Peter J. Leithart
Several years ago, I did some research on Roman Catholics who had converted to conservative Protestant churches. What intrigued me most about those who shared their experiences with me was the large number who said that they left the Catholic Church because they became Christians or that they became Christians after leaving. At least in retrospect, these converts do not think they were Christians while they were in the Catholic Church.
Though I am a Protestant with fundamental objections to certain Catholic practices and doctrines, I found these testimonies puzzling. The Catholic Church, after all, explicitly confesses Jesus Christ as God and Savior. The Christian Bible occupies a central place in its liturgy and doctrine. Catholics are baptized in the name of the Triune God and celebrate the sacrament of Christ's body and blood. But meanwhile, some attain adulthood as Catholics apparently without ever considering themselves Christians. How does this happen?
I was given a number of answers to this question. Some Catholics claim that conservative Protestants have a monopoly on the word "Christian." Others imply that Protestant "sects" virtually brainwash converts with anti-Catholic propaganda. Still others say the problem is pastoral rather than theological; Catholic doctrine requires conscious faith of each member of the Church, but the force of this teaching gets lost in the rituals of automatic infant baptism and confirmation.
Some Catholic leaders have admitted the Catholic Church's own culpability for this situation. The Most Reverend Pastor Cuquejo, Auxiliary Bishop of Asunci"n, Paraguay, attributes the strength of Protestant "sects" in Latin America to the failure of the Catholic Church to keep the gospel central to its mission: "We have at times advanced to a 'second stage' of evangelization without laying the foundation for everything else: the kerygma, the apostolic preaching of the Church about the good news of the life and passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ-which has to be the first stage of any valid evangelization." Along similar lines, the Rev. John Catoir has written, "My own instinct is that the Catholic Church has not emphasized Jesus Christ enough in its teaching. He is certainly central to the Church, but the popular perception of Catholicism is that it is more issue- oriented than Christ-centered."
These observations are both refreshingly honest and, in my judgment, profoundly true. But I would go still further to suggest that the tendency to obscure the gospel and to displace Christ is inherent in Roman Catholic theology and practice. At this point, a Protestant might be expected to launch into a defense of the Reformation doctrine of justification or an assault on the papacy. In my view, the more theologically fundamental point dividing Roman Catholics from conservative Protestants is the doctrine of revelation, and specifically the relation of Scripture to tradition. The nineteenth-century church historian Philip Schaff called sola Scriptura the "formal principle" of the Reformation, but this "formal principle" affects piety and religious experience in very substantial ways.
One of the lesser-known works of John Calvin is a tract whose short title is "An Inventory of Relics." It is predominantly a sharp attack on the extremes of medieval Catholic piety-practices that I imagine many Catholics would today dismiss as empty superstitions. Samples of Christ's hair, teeth, even his foreskin were distributed across Europe, and so much of Jesus' blood had been preserved as to "be diffused over the whole world." Calvin complained that "had the most Holy Virgin yielded a more copious supply [of milk] than is given by a cow, or had she continued to nurse during her whole lifetime, she scarcely could have furnished the quantity which is exhibited." The complaint could have been written by Voltaire.
Calvin's attack on relic veneration, however, was grounded in an evangelical insight that lies at the heart of the Reformation. "The first abuse," Calvin wrote, "and, as it were, the beginning of the evil, was that when Christ ought to have been sought in his Word, sacraments, and spiritual influences, the world, after its wont, clung to his garments, vests, and swaddling clothes; and thus overlooking the principal matter, followed only its accessory." In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin offered a similar critique of the liturgical tradition of the medieval Church. Formally, Calvin's argument is that many medieval ceremonies were human inventions, unwarranted by Scripture. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce his argument to a trivial quarrel over the warrant for this vestment or that gesture. Calvin's principal concern was evangelical and pastoral; he wished to direct sinners to that "place" where they could encounter the living God. Ceremonies, he argued, "to be exercises of piety, ought to lead us straight to Christ." Ceremonies and devotional practices that fail this test are best removed from the Church.
