Constantine's Sword
by James Carroll
Reviewed by Theresa Welsh
When I saw the huge size of this book - over 700 pages - I wasn't sure I wanted to delve into it. But I began reading and found myself drawn into this personalized story by an ex-priest whose childhood experiences coincided with mine. I too was raised Catholic in the 1950s, but James Carroll's immersion in Catholicism, its symbols and stories, was almost total. His mother was a devout Irish Catholic woman. His father was a military man, which is why the family had lived in Germany and visited shrines related to Constantine and his embrace of the Christian faith in 312 AD.
THE CROSS AT AUSHWITZ
Carroll opens with a tale of Pope John Paul II celebrating Mass in a field next to the Auschwitz death camp and a cross left at the site that became a source of present-day conflict with the Jews, who wanted it gone, along with the Carmelite convent that also had opened near the cross. Jews wanted no part of the Christian cross, the very symbol that had provoked their persecution through the ages and culminated in their near extermination during Hitler's insanity in the 1940s.
How did it happen that the Catholic Church became the persecutor of Jews, through pogroms, the Inquisition, forced conversions and confining Jews to walled ghettoes? How had it come about that a Pope had ordered built a Jewish ghetto in Rome that persisted for generations, right in the shadow of the Vatican? How had Jews been relegated to inferior status in the eyes of the Church and how had Pope Pius XII, who was head of the Church during World War II (and was the pope of my childhood) concluded a Concordat with Hitler, then allowed Roman Jews to be rounded up and sent to death camps?
THEOLOGY OF SUFFERING
Those are interesting questions that had bothered me too, but when Carroll ties the Catholic attitude toward Jews into Catholic theology, it really piqued my interest. I had always had a problem with the idea that "Jesus died for our sins." Why would he need to do that? Along with that was the odd emphasis on Jesus' suffering on the cross instead of on his teachings. Over the years during which I married a non-Catholic and quit going to church, I became more curious about Jesus the person. Who was he and what did he actually teach? The discovery of new gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hamadi documents have given us more information about that time. I took a big interest in new thinking about the personhood of Jesus. But there was the Catholic Church, still mired in the past, still thundering against "heresy" and keeping women to minor roles, declaring something as sensible as contraception "a sin," and sticking to the dictum that "outside the Church there is no salvation." Still the infallible know-it-all Catholic Church!
In this book Carroll shows how the narrative around the Jesus movement might have deliberately labeled "the Jews" as the killers of Jesus because the Romans were still in power and no one wanted to run afoul of them. Clearly, the Romans crucified Jesus, but the story down through the ages is that "the Jews killed Jesus." So our "salvation," supposedly won through this terrible suffering of Jesus, somehow makes "the Jews" necessary as the "other" for which Christianity is the remedy. But the Jews are also a threat to the triumph of Jesus-centered salvation because they refuse to convert and accept "the truth" as defined by the Catholic Church.
CONSTANTINE'S POLITICAL AGENDA
In the generations after Jesus' crucifixion, his followers were a small cult within Judaism and only gradually separated themselves from the larger Jewish community. Their main nemesis was the Romans, who had their own religion that deified emperors and was often intolerant of other belief systems. All that changed with Constantine. This emperor, with his throne in the East, accepted Christianity as the state religion that could pull together the disparate parts of the territory he ruled and hoped to rule. His vision of a cross that would lead him to victory in battle and his subsequent triumph in battle on Rome's Milvian Bridge is the stuff of legends.
Constantine's rule as a Christian emperor, with the cross elevated as an important symbol of his power, gave the Catholic Church its opening to create a Catholic Europe, a Holy Roman Empire, as the emperor's subjects accepted the emperor's religion. His mother, Helena, exists in Church lore as the discoverer of the "true cross" of Jesus and also of the "seamless robe," supposedly worn by Jesus as he carried his cross, and later won by a soldier as his persecutors "cast lots" for it. Thus began an era in which the papacy exerted temporal power over the subjects of kings and even the kings themselves.
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE - HOLY TERROR FOR JEWS
It was an era in which representatives of the Church decided who was "in error" and sent its Inquisitors to search out heretics, and mete out harsh punishment, often burning at the stake. The very embodiment of being "in error" were the Jews, who resisted conversion, even when forced to listen to Christian sermons in their synagogues. Jews were barred from many occupations, with banking and money-lending being an exception. Many large cities had ghettoes where Jews had to live. In Spain, the Inquisition took its harshest stand, with forced conversions of large numbers of Jews. That created another problem for the Church, as many of these "conversions" did not really take and that began another war on "Crypto Jews" also called "conversos."
THE CHURCH VS. "MODERNISM
But the power of the Catholic Church was to be challenged during the Reformation when many Catholics joined newly-organized Protestant denominations; the Church's temporal power waned with the loss of the Papal States. Democracy was making itself felt through burgeoning American power. Pope Leo XIII fought "modernism" at the opening of the 20th century and declared "Americanism" a heresy As the century progressed, the Church, which had opposed Communism as "Godless," seemed to have no problem with Fascism and Hitler. Pope Pius XII has been criticized by many (including John Cornwell, in his book, Hitler's Pope) for doing nothing to protect the Jews during the war that put an end to Hitler's regime and revealed the horror of his "final solution" for the Jews.
VATICAN III COUNCIL?
James Carroll makes a plea for a new Vatican Council to undo the damage of the past through a re-examination of Catholic theology. The Jesus who had to die for our salvation should be put aside and the cross should fade into the background as a symbol of Christianity, Carroll tells us. The Jews should be restored as God's chosen, with no supersessionist idea of a New Covenant replacing the old. The infallibility doctrine should be rescinded and an acknowledgement made that there are many paths to God, not just the Catholic Church. That is the plea Carroll makes in this very long and interesting tome.
Since more than ten years have passed since Carroll wrote this book and there has not been a new Vatican Council and an even more hard-line pope than John Paul II sits in the Vatican, I doubt we will see a Vatican III Council. I also disagree with him about the "Holiness of Democracy." It is a mistake to replace Catholic Exceptionalism with American Exceptionalism. I too love my country and feel our founding fathers were the best. Our Democratic system mostly serves us well and I'm glad to see other countries adopting it. But any system can become corrupt and rule of the majority can end up persecuting the minority. Voters can be misled by powerful consortiums, and even Democratic countries can perpetrate evil (how much did the US do to prevent the slaughter of Jews in death camps?).
Freedom to search for God in our own way and to find our own truths is what's at stake. What Catholic power took from us was our ability to exercise our freedom to express our thoughts and feelings and find our own authentic spiritual awareness. Yes, there are many roads to God the Creator, but the Church has insisted only its roadmap is any good. That is what they must see and change…but I don't think the Catholic Church CAN change. I think it will disappear instead.
See also my review of Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell.
Click below to go to amazon.com page for this book:
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History
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