JAMES CARROLL'S new book, Constantine's Sword, is being offered as a potential watershed in Jewish-Christian relations. At the very least, it's sure to provoke controversy. Carroll, a former Catholic priest, has painstakingly examined his church's record on the Jews and found it wanting. Anti-Semitism, he believes, was woven into the fabric of Christianity almost from the beginning, so much so that nothing short of a theological revolution can purge it. Impatient with rationalizations and halfhearted apologies, he is calling for the Church to convene Vatican III to deal with the problem. And since Carroll claims that even modern, secular anti-Semitism has its roots in Christianity, his argument has important implications beyond the Christian fold.
Carroll himself is no stranger to revolution. As a young priest, he became increasingly disillusioned with the Church hierarchy's silence about the Vietnam War. He got involved with religious antiwar protesters such as the Berrigan brothers and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, and also came under the influence of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian and peace activist. While a chaplain at Boston University, Carroll's friendships with Jews led him to try to see his church from the Jewish point of view. After leaving the priesthood, he married, raised a family, and became an acclaimed novelist. He is also the author of a memoir, American Requiem, about his relationship with his father, a devout Catholic and an Air Force general who was involved in the Vietnam War.
I met Carroll recently in the lobby of a midtown hotel for a two-hour conversation about his book. Despite his anger at the Church, he remains a practising Catholic and believes that through understanding and repentance, Christendom can still cleanse itself of the sin of anti-Semitism.


FEED: How did you come to write such a book after having written fiction and memoirs?
JAMES CARROLL: I set out about twelve or thirteen years ago to write a novel set in the Vatican during WWII. I'm a Catholic. I care about the Church. I've been mystified and troubled by the record of the Church's behavior during WWII for my whole adult life. It was a question that I was really interested in pursuing. And so I continued to mull on it, look for a way to write about it, look for a way to think about it. The "it" being basically the Church's failure in relationship to the Holocaust. I really took it on when I was invited to propose an article to The New Yorker about John Paul II, and I proposed an article focused on the problem of the Holocaust, the problem it was for him and what it still is for the Church. I would say I've been working on this problem since I was twenty-two years old.
FEED: The problem that you deal with in the book is really nothing less than the history of anti-Semitism in the Christian world. How did you get from WWII to this broader topic?
CARROLL: Good question. Pope Pius XII [who was pope during WWII] obsesses people. As I put it, the silence of Pius XII is not the crime -- it's the indictment. But once you begin to move back in time, you realize that there is a chain of causality that goes right back through the centuries to the mistake that the first followers of Jesus made when they understood Jesus in opposition to the Jewish people.
FEED: What is the significance of the title, Constantine's Sword?
CARROLL: I would argue that the pivotal moment on which the whole story turns is when Constantine becomes a Christian, and the Church and the Empire become the same thing. The great irony of that, of course, is that the very force that put Jesus to death -- not Jews, but the imperium of the Roman totalitarian system -- was embraced by followers of Jesus and with terrible consequences for Jews. It's really at that point that the Christian slander against Jews becomes fixed. The sword referred to in the title is the Cross. There's a story where Constantine literally has a vision of the Cross the night before a battle. In the myth, it's what makes Constantine a Christian. But for my purposes, the really revealing event is the next morning after the vision, when he instructs his soldiers to transform their spears into the sign of the Cross. And they go into battle behind the sign of the Cross. So suddenly, we begin this movement of violence becoming sacred; it's a deeply corrupting event in the history of the Church.
FEED: A particularly memorable metaphor in the book describes the Cross as becoming like a crosshairs. A sight through which Jews are sighted and singled out for victimization. Can we go back to the time of Jesus and ask what was it that led to this vilification of Jews?
CARROLL: The argument between the followers of Jesus and other kinds of Jews might well have continued as an argument within the various Jewish communities except for something that happens, an accident of history, exactly at the wrong moment: the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, and the outbreak of the Anti-Jewish War. A war that was so violent against the Jewish people -- Josephus says 600,000 or 700,000 in the first phase of the war in A.D. 70, and another 600,000 or 700,000 or 800,000 in the second phase of the war in 130.
FEED: Which makes it the biggest act of violence against Jews other than the Holocaust.
CARROLL: Indeed it does. It's different because, of course, the Final Solution is targeting Jews simply by virtue of their being Jews. The Romans are imposing the inimical Roman power of a totalitarian system, and if the Jews had cooperated with that system, then Romans wouldn't have treated them any worse than they did any of their other captive peoples. But when the Temple was destroyed, the basic fundamental source of Jewish identity, of Jewish worship, went with it, and with the Jews expelled from Jerusalem and Jerusalem closed down as a Jewish city, the dispersal that took place led to a reinvention of Jewish religion all across the board.
