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

refusal to treat the wall separating the past from the present as impenetrable. The same human impulse leads Americans to honor Plymouth Rock and the flag of Betsy Ross. But what happens when reverence for relics becomes swamped by superstition, when the past is treated as infinitely malleable, depending on the needs of the present? Really—the Three Kings? I would surely have dismissed it except for that priest's explanation. Saint Helena was an authenticating hook on which to hang any story, and people like us would believe it. If she had discovered the True Cross in Jerusalem, why could she not also have discovered corpses of the Three Kings in the same city? Saint Helena was central to the piety of Catholics of our kind. If you started to disbelieve her, where would you stop?
     
     
    In addition to celebrating the virtue of omnipotent America, our pilgrimages through the Rhineland implicitly honored the heroic integrity of Roman Catholicism, which, we were assured, had never been sullied by the Third Reich. We knew the Catholic Church as a staunch opponent of totalitarianism—in the 1950s, Pius XII was America's fiercest and most outspoken ally against Stalin. We all assumed that Catholics had bravely defied Adolf Hitler. That Hitler was born and had died a Catholic, even if only a nominal one, was never referred to. The living witness to Catholic virtue in Germany was the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who ranked in the postwar pantheon with Charles de Gaulle and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Adenauer was a living refutation of the Soviet emphasis on pan-German culpability, as opposed to a narrow American emphasis on Nazi guilt. The American position suggested that there were relatively few Nazis, and they were all gone. We wanted a revived Germany to stand with us against Moscow, and Adenauer's roots in the Roman Catholic Christian Democratic Party—not the Social Democrats of, say, Willy Brandt—served that purpose. 2 I grasped little of this at the time, but I knew that Adenauer was a former mayor of Cologne and a staunch Rhinelander. He had had the new West German capital built in nearby Bonn. Such a commitment to a region we had adopted only made him, and his virtue, seem that much more like ours.
    Adenauer was one of the reasons for our pilgrimage to Maria Laach, the Benedictine monastery about halfway between Wiesbaden and Cologne. In the western nave of the twelfth-century abbey church is displayed a modern stained-glass window showing figures from the Bible. The window is inscribed, Dr. Konrad Adenauer, Bundeskanzler, 1956. He donated the window to the abbey in gratitude that year because in 1933, after defying the newly empowered Hitler, and drawing down a death sentence on himself by refusing to fly the swastika in Cologne, he had taken refuge there. The abbot, Ildefons Herwegen, and Adenauer had gone to school together, and so the abbot had offered him refuge. Adenauer was able to melt into the monastic community. For most of a year, he hid in a monk's cell at Maria Laach, and he fled only when Herwegen alerted him that he was in danger of being found out. Ever after, the ancient abbey has been associated with Adenauer's anti-Nazi resistance. A film shown to visitors in the pilgrims' hall refers to the connection even today. We will return to this story later.
    The nearby lake, which the monastery dedicates to Mary, is a water-filled volcanic crater, set dramatically in the Eifel Mountains a few miles back from the river. The abbey is a walled cluster of buildings in various styles several hundred yards up a gradual slope from the shoreline. Lush pastures and woodlands still in the abbey's domain surround the lake. For more than a thousand years, with few breaks, monks have been chanting the office here. The pillared arcade at the entrance to the Romanesque chapel dates to the eleventh century, and is a source of our most cherished, if stereotyped, image of cloister architecture.
    When my mother and I