For Calvin, then, sola Scriptura was inseparable from solus Christus. Solus Christus and sola Scriptura were the Reformation's answers to two fundamental religious questions. Solus Christus answered the question, How can I have communion with God? Sola Scriptura answered the logically prior epistemological question, From what source do I learn how I can commune with God? Solus Christus means Jesus alone can bring sinners into true life, the life of fellowship with the Triune God. Sola Scriptura means the Scriptures are Christ's unique revelation of the way to life; it means that Scripture alone, being the Word of God, identifies where the living and life-giving Christ can be found. The Reformers found in Scripture that Christ had promised to meet with His gathered people through His Spirit, His Word, and the Sacraments of Holy Communion and Baptism. To see Him elsewhere is to search in vain.
At this point, Calvin's attack on relics and superfluous ceremonies strikes at the foundations of Roman Catholicism, both medieval and modern. While Jesus promised to offer Himself to His people through bread and wine, Calvin argued, He never promised to encounter them through icons or relics. While Jesus promised that sinners could gain access to the Father through Him, He nowhere promised access to the Father through the saints or Mary. While Jesus promised that Scripture gives wisdom leading to salvation, He never promised to communicate that wisdom through papal decrees. The Roman Catholic Church had, Calvin admitted, preserved the Word and Sacraments, so that one could come to know God truly in the Catholic Church. But the Word and Sacraments had been so shrouded by layers of tradition and distracting ceremony that Christ could be perceived only with difficulty. Calvin charged, in short, that Roman Catholicism taught people to look for God in all the wrong places.
Ultimately, this a question of truth. If the Reformers were wrong about sola Scriptura, they were wrong too about the source of errors in the Catholic Church. For myself, I stand with Calvin, who, I am certain, would be as heartened as I to hear the recent calls from Roman Catholic leaders to reaffirm the centrality of the gospel, Jesus Christ, and Scripture. Given even a modest open door, the Word of God can take care of itself; it never, Scripture says, returns void. Though Protestants believe that Roman Catholic teaching continues to veil the Christ of the gospel, we know that God has a habit of rending veils.
John M. Haas
The man sitting next to me on the plane was pleasant enough. He was well dressed, had a kind face, and showed a surprisingly friendly concern for me as a total stranger. So when he finally revealed that he was a Protestant minister, I was not surprised. He spoke openly and easily of his faith and of the joy he had found in his relationship with the Lord.
He continued to be courteous to me even when he learned that I was Catholic. He said that he was pleased to learn that I, too, knew and loved the Lord Jesus. But as the conversation progressed, he eventually could not avoid giving expression to a frustration he had with the Catholic Church.
"You know," he said, "I just cannot understand why you Catholics engage in these practices which have no basis in Scripture!"
"Oh?" I responded, a bit surprised. "What particular practices did you have in mind?"
"Well, for example, this practice of men presuming to forgive other men's sins! This practice of confession," he replied.
"But that is based on Scripture," I insisted. "After Our Lord's resurrection, He appeared to His disciples in an upper room, He breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit! Whose soever sins you forgive are forgiven, whose soever sins you retain are retained!'"
"Well, that may be in your Bible," he responded. "It's not in our Protestant Bible."
"Do you have a copy of your Bible with you?" I asked.
"Of course, I do," he responded reproachfully, as though I thought he might travel without it.
I took the worn, black leatherbound King James Bible he handed me, turned to the twentieth chapter of John, and read the passage aloud in its eloquent Elizabethan prose.
A look of astonishment and confusion came over the man's face. "I never noticed that before," he said. After a moment's silence, he went on, "I'm going to have to think about this."
Of course that kindly minister had undoubtedly read the passage many times before. But he had never done so in the light of Catholic practice.
