It is a heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in ’t.
The Winter’s Tale
Here at the book’s end, I regret many things I have had to leave out. This was meant to be a full treatment of neither Renaissance nor Reformation, but an investigation of how each of those immense movements has given us a part of the mechanism of our functioning contemporary selves. Though Renaissance and Reformation occur in roughly the same period, and though each may spring initially from the scholarly, and especially the linguistic, interests of the early humanists, each morphs quickly into a very different beast, requiring separate tracking and separate analysis.
There is in this book almost nothing about the Scandinavian countries, which cry out for more attention, especially to the ways in which their very Lutheran societies developed so very differently from Germany, leading to essential religious philosophers such asSøren Kierkegaard and to a politics of social welfare rather than of fascism. Even within the story of German Lutheranism, we have had to leave Luther before his very happy, if exceedingly conventional, marriage to an ex-nun, and before his hateful rants against Jews.
A far more serious absence from this book is the thrilling story of the development of music over the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, led by such religion-inspired composers as Josquin des Prez, Palestrina, Byrd, Purcell, Handel, andJohann Sebastian Bach, to name but a few. Bach, in particular, nearly edged himself into the last chapter as part of “The Deepening,” but his period is a little late for this book. Perhaps, Deo volente, he will find himself in the next and last (planned) volume of this series. Bach is so wonderfully Lutheran, sounding in music every note that Luther played in rhetoric but raising the conversation to a wholly transformed and even transcendent level.
Beyond the Lutherans, I regret that so little attention could be devoted to the new Catholic religious orders, which had so much to do with raising Catholic numbers throughout the world. My moments of attention to the Jesuits and the Ursulines can scarcely be considered sufficient. All religious orders are now on the wane, but for centuries they supported and kept strong the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.
The Anabaptists are another near omission. They became in time the Mennonites, the Bruderhof, the Quakers. Though universally despised in the early modern period, persecuted, and often drowned by both Catholics and Protestants, their main reforms beyond adult baptism—that is, a heightened sense of community, compassion for the poor, prison reform, elimination of the death penalty, refusal to take up arms, peacemaking—are now the ideals of almost all their former persecutors, whether Catholic or Protestant. From a historical point of view, this is an astounding reversal. Today, in a way we are all Quakers. We are certainly not the religious vigilantes who took up arms and murdered as many of their religious opponents as could be found.
So much for regrets. But I would leave you to contemplate three figures of hope, one a German Protestant in the Lutheran tradition, one an Italian Catholic, the third an American Episcopalian—all three catholic with a small “c.” The first figure, hanged by the Nazis in 1945, is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the second is Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Roncalli, a Lombardian peasant who died of stomach cancer in 1963, the third is Muriel Moore, a New York woman not famous like the other two but known to many nonetheless.
In the years leading up to the rise of Hitler and World War II, Bonhoeffer was a young German theology student, acknowledged by his teachers to be of extraordinary scholastic ability and astonishingly penetrating mind. His high bourgeois family members, who were only occasional churchgoers, were shocked when he chose to study theology and seek ordination. His initial interest in the nature of the Christian Church developed into his thesis, Communio Sanctorum (Communion of Saints), for which he was awarded his doctorate at the age of twenty-one. Although he was already moving in the direction of a broadly ecumenical path, his visits to Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the United States, Latin America, England, and North Africa opened Bonhoeffer even more to engaging in fellowship with non-Lutheran Christians. While pursuing postgraduate study at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer taught Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where he heard for the first time the African American spirituals that would become a passion of his.
In January 1933, about fourteen months after Bonhoeffer’s ordination, Hitler became chancellor. Two days later, Bonhoeffer, just days before his twenty-seventh birthday, delivered an anti-Hitler national radio address in which he was cut off the air in mid-sentence. Thereafter, Bonhoeffer initiated a movement to oppose the gradual nazification of the Lutheran churches, to speak out against the persecution of the Jews, and even to find ways to thwart the broader nazification of German society. Speaking of the persecution of Jews, Bonhoeffer insisted that Christians must not only “bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself.” His new organization came to be called the Confessing Church.
But as Nazism clamped an ever firmer grip on Germany, Bonhoeffer was moved to establish an underground seminary to train students who would be genuine Christians, rather than Nazis. Soon thereafter, his authorization to teach at the University of Berlin was revoked and he was denounced as a “pacifist and enemy of the state,” both of which he was. In 1937 he published The Cost of Discipleship, his meditation on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, disparaging the “cheap grace” of the majority of German Christians in favor of the “costly grace” that linked Christian belief to social courage. The Gestapo found his seminary and closed it down.
In April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. More than a year later, the Gestapo uncovered documents that linked him to a high-level conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, which Bonhoeffer had indeed taken part in, casting aside all Lutheran qualms about obeying the prince. He was condemned to be hanged and was marched naked to his execution at the Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before two divisions of the United States Infantry would liberate the camp. The camp doctor who witnessed the execution testified that he was “deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed.… I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
Another lovable Christian was Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, a man from the other side of the Alps, but one who had also lived most uncomfortably under a fascist dictatorship. A historian rather than a theologian, and for long a faithful servant in the papal diplomatic service, Angelo, though no mouse, had seldom been noted for renegade opinions that clashed with the papal party line of the moment. He was full of such opinions, but these had all been couched in such diplomatic language that virtually everyone had missed them.
