Ends of Things

I have finished Team of Rivals. When I was done, I felt great affection for Lincoln and great sadness at his death. I think the United States would have been quite different had Lincoln lived. That is more than cliché, however, for of course, his presence would have affected the courses of history. How could it not? Everyone affects the course of events, be those events big or small. But (at least according to Kearns’ perspective), Lincoln’s strong foundation in ethics and moral sense; his sympathy for human struggle; his facility to handle crisis and to organize those about him so as to accomplish not only their best but Lincoln’s best as well; his ability to learn and to grow, his great intellect, and his expressive voice; embody an historical figure not likely to be matched again, or ever. His plans for reconstruction, opposed as they might have been by radical Republicans, might still have carried the day owing to Lincoln’s ability to influence and coerce. The South would not have ultimately won the Civil War had Lincoln survived his second term. How different our lives might have been. How different history might have been!

Now I am reading The Kidnapping of Edgardo Montaro, by David Kertzer. The pain of this one surpasses understanding. The book concerns the kidnapping of an eight year old by the Roman Catholic Church in Bologna because an illiterate young servant in the Montaro home had had the boy baptized, and the Church assumed that from that moment the child was a Catholic and it therefore, had responsibility for the boy’s soul. Certainly he could not be left in peace in his Jewish family—after all, they were damnable and damned. They were Jews: their books were heretical and condemned to burn; their Rabbis were marched as clowns and assaulted during ‘holy week;’ their lives were always precariously lived in dangerous environments. If the kidnapping were an historical aberration, it would still be a painful subject, but that this act and the motives behind it are typical of the attitudes and behaviors of the Roman Catholic Church towards Jews and Judaism revolts me. Disgusts me. I have read Constantine’s Sword and Hitler’s Pope, so I have supporting evidence for the moral depravity and heinousness (no, the absolute evil!) of the Church. This knowledge inspires a fear which awakens me in the middle of the night as I wait for the modern day Inquisitors to come beat in my door.

I read this morning Thoreau’s "Life Without Principle." Yes, that is this world. In which such events happened and continue to occur. In which our leaders dissemble and pusillanimously creep about sacrificing our lives and virtues for the sake of fighting personal animus. In which burning villages to save the town and kidnapping young children from their families to offer them safety makes sense.

And in this world, alas, we are called to teach.