Over the years I have often wondered what happened to him. I have wondered whether his new way of looking at Scripture might have eventually led him down the path to the Catholic Church that so many of my friends have traveled. Most of the Protestants whom I know who have become Catholics (the number seems to grow every year) did so because of their love for Scripture, not despite it.
We knew a married couple, both of them physicians, who loved our Lord deeply as Protestants and searched His Scriptures daily. And as their knowledge of the Bible grew, it seemed to them that what they experienced in the Protestant Church did not conform to the witness of Scripture to the extent that Catholic practice did. They read, for example, the biblical accounts of Jesus handing over His authority to forgive sins to His apostles, and they saw that the Catholic Church carried on this ministry of the Lord into their own day through the sacrament of penance while their Protestant denomination did not.
They read Jesus' words about the Eucharist, "This is my Body . . . This is my Blood," and found their Catholic friends believing it quite literally while Protestants gave the words various interpretations that weakened the obvious meaning of what the Word Incarnate Himself had said. They read of the instruction of James to the Christians to call upon the elders of the Church to anoint the sick in the name of the Lord. They saw the practice in the Catholic Church but looked in vain for it within their own.
Finally, out of a desire to be more faithful to Scripture and to come closer to their Lord, they asked to be received into the Catholic Church and to be admitted to the sacraments, in which they believed that they encounter Christ Himself. They had come to see that sacraments are not obstacles that must be overcome in order to encounter Jesus, but that they are the very means that God ordained for them to come to Christ. They saw the Catholic truth that the humanity of Jesus is no obstacle to coming in contact with His divinity. There is simply no other way. The Word was made flesh. The two natures of Christ are united in One Person, "without confusion, change, division, or separation" (as professed by the Council of Chalcedon of 451).
The Catholic love for the sacraments-and for sacramentals and relics and icons and statues and ceremony-therefore derives from love for God-made- man. In the First Epistle of John, the author cannot seem to find sufficient words to convey the importance of the fact that the Word was made flesh. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life." John appeals to all the senses to give witness to the Incarnate God. We saw Him and heard Him and touched Him, he insists.
The Catholics kneeling before the raised Host at Mass worship in wonder and love the God whom they see with the "spiritual eye" of the intellect elevated by the gift of faith, the God whom they touch and taste under the appearances of Bread and Wine. The Catholic kneeling in the confessional hears Jesus say, "I absolve you of your sins," through the lips of the priest. Just as Peter encountered Christ's divinity in His humanity through the gift of faith, even so today the Catholic encounters Christ in His sacraments. The sacraments are no more an obstacle to our coming to Christ than Our Lord's humanity is a barrier to our coming to His divinity. With the eyes of faith, Peter was able to look on his friend and teacher, a carpenter from Nazareth whose family Peter knew, and declare, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." The Catholic looks upon the elevated Host at Mass with the eyes of faith and declares, "My Lord and my God!" The Catholic venerates the Host because he venerates Christ.
Catholics worship the Sacred Humanity of Christ that has redeemed them. This worship of Christ's Humanity reflects the most profound commitment to the truths revealed in Scripture about the nature and work of Jesus. The Word was made flesh. This man Jesus is God. As Tertullian said in the second century, "The flesh is the hinge of salvation." We can certainly understand that truth when we meditate on the Incarnation. But Tertullian is speaking also of the effects of the sacraments to bring us to our bodily resurrection in Christ.
For a variety of reasons, classical Protestant thought has usually held "the flesh" in some suspicion. It suggests that the "flesh" is something which must be overcome to reach Christ. Both Luther and Calvin railed against the "carnal Church," the Catholic Church, and called men to the "spiritual Church," their "reformed" Church. They seemed to feel an uneasiness with the radical implications of the Incarnation extending Christ's saving actions to the sacraments, a visible Church, and a hierarchical ministry stretching through time.