This is the beginning of rabbinic Judaism, where the center of Jewish life becomes the synagogue and Torah study. It's the beginning of the imagined Temple as a kind of center of Jewish religious imagination. But it's also the beginning of the new people of Israel who are the Church. This is all happening just at the time when the Gospels and the New Testament are being written down, and the tragedy that takes place here is that, because the identity of Jewish religion is up for grabs, the various sects of Jews begin to compete with each other ferociously for the claim to be the true inheritor of the true Israel. And you see that reflected now in the Gospels.
So there's a lot of inner Jewish sectarian polemic that's reflected in the Gospels, which,  falling on a Jewish ear within the polemic, would have sounded one way, but once it's read from outside the polemic by non-Jewish ears, it becomes something entirely different. That's what happens as more and more non-Jews come into the Christian movement and begin to read these stories without hearing them the way in which they would have been heard by the first people. I mean, it's a little bit like hearing an argument between Jews of Mea Shearim and the secular children of David Ben Gurion. And within the argument no one hears it -- or almost no one hears it -- as anti-Semitic.
FEED: Though Jews are by no means immune to calling each other anti-Semites.
CARROLL: Yes, that's true. But there's the beginning of the problem, and one of the subjects here is the fallibility of human memory. Christians remember the origins of the Christian faith in ways that are not authentic. The most obvious example of that is Christians remember Jesus as if he were not Jewish. And Christians remember the Apostles as if they were not Jewish. The Jew among the Apostles for the Christian is Judas.
FEED: Aptly named.
CARROLL: Aptly named. And, of course, the anti-Jewish stereotypes about concern for money and greed and all of that stuff go right along with the myth of Judas. The truth is that Jesus was a faithful, devout, observant Jew from the beginning to the end of his life. And if he preached a message, it was a message that came right out of the Jewish scriptures. The Christian habit of reading the New Testament over against the Old Testament as a fulfillment of something, so that the New Testament is by definition superior to the Old Testament, that's another example of the denigration that comes into this community at the very beginning. It seems like a long stretch between the year 70 and the year 1939, but, in fact, events set in motion in year 70 culminate, really only reveal themselves, in 1939 through 1944.


FEED: Doesn't modern anti-Semitism differ radically from traditional Christian anti-Semitism by being secular and racialist, and Nazism in particular by being eliminationist, in calling for the total murder of all Jews?
CARROLL: Well, I completely agree that lethal Nazi anti-Semitism is entirely unique. There've been many problems between Christians and Jews down through the centuries, but Hitler did something that nobody else had done. It's not true to say, on the other hand, that Hitler's anti-Semitism sprang whole from the Teutonic forests. The Vatican defensively calls Nazi anti-Semitism "neo-pagan," and has explicitly asserted that it has its roots entirely outside the Christian tradition. They like to distinguish between Nazi anti-Semitism and Christian anti-Judaism, observing rightly that there is a racial component to Nazi anti-Semitism.
But it isn't true that it sprang whole out of kind of the dark pagan forest. Lethal Nazi anti-Semitism has precedents in Christian anti-Judaism. Racial hatred of Jews as opposed to religious hatred of Jews, is very much a phenomenon of the Inquisition, the introduction of so-called blood purity as a definitive note of identity. Where does racial identity begin? You know the irony here is heartbreaking. For centuries, the Church did everything it could do to, quote, convert the Jewish people, with almost no success. Jews steadfastly refused to convert. Until the early 14th, through the 14th century in Iberia where violent pressure brought against Iberian Jews did in fact begin to lead to large numbers of conversions. Jews were given the choice of either dying, losing everything, or converting. And many of them began to convert. But the irony is, when you force people to convert, eventually and inevitably, you begin to suspect that the conversion hasn't really changed them. Which leads them to suspicion, not of Jews, but suspicion of anyone of Jewish heritage. So this is the beginning of racial anti-Semitism, happening at the very dawn of the modern era.
The second, most important thing to observe here is that for centuries Christians had defined the Church against Jews with Jews as the negative other, and that's the way this conflict is usually discussed. What made Nazi anti-Semitism different was that Jews are not just the negative other of the German folk, but Jews are the secret and hidden parasite, the bloodsucking leech attached to the body of the German people, and the justification for elimination was that the parasite had to be violently removed. If that's the character of Nazi hatred of Jews, where does it come from? The converso becoming identified as the secret parasite attached to the body of the Church and having to be eliminated, which is what the violent Inquisition set out to do.
FEED: German Catholics didn't see a great problem or conflict with being Catholics and being Nazis.
CARROLL: To really understand the behavior of Catholics during WWII and in the thirties, it's very important to see it in the context of the way Catholics had behaved in relationship to the oppression of the Church under Bismarck, the so-called Kulturkampf. The reason I say that is because Catholics often argue that the Pope and Catholics generally had no choice, that the power of the Germans overwhelmed any possibility of resistance. Now, it's true that Bismarck wasn't Hitler, but, in 1933, Hitler wasn't Hitler either. The resistance he could have been met with in the 1930s had been demonstrated in the 1880s and 1890s, when German Catholics were called to "passive resistance" by Pope Pius IX. He formally excommunicated any German who would overtly cooperate with the Prussian state in any way.