At Pentecost 1944, for instance, he had spoken to his congregation in the tiny Catholic cathedral of Istanbul—to which he was then the Vatican’s ambassador (or apostolic delegate)—about the Holy Spirit and how necessary its presence is to humane life. Left to itself, said Angelo, the human race resembles “one of those iron-age villages, in which every house was an impenetrable fortress, and people lived among their fortifications.” It was, said he, so easy to stay within one’s group, especially for Catholics, cutting ourselves off from “our brothers, who are Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, believers in other religions, or non-believers.” But, he added, “I have to tell you that in the light of the Gospel and Catholic principle, this logic of division makes no sense. Jesus came to break down barriers; he died to proclaim universal brotherhood; the central point of his teaching is charity—that is, the love that binds all human beings to him as the elder brother and binds us all with him to the Father.” Angelo said that he hoped for “an explosion of charity,” in which the word “Catholic” would no longer carry any exclusive connotation but would signify universal unity.
In late October 1958, Angelo, already in his late seventies, was elected pope, expected to play his part in a quiet, interim pontificate between that of Pius XII, a know-it-all control freak, and whoever (and whatever) might come next. The conclave cardinals who elected Angelo wanted less excitement. It was not to be. As John XXIII, Angelo called a council of the universal church for the purpose of “updating.” He laid out very few specifics, except that his council was to condemn no one. Rather, he said, he wanted to open the windows and let in some fresh air. Oh, and he wanted to invite representatives of all Christian churches and communities, Orthodox, Protestant, everyone.
It took the assembled bishops about a year to realize that the new pope was not about to tell them what to do (or think). He actually meant for it to be their council; they were to decide. When he spoke to the non-Catholic Christian observers at the council, he told them that he “felt comforted by their presence” and reassured them that he didn’t “like to claim any special inspiration. I hold to the sound doctrine; everything comes from God.” So much for the late, embarrassing doctrine of papal infallibility. I even believe John wanted these observers to be upgraded to voting members of the council but was waiting for the council fathers to issue that invitation, which never came.
What has followed since the death of Angelo/John in June 1963 is a massive retreat from his stance of open embrace. There is no need for me to repeat what I have written elsewhere (a biography, Pope John XXIII, and a New York Times op-ed on the death of Pope John Paul II, highly critical of his pontificate). Not long before he died, a dear old friend, David Toolan, then an editor of America, the Jesuit weekly magazine, said of John Paul that “it will take the Church two hundred years to recover” from his pontificate. I hope Dave was right and that it takes no longer than that.
A third lovable Christian was Muriel Moore, a woman who grew up in the 1930s in the old Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, who spoke like a real Noo Yawker, lacking any of the cultivated purr of the Brahmin WASP. Not only was she a plain woman, she was a hunchback who in her later years required a walker, which she referred to as “my Mercedes.” Though she never talked about it, I suspect she was seldom if ever without pain. But this did not slow her down. Rather, she barreled forward, smiling and greeting everyone, as if the world were her oyster (as Pistol says in The Merry Wives of Windsor).
All her life she attended the same Episcopal church in Chelsea where she had been baptized, Holy Apostles, and was quietly instrumental in establishing it as the largest daily provider of free meals for poor people in the entire city of New York. Thousands showed up each day for food, fellowship, and various forms of continuing assistance. Muriel talked the same way to each soup kitchen guest as she would talk to a visiting bishop—with playful humor, delight, and sympathy. Someone once overheard her telling one of the guests, “We are all the same.” That was Muriel’s credo.
Muriel never went to college and spent many years caring for her invalid mother, who had been widowed early. Muriel also worked for forty years in the payroll department of an insurance company. But after her mother died in 1983, her best friend in the payroll department, Eileen McCarthy, invited Muriel to spend the very American holiday of Thanksgiving in Killarney, Ireland, where Eileen hailed from. Muriel fell instantly in love with Ireland, and the Irish loved her back. For the rest of her life, till her death in 2011, she would visit Killarney twice yearly. “Welcome home, Muriel!” everyone would say. In Killarney, Muriel attended the local Catholic church with her friends, it being the only church in walking distance. “What else would I do?” she asked me once. “Anyway, we’re all the same.”
Muriel’s funeral at Holy Apostles on July 30, 2011, was an immense gathering. So many of her old friends from the soup kitchen were there, as was a substantial body of regular parishioners, many of them gay or lesbian in keeping with the recent population changes in Chelsea. And standing among all these were scores of Irish friends, men, women, and children, who had flown to New York just to participate at Muriel’s funeral. All of the Irish visitors were Roman Catholic—and almost all of them came forward that day to receive consecrated bread and wine from the hands of female and gay priests of the Anglican Communion in a ceremony the validity of which is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. It was a massive act of defiance, I suppose, but it was all done for Muriel—“Auntie Moo,” as she was known to the Irish children—a woman who knew in her aching, brittle bones that we are all the same.
If Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Angelo Roncalli, and Muriel Moore could sit down together and converse for an hour or two, without interference from careerists, time-servers, and assorted fanatics, the rending of Christendom would be over, and Christians would achieve their long-sought goal of reunion.
Perhaps the three have already had that conversation.