The hierarchical ministry, for example, is not merely incidental to the life of the Church for Catholics but essential to it. Flesh and blood men become themselves sacramental realities as they bear the authority of Christ Himself which He had passed on to His apostles. Our Lord designated one among them to be the chief shepherd to feed His "lambs" and to exercise "the power of binding and loosing." And Simon Peter passed this authority on through an unbroken "apostolic succession" to the Bishop of Rome, the Vicar of Christ. In the actions of the Pope and the legitimate successors of the apostles, believers encounter Christ Himself binding and loosing, consecrating and forgiving.
For many Protestants, however, the sacraments became merely external signs of God's promises rather than transforming encounters with Christ. In his Of True and False Religions, Calvin writes that "a sacrament is an external sign, by which the Lord seals on our conscience his promises of good will towards us, in order to sustain the weakness of our faith."
The Catholic sees the sacrament as much more than that. Baptism, for example, does not communicate simply the promise of God's good will towards us, but rather by God's power radically transforms us and gives us new life. "Unless you are born again of water and the Spirit you shall not enter the Kingdom of God." For the Catholic, the water with the invocation of the Trinity is an efficacious sign that actualizes what is symbolized-the washing away of sin and a true rebirth. The Catholic has no reluctance in seeing his relationship with God in Christ being realized, not only through interior prayer, but also through prayerful eating, drinking, washing, anointing, and touching.
The realization that God brought about our salvation in time, in a particular place, in a historic Individual who could be seen, touched, and heard leads Catholics to seek to come as close as possible to that Man and to His friends and collaborators, the saints, by venerating their holy relics and the holy places where they worked God's wonders. It is undoubtedly true that the search for relics at times bordered on excess and credulity. But the motive in the search for relics was no more base or misplaced than was the motive of the hemorrhaging woman in the Gospels who reached out to touch the hem of Jesus' garment in order to be healed. From that faith-filled tactile encounter came healing and new life. The Catholic desire to encounter Christ in the sacraments, to make pilgrimages to the Holy Lands, to venerate relics of Jesus' friends is a desire to come as close as humanly possible to the Incarnate God whom Catholics love above all things.
There are undoubtedly people raised as Catholics who look on the sacraments and ceremonial of the Church and do not see there the opportunity to encounter Christ. After all, there were people of Jesus' own day who looked at Him and saw merely a carpenter's son from Nazareth and not the Christ, the Son of the living God. Some of Jesus' followers heard the words come from His very mouth: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you." But they did not believe Him. "From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him."
In a similar way, there are those who are raised Catholics, and who somehow never relate to the words and actions of the Mass. In fact, the liturgy of the Catholic Mass is a mosaic of Scripture; it is almost entirely sola Scriptura! But for some reason the words of Scripture sometimes fail to touch the hearts of those who hear them. At the Mass the worshippers stand when the Gospel is read as a gesture of reverence and respect for the words of Jesus proclaimed by the deacon or priest. But somehow the significance of this posture of respect is lost on certain members of the assembly.
Some of these individuals who have not been touched by the words of Scripture in the Mass later come to have a true conversion of heart and enter into a deep and loving relationship with Christ. This is a wonderful development over which the Father in Heaven and all the angels and saints rejoice, as should every Catholic. Sometimes this conversion takes place outside the Catholic Church. Even in that case, Catholics should rejoice. But as these individuals grow in their knowledge of Scripture and in their love for our Lord, they may, with God's grace, one day be drawn to that life of intimate encounter with Christ in the sacraments of His Catholic Church that has absolutely no parallel on this earth.
This was what drew my family and me (a Protestant minister) and many of our friends (some of whom were also Protestant ministers) to embrace the Catholic faith. It was not that we had not loved our Lord as Protestants. We had. And we loved Him deeply. Indeed, we became Catholics because we wanted to be as close to Him as possible in this life and to take full advantage of all the gifts He left us under stewardship of His authorized ministers in His Church.
