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that all changed with Constantine. Politics and theology were fluid until then, but boundaries were suddenly defined around the grid of the True Cross. A symbol then and ever after associated with Helena, it now became the touchstone of membership, not only in the Church but in the empire. That made it the touchstone of survival. Saint Ambrose, the greatest theologian of the age, would use the True Cross explictly against the Jews, finally urging violence as the proper response to their denial of Christian claims. Saint Augustine, the protégé of Ambrose, would demur, and Jews would live, but only in a certain way—one that stamps history still. All of this unfolds from where I stood, knowing nothing, in Trier.

PART FOUR
    FROM CRUSADES TO CONVERSIONISM

PART FIVE
    THE INQUISITION: ENTER RACISM

PART SIX
    EMANCIPATION, REVOLUTION, AND A NEW FEAR OF JEWS

PART SEVEN
    THE CHURCH AND HITLER

PART EIGHT
    A CALL FOR VATICAN III

Epilogue: The Faith of a Catholic
    W HEN OUR CHILDREN were young, my wife, Lexa, and I traveled with them through Europe on a Eurailpass, which let us hop on and off trains with abandon. It was 1989. Lizzy was nine, and Pat was seven. Beginning in Amsterdam, we passed through Brussels, then made our way to Paris for the centenary celebration of the Eiffel Tower, which our children dubbed the birthday tower. In that pre-euro era, what we loved most was crossing borders, and we decided to cross as many as we could.
    Lizzy had a preoccupation that tracked us like a cloud. In Amsterdam, we had visited the Anne Frank House. The small rooms of the hidden annex had left us all short of breath, but it was our daughter who carried away the image of Anne as a locating compass rose. Lizzy's identification with the young girl, whose diary she had begun to read, was complete. When our train crossed from Holland into Belgium, Lizzy asked, "Whose side were these on?" The Belgians, she meant. Were they on Anne's side or Hitler's? Anne's, we answered. Then, the same thing when we crossed into France. "Whose side were these on?" Anne's, we said again, giving France a large benefit of the doubt. At each border she asked again. And when we said, at the crossing from Switzerland, that Italy had been on Hitler's side, we could see judgment seize her gaze as she turned to look out the train window, as if surely the landscape itself would tell her how such a thing had been possible. All of history was present to her as she stared out at the Italian countryside. For the first time, regarding the fate of Anne Frank and her people, I felt completely ashamed.
    The next summer, we began in Amsterdam again, but now we went where we hadn't gone the year before, which was Germany. I had to overcome Lizzy's implicit objection—I wanted my family to see Wiesbaden, where I had been as a boy. The previous November, the Berlin Wall had been breached. Large vestiges of it still stood, and Lexa and I agreed that for history's sake we should all see it. We began our tour of Germany with a dreamy cruise down the Rhine, but soon it became a grim trip. As we sailed upriver from Cologne, passing Koblenz and the confluence of the Moselle, I thought of Maria Laach and Trier, but my family was already impatient, and I didn't tell them my stories of those places. When we disembarked directly across from Mainz, we turned our backs on that "Rome of the North" to go the short way to Wiesbaden. Its elegance no longer stood out from the ruins of the rest of the Rhineland's cities, as it had in my day, and so neither Lexa nor the children could see it. I insisted on the extravagance of staying in what had been the best hotel in town—in my time, reserved for senior American officers. But it was adjacent to the famous spa, and its rooms reeked of the sulfurous hot springs that Germans still regarded as an indulgence. When I showed my family the mansion in which my parents, brothers, and I had lived, no one was impressed.
    We took the train from Frankfurt to