At Canaan's Edge (49 page)

Andrew Young told Stanley Levison that it was hard to cut short the visit to Europe, where people lined the streets and pressed King for autographs. On his last day, King preached to an interfaith service that overflowed the American Church of Paris, then addressed the topic “The Church in a World in Revolution” before a packed audience of five thousand in the Maison de la Mutualité auditorium, with an estimated ten thousand more listening to loudspeakers outside. Both crowds responded fervently to King's discussion of international crises, such as the holdover colonial secession in Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which proved to Young that King did have an audience to speak on Vietnam. An ecumenical spirit waxed through Europe partly because the fourth and last annual plenary of the twentieth century's only Vatican Council was gathered from around the world, with civil rights clergy active in the final struggles to reform Christian doctrines on Judaism.

Unremitting intrigue seeped from the walls of Rome even after a committee of cardinals approved another draft of the
Nostra Aetate
(“In Our Time”) declaration on October 15. Rumors predicted that its statement on Jews would be modified or postponed again. Critics took heart from the hesitancy of Pope Paul VI to implement the mandate of his predecessor, John XXIII, for penitent recognition that two millennia of Christian teaching had contributed to the Nazi Holocaust. At a critical moment, the Pope himself had repeated a liturgical broadside about crimes against Jesus by “the Jewish people,” who “not only did not recognize Him, but fought Him, slandered and injured Him, and, in the end, killed Him.” Reportedly at the Pope's behest, Vatican deputies removed from
Nostra Aetate
a clause that explicitly revoked church portrayals of Jews as a “deicide people” cursed by God. An observer of the warring caucuses wrote that key cardinals “realized fairly late that there were some Catholics, more pious than instructed, whose contempt for Jews was inseparable from their love for Christ.” Against them, American cardinals led unsuccessful fights to restore the exculpation clause as the purest antidote to poison within the church. Others objected that the very word “deicide” raised thorny heresies from yesteryear about the dual nature of Jesus, and whether God could be killed; some warned that any positive statement about Judaism risked riots against Christians in Muslim countries. Meanwhile, Rabbi Abraham Heschel had dared to plead secretly in person with Paul VI against a separate new clause seeking final reconciliation with Jews by their mass conversion to Catholicism, saying he would rather “die at Auschwitz” and that what he understood of Christian grace should not countenance a prayer for him to annihilate his faith. Last-minute scandalmongers charged that Vatican reformers were paid agents of a Jewish conspiracy, and a pamphlet proudly claimed that “Christ and the Apostles John and Paul were the first anti-Semites.”

On October 28, porters lifted the papal sedan through a sea of spectators into the Basilica of St. Peter, which was decked in full sacred pomp of bishops with miters in long ranks of white and scarlet robes. Votes against
Nostra Aetate
collapsed from the roiling dissent on both sides, leaving an advisory show of consensus—2,221–88—and Paul VI officially promulgated the epochal new teaching on “Non-Christian Relations.” In place of “deicide repeal,” proponents of reform accepted the qualified statement that treatment of Jesus by Temple authorities “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” along with an edict that “the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews…decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” The declaration commended Paul's scriptural advice to the earliest generation of Jewish and Christian rivals: “So do not become proud, but stand in awe.”

Most significantly,
Nostra Aetate
discarded the substitute clause that prescribed ultimate peace only by the conversion of Jews to triumphant Catholicism. In its place, the final version looked to an age when “all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.'” The three small words—“shoulder to shoulder”—conveyed a breakthrough image of separate identity and common stature. There was equal footing, with no hint of dominant authority. For the Roman Church, which remained vertical in every respect—claiming one truth and superior faith sustained by its steadfastly monarchical organization—a horizontal bond with Jews was revolutionary. It suggested new church governance and belief, comparable in religion to the political shift from a vertical world of rulers and subjects toward horizontal experiments in structured self-government. It introduced a hint of democracy to religion built on hierarchy. In the single month of October, the United States opened citizenship to legal immigrants from the whole world, and the Vatican opened fraternal faith to the remnant people of Jesus.