Carol Iannone
Contemporary feminism began some decades ago with what Betty Friedan called the "feminine mystique"-the notion that women had been trapped into thinking of full-time wife-and-mothering as their path to fulfillment. The feminine mystique went on to become the defining and energizing idea of the feminist movement, as outrage over the quantities of female talent being squandered in kitchens and scout dens took hold. In the generations after Friedan, many women would define themselves in opposition to their mothers' experience of baking cookies and serving tea with a degree from, say, Wellesley.
A Wellesley graduate who famously avoided this ignominious fate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, remarked feelingly on a recent PBS documentary that, due to restrictive definitions of femininity, America had lamentably lost the services of untold numbers of women as doctors and lawyers and judges and teachers and so on. Perhaps only the First Lady could make feminism sound like a selfless desire to serve, but what is more important in her remarks is that she spoke as though every woman had the ability to be a professional, and as though only professional women counted.
At the time of the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963, there seemed to be so many Seven Sister graduates up to their elbows in cake mix that the many women who had taken a basic satisfaction in motherhood were overlooked and forgotten-especially women from that class for whom the alternative was being not a doctor or a lawyer or a judge but, say, a machinist. The movement seemed driven by the discontent of overeducated, upper-middle-class women and their angry daughters determined not to repeat their mothers' mistakes.
Some commentators anticipated that a division would arise between women who wanted motherhood and women who did not, but it turns out that motherhood was not to be left behind in the new feminist model. A division developed instead between the rapidly receding ideal of motherhood as a primary activity and the accelerating insistence on motherhood as one among many "life experiences."
It seems necessary to bring all this to light now because, while the insistence on motherhood as a life experience seems to be in the ascendancy (guiding all kinds of public choices and official decisions, from work policy to day care to welfare), the rapidly receding ideal of motherhood as a primary task may not have entirely flickered out, particularly among the nonprofessional classes. This still-surviving ideal of motherhood needs to be considered before we can fully understand some of the chronic problems we face at present-especially the problem of single mothers receiving public assistance.
The professional class's attitude toward these women has routinely been that no young woman would choose motherhood (especially early in life, and especially without a husband) if she had other options. We commonly hear that these "children having children," or even "babies having babies," are without hope-prompted to pregnancy by the bleakness and emptiness of their lives. A child at least gives them "someone to love," something to live for, a way to be needed and appreciated.
This is no doubt what inspired a recent experimental program for young mothers called New Chance, which served 1,408 women in ten states, and which, according to the New York Times, "showered" its participants with education and social services. The program was closely watched by welfare experts since its basic inspiration seemed close to many Clinton Administration initiatives.
An article in the Christian Science Monitor, written at an earlier stage of the program, gave details of the services offered and suggested that it was yielding some modest successes. The young mothers, aged sixteen to twenty-two, came to community centers five days a week, from nine until three. Their children generally received on-site supervision and health care. In the mornings the women studied toward their high school equivalency degrees; in the afternoons they received counseling on careers, family planning, parenting, and child development. Later in their programs, they were given training in job skills, internships related to their career choices, and further education. Each had a personal case worker to provide individual support and direction.
A later article in the Times, however, tucked away in the bottom corner of page sixteen, reported that the program had at last been determined to have failed. The experiment had "no effect in moving [the mothers] from welfare into the job market," the Times reported. "After eighteen months, those who joined the program were no more likely to be off welfare or in a job than a similar group that received no services," and about "80 percent of the mothers from both groups were still collecting welfare." The program did succeed in getting more women in the test group than in the control group to complete their high school equivalency diplomas, but this turned out to be meaningless. Both groups were still reading below eighth-grade level at the end of the eighteen months (which perhaps tells us more than we wanted to know about the value of the high school equivalency degree). And, most importantly, 57 percent of those in the test group were pregnant again after the eighteen months, while 53 percent of those in the control group were.
One reason for the failure of programs like New Chance may be that the women involved do not see motherhood through the eyes of our national elite. They see that having a child may actually be something primarily and immediately desirable, not something to avoid or postpone-not a make-do out of desperation, not an inconvenience that interferes with an education, not something to do while also advancing a career, not one of a number of life experiences, but a primary experience.
