Sins of the Fathers. - Review - book review

National Review, March 5, 2001 by Daniel P. Moloney

Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, by James Carroll (Houghton Mifflin, 756 pp., $28)

'If I were Pope . . ." Every Catholic at one time or another plays this game. Pro-lifers would excommunicate Senator So-and-So, traditionalists would return to Mass in Latin, theologians would silence each other, etc. In small measures, this can be a healthy exercise of one's imagination, envisioning a world in some way, small or great, better than the one we inhabit.

It takes a healthy ego to write a full-length book based solely on such woolgatherings, but even in its twilight, the Catholic Left has not lacked partisans with the necessary brio. Since 1999, we have seen John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope, Garry Wills's Papal Sin, and now James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, each laying out a vision of what God really intends the Catholic Church to be. Although each claims to be a work of history, each instead uses (and abuses) history to make a case for a Church without all the bad parts: priests, men, heterosexuals, absolute truth, confession, the papacy, Scripture, the Mass, the Resurrection, Rome.

On March 16, 1998, the Vatican issued its long-awaited statement on the Holocaust, "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah." The document acknowledged and condemned Christian discrimination against and persecution of Jews throughout its history, and repeated the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that "the Church . . . deplores the hatred, persecutions, and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and from any source." Constantine's Sword is Carroll's attempt to rewrite this historic document as he thinks it should have been written.

A vocal segment of liberal opinion, including the editorial board of the New York Times, sniffed that the Vatican's statement was fine as far as it went-but it should also have condemned Pius XII for his alleged silence regarding the deportation of Jews, and should not have declared that anti-Semitism is external to the Church. The document quotes John Paul II saying, "In the Christian world-I do not say on the part of the Church as such-erroneous and unjust interpretations of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people and their alleged culpability have circulated for too long, engendering feelings of hostility toward this people." This distinction between "the Christian world" and "the Church as such" seemed to many observers-both Jewish and non-Jewish-a failure to admit just how pervasive Christian anti-Semitism has been in the Church itself.

The Catholic response to this was very theological: Yes, Christians at every level of the Church have treated the Jews unjustly. But when the Pope says "the Church as such," he is referring to Paul's doctrine of the Church as the "mystical body of Christ." The Church cannot sin, because Jesus was without sin, and the Church is nothing other than Jesus Christ dwelling among men in a mystical way. In this theological sense, and in this sense only, is the Church completely innocent of any injustices against the Jews.

Only from this theological viewpoint, it might be added, can the Church condemn the repeated actions of its members, even its leaders, without undermining her own institution. Because the Church is perfect and its members imperfect, the argument goes, it is possible to criticize Christians in the name of the Church, as being bad Christians when they are bad to Jews.

For most people, this solves the problem of dishonesty-the Pope is free to use theological terms in any way he sees fit. Yet Carroll rejects this distinction altogether. "Really to eliminate the contempt for Jews that lives not [just] in the hearts of prejudiced Christians but in the heart of 'the Church as such' requires fundamental changes in the way history has been written, theology has been taught, and Scripture has been interpreted. Indeed, in this context, the very character of Scripture as sacred text becomes an issue." So deep are the roots of anti-Semitism, Carroll insists, that to pull them up is to dislodge the central institutions and doctrines of Christianity. "We Remember," by trying to distance the Church from anti-Semitic Christians, did not go deep enough, so Carroll has set out to do it properly.

Carroll's story has three parts. Part One is an account of the early Church period in which Carroll denies the Resurrection of Christ and the divine inspiration of the Gospels. Part Two explains how the Gospel account of the Crucifixion led to the theology of the Cross as elaborated by the medieval bishop St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), which made the death of Christ at the hands of the Jews central to Christian spirituality. Part Three moves from the crusading impulse of Anselm's day to Auschwitz. All along, Carroll tries to connect anti- Judaism, the theological reasons for not being Jewish, with anti- Semitism, the prejudice against the Jewish people. In Carroll's revisionist story, all of the historic conflicts between Jews and Christians stem from the moment when (as the Christians tell it) every faction of the Jewish establishment-the Gospels mention the chief priests, the Pharisees, the officers of the temple police, the Jewish elders, the Sanhedrin, the scribes, the high priest, and the "Herodians" loyal to King Herod-demanded that the Roman praetor Pontius Pilate execute Jesus as a common criminal. Carroll draws a straight line between this Gospel account of the Crucifixion of Jesus and the horrors of Nazi ideology. No crucifix, no Auschwitz, he alleges. But because Carroll wants to remain a Christian, he seeks to preserve the authentic message of Jesus himself. Relying on the conclusions of the "Jesus Seminar," a well-publicized attempt to find the true historical Jesus behind the "propagandistic" New Testament accounts, Carroll discovers that the initial distinction between Judaism and Christianity itself is illegitimate: Jesus was himself a Jew who taught only love. His message was so revolutionary that it provoked the Romans (not the Jews) into killing him. The grieving disciples gathered in a "bereft circle" where they shared their memories of Jesus, sang songs, read poems, ate and drank to his memory-"the film The Big Chill captures this phenomenon," explains Carroll.