Among many others, President Morris Abram of the American Jewish Committee hailed
Nostra Aetate
as “a turning point in 1,900 years of Jewish-Christian history.” Adherents of both traditions were slow to plumb its meaning, however, in a postwar era marked by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and enduring stupefaction over the Holocaust. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and other Jewish authorities continued to forbid dialogue with Christians on religious questions as improper, impossible, and impolitic—a proven noose for persecution of Jews. Only gradually, sustained by an explosion of scholarship on the parallel historical development of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, interfaith pioneers gained confidence that textual exchange and interpretation could enrich understanding without surrendering vital points of difference. In September of 2000, American rabbis and Jewish scholars issued
Dabru Emet
(“Speak Truth”), the first formal response to
Nostra Aetate.
They offered a series of eight elaborated propositions, beginning, “Jews and Christians worship the same God.”

J
UST WHEN
Rome's ecumenical machinery clasped its rough mandate to tame ancient enmities, the psychology of war triggered fresh ones. Among some hundred thousand protesters at scattered Vietnam demonstrations over the weekend of October 16, David Miller, a young Catholic pacifist, lacked confidence in his oratorical ability to communicate urgent shortcomings of “just war theory” to crowds outside an Army induction center in New York. Nervously, he tried instead to burn his draft card in a gusting wind that blew out his matches. He succeeded with a cigarette lighter. As a registered conscientious objector, legally exempt from military duty in all wars, Miller told reporters that he hoped to commit “a significant political act” by inviting punishment needlessly upon himself, and the October protests exposed raw political nerves long before Miller went to prison for two years.

Overnight, James Reston of the
New York Times
scolded the campus intellectual and “dreaming pacifist” alike for paradoxical stupidity: “They are not promoting peace but postponing it.” By Monday, Mike Mansfield told the Senate that he was “shocked at pictures showing some of the demonstrators,” and a chorus from both parties seconded his stern reminder that Congress had outlawed the willful defacement of draft cards “within the past month.” Senator Russell of Georgia, while confessing his own prior opposition to the war, declared that “the time has passed now to discuss the wisdom of our entrance into Vietnam”—with troop commitments made, the battle flag planted, and American heritage in jeopardy “if we tuck tail and run.” Senator Dirksen joined Russell with a call for swift punishment of “the wailing, quailing, protesting young men themselves.” From Chicago, Attorney General Katzenbach pledged to investigate peace groups for actions “in the direction of treason.” Former Vice President Nixon said that to tolerate comfort for enemies in wartime threatened free speech worldwide. President Johnson, recovering from gall bladder surgery, issued a statement of surprise that anyone “would feel toward his country in a way that is not consistent with the national interest.”
Life
magazine disdained the “annoying clamor” of “chronic show-offs” it dubbed “Vietniks.” Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel of California branded them “vicious, venomous, and vile.” Public animus surged so broadly that defiant SDS leaders Paul Booth and Carl Oglesby called for a modified strategy of “build not burn.”

A hundred New York religious leaders signed an emergency appeal for open debate. “It concerns us that the President should be amazed by dissent,” explained Lutheran minister Richard J. Neuhaus to an October 25 press conference at the United Nations Church Center. With Rev. William A. Jones of Brooklyn's Bethany Baptist, Neuhaus warned that recent efforts to squelch protest, emanating from “the highest levels of Government,” threatened “to subvert the very democracy which loyal Americans seek to protect.” Asked whether additional statements could be expected, Rabbi Heschel spontaneously assured reporters that a coalition would organize and function for the duration of the Vietnam War, and afterward defended his promise to startled fellow spokesmen. (“Are we then finished?” he asked. “Do we go home content, and the war goes on?”) Heschel spurred new colleagues to prophetic witness against the “evil of indifference,” in language reminiscent of his tribute to King before Selma.
*
“Required is a breakthrough, a leap of action,” he said. To accommodate rabbis and women, the ad hoc New York “churchmen” became Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. When superiors promptly ordered two priests to withdraw, and banished the Jesuit co-founder Daniel Berrigan to South America, Heschel joined Neuhaus to protest the Catholic hierarchy's “injury” to ecumenical conscience.

