahn. She seemed another person from the grim worrier of my brother Joe's illness only a few years before. Now one or two or all three of my younger brothers might be bundled into the back seat, but with Joe away at college and Dad at work, there was no one to compete with me for riding shotgun. The wind feathered my hair too.
    The trips along the Rhine were plunges into virtue and adventure both. We careered up the river valley, past hillside vineyards and cobblestoned villages, above island castles and below the fortresses of Rhenish barons. Passing the Lorelei,