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PATRICIA MARX
particular time, asked: "Father, was Jesus in a position to do something
about that in the first place?"
The Jesuit could not answer my question precisely, but he said
that he believed Jesus could have acted because he already had the
people very much on his side. I said to him then, because his tremendous
hardness impressed me, "Father, I am ready to believe that you would
not bat an eyelash if you were informed that in ten minutes you would
be beheaded." He smiled at that. He liked that. I then continued,
"I also believe that you would not bat an eyelash if you were in the
cell of a human being who, five minutes later, would be executed."
And on this Sunday I became cognizant for the first time of what
bottomless cunning lurks in the Church's insistence on celibacy. That
these priests are obliged to live alone, that they do not have a single
human being to whom they can get thoroughly attached. They have
no child, no wife, and this gives them that unbelievable hardness,
which enables them to reckon years, not in the terms of a human life,
but incommensurably under the aspect of eternity. They are not
permitted to live. They are not permitted to have a life of their own,
and therefore life itself, the life of other people, is not of the same
consequence to them as life is for those to whom that is all there is.
And it is from this p0sition-I am now completely clear about
this-that the Church was able, from the beginning, to draw the
strength to demand for 2,000 years such unheard of sacrifices and
victims. This brutality is true of all great promulgators of ideas. So,
too, the Nazis were willing to sacrifice one half of the German people
in the Second World War because they felt they were building an
empire, a kingdom of a thousand years. The Bolshevists, too, reckon
not in our measures of time but in terms of centuries. They do not
think of the happiness of the living but in terms of generations and
generations to come-that eventually things will become better. But
it is always terribly inhuman to think in this way.
MARX:
Mr. Hochhuth, your characterization of the Pope emphasizes his
concern for earthly things, such as factories and the political realities
of Europe vs. Russia. Were you at that time unaware of his trans–
cendental view of life?
HOCHHUTH:
Well, first of all, I must say that in no part of my play
did I submit that the financial concerns of the Vatican caused the
silence of the Pope. That I did not maintain anywhere. I put the
scene dealing with finances before the actual drama concerning the
deportation of the Jews from Rome because I'm thoroughly of the
opinion that the Vatican does indeed have very substantial earthly
