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Constantine's
Sword
The Church and the Jews: A History
James Carroll
576 pages
Houghton Mifflin, 2001
$28.00
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From the Publisher
Constantine's Sword is a sprawling work of history, theology,
and personal confession by James Carroll, the author of An
American Requiem, among many others. Carroll begins his landmark
project by describing contemporary Catholic remembrances of the Holocaust
and the Church's intolerable legacy of hostility towards Jews. He then
surveys Catholic anti-Judaism beginning with the New Testament and proceeding
through the early Church, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Enlightenment,
and World War II, before concluding with "A Call for Vatican III,"
a Church council that would make meaningful repentance for an entrenched
tradition of hatred. Carroll's prescriptions for repentance, continued
in a powerful epilogue, are bracingly concrete; Carroll's personal reflections
as an American Catholic infuse his historical narrative.
Review
This is a big, bold, brave and immensely disturbing book. The author
James Carroll, a Roman Catholic and former priest, persuasively develops
the history of a tragic irony. Jesus Christ, a faithful Jew, came into
this world to preach, teach, and live His Father's will. His message
of love and service meant not "to destroy but to fulfill"
the Jewish covenant. The irony is that the church founded in His name
has caused directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously, the
suffering and slaughter of more Jews than any other cause. Ultimately
this Christian anti-Judaism resulted in the Holocaust: "…Nazism,
by tapping into a deep, ever-fresh reservoir of Christian hatred of
Jews, was able to make an accomplice of the Catholic Church in history's
worst crime, even though, by then, it was the last thing the Church
consciously wanted to be.”
The author’s list of goats and heroes
is pretty evenly divided, the list of the good including Pope Gregory
I, Pope Callixtus II, Pope Clement VI, Pope Paul III, the philosopher
Spinoza, and in recent times Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II.
An equally distinguished set of goats shows up: St. John Chrysostan,
St. Ambrose, Pope Innocent III, Pope Gregory IX, Martin Luther, Pope
Paul IV, the philosopher Voltaire, and more recently Cardinal Eugenio
Pacelli (Pope Pius XII). This book dramatically details the consequences
of their theology and how it impacted the Jews living at that time.
The author concludes with a call for Vatican
III, which would include "Jews and Protestants, people of other
faiths and no faith, clergy and laity and, emphatically, women.”
This book traces a 2000-year journey and takes too many side trips,
exhausting the reader in its thoroughness, but the argument remains
powerfully persuasive and needs to be read and discussed. Through it
all runs the ultimate question, "Who is God and who are we; how
does God work in our lives, and we in God’s?" What a wonderful
book this would be to discuss with a Jewish friend. I think God would
be present in that conversation.
—R. Paul Nelson is the President
Emeritus at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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