Constantine's Sword by James Carroll

First published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Church history; history; theology

Core issue(s): Catholics and Catholicism; guilt; Judaism; persecution; racism

Overview

James Carroll begins Constantine’s Sword, a history of Catholicism’s treatment of Jews, with a reflection on the cross made of railroad ties erected at the Auschwitz death camp. Pope John Paul II, still alive when this book was published, visited the camp in 1979 and prayed for the Catholic martyrs who died at the camp, including Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism whom he declared a saint in 1998. During his visit to Auschwitz, the pope stated that he would like to see something established there to honor the Catholic martyrs of Auschwitz. Five years later, a group of Carmelite nuns moved into a theater at the camp’s gate, fulfilling the pope’s wish and intending to pray especially for Sister Teresa Benedicta, the name given to Edith Stein after she joined the Carmelite order. Many Jews responded by protesting what they saw as a Christian takeover of a place that had been dedicated primarily to the murder of Jews.

For Carroll, the story of Catholic-Jewish tensions at Auschwitz is more than a struggle over whose tragedy should be recognized. He takes the Christian emblem of the cross as a symbol of the history of the anti-Semitic trend in Christianity. During the early centuries of the Christian faith, believers began to focus on the death of Christ, represented by the cross, rather than on Christ’s life and teachings. This focus on the Passion was also an early expression of hostility toward Jews, who were blamed for the death. Carroll interprets the history of the Catholic Church, including the wider history of Christianity after the Reformation, as a long series of movements in the wrong direction, ultimately ending in the Shoah, the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Throughout his examination, Carroll inserts his own memories of growing up Catholic, connecting the personal to the historical.

Christianity began within the Jewish religion at a time when this religion was redefining itself in response to pressure from the Roman Empire. One of the conflicting groups within the Jewish faith was the Pharisees, who eventually evolved into rabbinic Judaism, and another group was the followers of Jesus. Therefore, early relations between those who were becoming the Christians and those who were becoming the Jews had something of the nature of sibling rivalry. As Christianity moved away from its original Jewish base and into the broader Roman world, though, Christians tended to downplay the brutality of Rome and to emphasize their rivalry with the Jews. They did this through focusing on the story of the death of Jesus. Because the Gospels were being written at this time, their authors took the story of the Passion of Christ, with primary responsibility attributed to the Jews, as central to their religious narratives. Although Saint Paul attempted to join Christians and Jews together, in Carroll’s view, Christianity came to adopt the doctrine of supersessionism, which held that the new religion of Christianity had replaced the old religion of Judaism.

Carroll identifies the reign of Emperor Constantine (324-337 c.e.) as a critical time in the history of Christianity and of church relations with the Jews. Constantine adopted the cross as his symbol and united the Roman Empire under official Christian dominance. From that time on, what became the Catholic Church had secular as well as spiritual power, and it identified itself closely with the death of Christ. Jews were defined as outside of Christendom and continually held responsible for Christ’s death.

Carroll follows Christian hostility toward the Jews through the Crusades of the Middle Ages, discussing the bloody episodes when the holy wars turned against Jewish populations. He finds antagonism toward Judaism in such major thinkers as Saint Anselm and Saint Thomas Aquinas, arguing that Saint Anselm’s focus on the death of Christ on the cross reinforced anti-Jewish tendencies in Christianity. The controversial Peter Abelard, with his emphasis on the life of Christ and on God’s mercy and acceptance of all, is one of the few medieval figures Carroll sees in a positive light.

Although many historians have seen racist, as opposed to religious, anti-Semitism as a product of modern times, Carroll traces this racism back to the Inquisition. As Jews were forced to convert, especially in Spain, this created a category of suspect Christians. Thus, Jews began to be defined less by their beliefs than by their ancestry. Modern anti-Semitism, then, emerged from the Inquisition. The emancipation of Jews during the nineteenth century followed from the fears produced in European populations by assimilated Jews, in somewhat the same manner that earlier Christians had felt threatened by converted Jews.

In considering the Catholic Church’s relations with Adolf Hitler, Carroll agrees with those who argue that the Church had little interest in protecting the Jews from Nazi extermination, rather than with those who argue that the Church simply had no power to protect the Jews from the Nazis. He points out that the Church was, in fact, effective in opposing German chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s persecution of German Catholics during the late nineteenth century. Carroll maintains that the popes during the late nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century continually opposed modernity as a threat to papal power and that Catholic authorities frequently identified modernity with the Jews. Thus, he claims that Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, helped set the stage for the Shoah.

Carroll ends with a call for a Vatican III, a council of the Church that would enact fundamental reforms. He would like this council to go back to the New Testament and critically reconsider the anti-Semitism of the Gospels. Further, he would like the Church to use this council to renounce its efforts at worldly power by formally repudiating the late nineteenth century doctrine of papal infallibility. Further, he believes this council should adopt a new Christology, repudiating the doctrine of atonement through the death of Christ and celebrating a Christ whose life and teachings brought salvation to all. The council should adopt a new and more democratic approach to Church government. Finally, Carroll believes that the council needs to express repentance for its long history of anti-Semitism.

Christian Themes

In addition to a history of Christian relations with Judaism, Carroll offers an interpretation of the significance of Jesus that differs radically from the traditional view of the Catholic Church and the views of other major Christian denominations. He not only rejects the predominant concept of atonement, the doctrine that Christ saved humanity by dying for human sins, but also maintains that this concept of atonement has been the source of centuries of wrongdoing. Carroll’s call for a Vatican III to consider his interpretation, then, is a call for an event that would be not only more radical than Vatican II but also far more radical than the Reformation. Some critics may question why Carroll believes that a Church that needs to repudiate almost all of its own heritage should seek to continue to exist at all.

The idea that Christianity developed within Judaism after the death of Christ is closely connected to the work of a group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar. These scholars have maintained that the historical Jesus differed from the Christ who emerged in the minds of believers and who was described in the New Testament. Thus, from this point of view, one can find teachings of Jesus that predate Christology.

Finally, the theme of the role of the Church in promoting anti-Semitism is one that a number of modern thinkers have considered. The topic of how the beliefs and politics of the Church may have either resisted or contributed to the mass murder of Jews during World War II has been a subject of intense debate.

Sources for Further Study

Carroll, James. An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Gilmour, Peter. Review of Constantine’s Sword. Religious Education 97, no. 2 (Spring, 2002): 184-198. Transcription of an online symposium with Jewish and Christian participants on the importance of Carroll’s work for religious education.

Karabell, Zachary. “A Writer and Former Priest Sees Anti-Semitism as the Rock on Which His Church Is Built.” Chicago Tribune, February 4, 2001, p. 1.

Küng, Hans. Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow. Translated by John Bowden. New York: Crossroad, 1992. An examination of the past and present of Judaism and of the relationship of Judaism with Christianity by a Catholic theologian who has been an outspoken and controversial critic of the Church.

Morris, Charles R. “The Worst Thing About My Church.” The Atlantic Monthly 287, no. 1 (January, 2001): 80.

Olsen, Diane, ed. The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Vintage, 1996. Pagels argues that the figure of Satan in the Christian tradition emerged from the efforts of Christians to distinguish themselves from Judaism in antiquity. By identifying Jews and unorthodox Christians with Satan, early Christians sought to demonize their opponents.

Rourke, Mary. “A Faithful Catholic Indicts His Own Religion: Former Priest James Carroll Lights a Fire with His Examination of the Catholic Church’s History of Behaviour Toward Jews.” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2001, p. E1.

Sullivan, Andrew. “Christianity’s Original Sin.” The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 2001, p. 5.