On October 28, a planned anti-conscription ceremony outside New York's Foley Square courthouse degenerated beforehand into an imploded mix of hecklers, reporters, brawlers, angry police officers, and lapsed pacifists—“the most miserable mob scene ever,” said Dorothy Day, who had seen plenty of them since founding the Catholic Worker movement in 1934. With A. J. Muste, she called off the demonstration for lack of pacifist discipline, and assorted violence from elsewhere filled the front pages. A Pennsylvania Klan leader committed suicide hours after a Sunday
New York Times
story exposed his concealed Jewish ancestry. Murky reports from Indonesia suggested purge deaths running into the hundreds of thousands after an army coup, with victims concentrated among Chinese immigrants. U.S. Marines at the Da Nang airbase killed fifty-six Vietnamese guerrillas who mounted a “human wave” attack, including a thirteen-year-old scout they recognized as a Coca-Cola peddler, and captured an eighty-year-old woman with drawings of military installations in her banana basket. Also in Vietnam that Sunday, October 31, transposed numerals on grid coordinates led A1-E Skyraider pilots to drop white phosphorus erroneously on the hamlet of Deduc, killing forty-eight civilians.

Norman Morrison saw a television report about Deduc at home in Baltimore, where he absorbed converging news on his last day, November 2. A story in
I. F. Stone's Weekly
quoted a French priest from the Catholic refugee village of Duc Co, who said he had watched seven Vietnamese parishioners die of napalm—“always before my eyes were those burned up women and children”—and a letter in the
Baltimore Sun
scolded silent Americans for letting officials believe that “nobody opposes the war in Vietnam except draft-dodgers and addlepates.” Morrison chafed gently at his wife's praise for the activist tone of the letter, saying he had already done everything the writer recommended to no avail. Newspapers had published his appeals, and he had petitioned the White House on as many as three consecutive days, sending thoughtful notes to his “fellow” seminarian Bill Moyers (with whom he had overlapped briefly in Edinburgh, Scotland, before switching his ministry from Presbyterian to Quaker), and pleas for peace to Johnson himself (“Every day we sin more against the yellow people of the world!”), closing one “a conscience stricken citizen.” When his wife left to pick up Christina, five, and Ben, six, from the Stony Run Friends School, Morrison drove to Washington with their one-year-old daughter, Emily, and mailed a short letter back to “Dearest Anne: For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown as clearly as I was shown that Friday night in August, 1955, that you would be my wife. Know that I love thee but must act for the children of the priest's village.”

A traffic policeman recalled a man with a baby walking along the low parapet of a walled garden outside the Potomac River entrance to the Pentagon, then flames shooting fifteen feet high. “He was a torch,” said an Army major who was among those who rushed from the parking lot. Near Morrison's corpse they found a Harris tweed coat, a gallon can of kerosene, and a placid, unharmed Emily, whom
Jet
reporters photographed in the arms of rescue nurse Cloretta Jones. Giant headlines spread everywhere—“Baltimore Quaker with Baby Sets Self Afire”—and the
New York Times
devoted two subsequent profiles to the late salaried leader of the venerable Stony Run Meeting of Friends (founded 1782), finding stunned admirers but no background instability and only one prior newsworthy deed, an arrest among nationally prominent clergy at a segregated Baltimore amusement park in 1963. A
Times
editorial recoiled from suicide witness as “alien to the American temper…confused and misdirected.”
Newsweek
charged that the “macabre act of protest almost included the sacrificial murder of his own baby daughter.” The editors of
The Christian Century
preferred “to avert our eyes.” In the face of what she called “raspingly discordant” evasions from “many who talk and agitate constantly about religion, politics, race, and peace,” a lone Detroit correspondent asserted that Morrison “simply converted his life into a word which would carry…. I believe the message, loud and clear, reached the ends of the earth. Who is prepared to say this act was futile?”