We used to see public service advertisements that tried to discourage illegitimacy by portraying the frustration and loneliness of the single mother, but these young women know better. Single motherhood is an established institution in our society by now; these women have numerous friends who have had babies out of wedlock, and they do not quite see the awful, hopeless, dead-end entrapment of public lore. If they did, they perhaps would be more careful, but what they see instead is many young women managing, more or less, and probably enjoying, more or less, the experience of motherhood. This may be the reason we no longer see the kind of public service campaigns that we used to; to those in the know they would look as antiquated as the old VD films that were once shown to GIs.
Of course we have all heard the discouraging statistics connecting single motherhood to poverty, crime, limited education, and unemployment. But these statistics do not reveal a life of total desperation in each individual case. While single motherhood is a bad idea overall, it is dishonest for welfare reform critics to keep up the fiction that it is only embraced out of hopelessness or despair, or that it can only be countered by massive public programs offering greater "opportunity." In many city neighborhoods one can see briskly attentive single mothers and their offspring, shopping, lunching out, playing in the park, walking home from school, visiting the library. Recently, a number of unmarried women on public assistance (many of them already mothers several times over) managed to obtain fertility treatments on Medicaid. A news article told of the "joy" felt by a single mother when she heard that her teenage son's girlfriend was pregnant, and a husband and wife pastoral team with a radio ministry had to give a lecture on the inappropriateness of baby showers for single Christian women.
To onlookers consulting the statistics, the situation of single mothers may seem hopeless, even disastrous. But to these women, it is a real life they are living, and not some apology for a life. In fact, compared to real motherhood, the New Chance model of studying, laboring, work shopping, interning, skills training, career counseling, etc., all under the watchful eyes of a social worker, probably looks a little grim. Even "wanting someone to love" is not as desperate or illegitimate a reason for having children as it may at first sound. "I look at my children and I know I gave something to the world," a welfare mother told the Times. (The situation of the children may be a different story, but that is not what we are asked to consider by those who want us to pity the women's lives.)
Even so, women in the professional classes, confronted with a young single mother, imagine that the only life worth living is one very much like their own-that to live without the prospects of a major career, to give birth without completing an education, to rear a child without setting up a college fund and providing violin lessons, is to face a void. But this is simply untrue. A great many people manage to enjoy life with much less than all that, and do not feel nearly as sorry for themselves as others do for them.
None of this is to suggest that single motherhood is a good thing; in fact, its escalation is an alarming sign of how far the institutions and civilizational mechanisms of our society have been destroyed by the forces of "liberation" in recent decades. But the ascendant trivialization and denigration of motherhood by the professional classes keeps us from seeing not how "hopeless" these lives are, but, relatively speaking, how gratifying. For many women being a mother can suffice, despite what all the feminist maximizers, actualizers, and promoters of female potential and absolute self-fulfillment may think.
If it is true that illegitimacy is spreading through all levels of the population, perhaps one of the reasons is that state-supported single motherhood has been for some time the one situation in which women can actually be relatively relaxed about putting motherhood first. The idea of a nonworking wife has already become unthinkable for many middle- class men. "Welfare Mothers Have a Big Job To Do Raising Their Children," ran a defense of welfare opposing the idea that mothers on public assistance should be made to work. Who makes such an apologia for the harried middle-class mom, "juggling," "balancing," and "having it all"? Our society should rethink its ideas about motherhood, if it is serious about reducing illegitimacy. Come to think of it, it should rethink its ideas about motherhood, period.
Peter L. Berger
The other day a colleague of mine, who came to America from Russia via Israel, told me a story about her son who is in the eighth grade in a renowned progressive school in Cambridge, Massachusetts (than which no community could be more progressive). The boy was puzzled over how to complete an assignment he had been given in school, to write a paper responding to the question, "What do your people believe in?" My colleague was quite annoyed and suggested, "Why don't you say, my people believe in liberal democracy!"-to which her son replied, "They would kill me if I wrote that!" My colleague commented, "You know, there is no way in which a kid in this school could identify himself simply as an American."
Then there was this conversation with a visiting scholar from Russia. She reported that she was pleased to have found some people here with whom she could speak Russian, especially one woman who only lived a short distance away. It was clear from her account that this woman was married, so I asked whether her friend's husband was Russian too. "Oh no," she replied, "he is a Jew." I asked, "But aren't there Russian Jews?" A perplexed look came over her face, she thought for a moment (as if this were a difficult question), then said: "No. There are Russians and there are Jews. She is Russian, he is Jewish." I observed that her remarks could be taken as anti-Semitic. "I'm not anti-Semitic," she said emphatically.
All of this made me remember something I had read many years ago. Shortly after the end of World War II a group from an American Jewish organization visiting Denmark met with an official of the government. The topic of conversation was the well-known story of how the Danish people and government spirited away to Sweden virtually the entire Jewish population of Denmark and thus saved them from the Nazis. The spokesman of the American Jewish group told the Danish government official, "We want to thank you for what you did for our people." "We didn't do it for your people," he replied; "we did it for our people."
A few years ago, well before the end of apartheid in South Africa, an acquaintance of mine, a black professor from that country, was a visiting scholar at Harvard. As soon as he arrived in late summer, he wanted to register his two children at a nearby Cambridge public school. The person in charge of registration seemed embarrassed, said that there were some technical problems, and suggested that the professor and his children should come back the following week. The next week they were told that the children could not be admitted at this school but would e assigned somewhere else, which happened to be a long bus ride away. The father, who by then was very angry, asked to speak to someone higher up and was finally seen by the school principal. The principal was very embarrassed indeed (I'm not sure that he should be given credit for this) as he explained, "You must understand my position. You see, we have now achieved the targeted racial balance in this school. If we admitted your children, it would disturb the balance." The professor observed that he came from the country of apartheid and had not expected, in liberal Massachusetts, to have his children refused admission to a school because of their race. That may or may not have aggravated the embarrassment of the principal, but it did not change his position. The children wound up at a nearby Catholic school.
Last year I happened to have some time on my hands in Amsterdam and, wandering about, came upon the museum of the city's history. A large group of school children was being led through the museum, the great majority non-white-evidently children of immigrants from the erstwhile Dutch possessions in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands Antilles. (Assuming that there was no racial segregation in Amsterdam schools, I later asked a Dutch acquaintance about this, and he opined that this must have been a class for children still learning the Dutch language.) As one would expect, much of the museum is dedicated to the golden age of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, when the first modern capitalism flourished there and the city was arguably the commercial capital of Europe. I do not know Dutch, but I could make enough of the teacher's explanations to understand that he was speaking with much pride about this great period in the history of "our city." The children were well-behaved, and all the little brown and black faces were raised attentively to the various exhibits of Dutch glory. Of course, I had to wonder in what way these children, whose parents hailed from Java or from Curacao, could identify with the dour Calvinist faces staring down at them from the portraits along the walls. "Our city"?
When I'm by myself in a strange place I'm prone to fantasies. I had a fantasy there and then. There are now a good many children with brown faces in Germany too, and I had just been told that, for various reasons, there had been an upsurge of anti-German feelings in Holland. My fantasy was that a little brown Dutch boy was talking to a little brown German boy, berating him for "what you did to us during the war." It occurred to me that, if such a scene could take place, both countries would have solved their immigration problem.
The United States has been an immigrant country from the beginning and for a long time could take satisfaction in its record of reasonable success in integrating into its society people from the most varied backgrounds. Today all of Western Europe is an immigrant society and all its countries are struggling with the problem of integration. What does it mean to be a black citizen of the Netherlands? A German whose native language is Turkish? A Muslim Briton? In trying to answer such questions, it is no longer clear that Europeans can learn from the United States.
The road to Bosnia is not so very long.