FEED: Why was that?
CARROLL: Because the new Prussian state that was coming into existence then was trying to clamp down on institutions of Roman Catholicism. The resistance to the Kulturkampf, which went on for almost twenty years, was a powerful act of political and cultural resistance in which the Pope, bishops, and Catholics generally showed themselves willing to risk everything. Bishops were thrown in prison, priests were thrown in prison and expelled. It was a powerful example of what the Church can do when it sees something worth fighting for, and the fact is that Bismarck backed down, and the Church was victorious. By the way, in that period, Roman Catholicism was very supportive of the other oppressed minority in the new Prussian state: the Jews. There were anti-Semitic German Catholics, but, in general, the Roman Catholic center party defended the rights of Jews against the Prussian state. Well, all of that stands in contrast to what happened crucially in 1933 -- when Hitler comes to power, his first bilateral treaty, the Reichskonkordat, is with the Vatican. Before that, Catholics were forbidden to be members of the Nazi Party. Priests were forbidden to give communion to anyone wearing a swastika armband. In 1933, Hitler comes to power in March, and on the first of April, with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, he makes his anti-Jewish campaign very clear, and within days, the Roman Catholic bishops of Germany, following the signal they have from Cardinal Pacelli [later Pope Pius XII], lift the ban on Catholic membership in the Nazi Party. They make it possible for Catholics to come to communion wearing the swastika. It's an appalling contrast to what the Church did in relationship to Bismarck. It's impossible to settle the historical dispute "Could Hitler have been stopped?" But it's certainly clear that the road would not have been nearly as open for him, if the Roman Catholic Church had behaved in '33, in relationship to the German government, the way it behaved through 1872 or '73 through 1887 and '88.
FEED: Is the fact that few Catholic Nazis saw a conflict between their religion and their politics only because of this Reichskonkordat, or is there a deeper reason?
CARROLL: Well, the Reichskonkordat is the symbol of the peace that the Catholic Church made with the Nazi program in 1933. I should not be understood as saying that in '38, '39, '40, there was any friendliness between the Roman Catholic Church and Hitler, who by then had also made clear his intention to stomp out everything that was not prepared to put the Third Reich first, and that included Roman Catholicism. Having said that, it's clear that the Reichskonkordat came out of a commingling of strains in the German character, one could say. In the context of its tradition of a universalist, totalist, absolutist worldview, Roman Catholicism shared a deep sympathy with the German Nazi worldview. The notion of the German Volk had a strange and kind of sad resonance with a Christian mystical notion of the body of the Church. You see this reflective in a movement called Reichs Theology, which was the movement of Roman Catholic theologians who embraced the Nazi idea in the '20s and into the '30s. So there was some deep common resonance that was touched there.
I would insist that the Nazi program was diabolical in ways that were an entire surprise to these people, and they almost all moved away from any such feelings by '37 and '38. But it's crucial to understand the Church failure to confront this mystery of Church sympathy with Nazi absolutism in the '20s and '30s. And just quickly, by the way, I would say that this is one of the reasons I called the Roman Catholic Church -- which is still ambivalent, to the say the least, about basic ideas of liberal democracy -- to account.
FEED: What was the record of the Church during the War?
CARROLL: There are two ways to look at it. One is to look at what the Church did to oppose Hitler, and the record there is very clear. Pius XII is maligned in so many ways, but he was a powerful enemy of Hitler by that time. In 1939, he participated in -- or, let me put it this way -- demonstrated his willingness to participate in a plot to overthrow Hitler in support of the German Army brass who were inclined to overthrow him. But the more telling and important fact of that period is the Church's relationship to the clear Nazi program to eliminate Jews. And in that context, the failure of the Church is total. Now the defense that you hear made about Roman Catholic readiness to support Jews is confusing because there was a Roman Catholic readiness to support Jews, but only a certain kind -- Jews who had been converted to Christianity. There were initiatives taken asking for special consideration to be shown to those of non-Aryan descent, as they were called, who had become Christians. So when you hear people somewhat glibly assert that yes, there was Catholic initiative on behalf of Jews, the question to ask is, "Well, was it really on behalf of Jews?"
FEED: What about Vatican III? What kind of amends can the Church make now?
CARROLL: I did call for a Vatican Council III. Now, no one at the Vatican has asked for my advice on this, and I have to admit in all honesty that I don't think that it's going to happen tomorrow. But I felt obliged, after recounting this long history, to take a position as a Catholic, to say that we're not doomed to this kind of relationship, that if free human choices led to dark outcomes in the past, free human choices can change those outcomes in the future.
Repentance is not just about saying you're sorry. Repentance is about changing the structures and attitudes that led to the offense in the first place. That's why the so-called apologies that we've heard from the Roman Catholic Church up to now are only a beginning of something, not the end of it. I don't denigrate them at all. I think the Pope's expression of apology last year was powerful, especially when he made it so palpable and clear and undeniable by his visit to the Western Wall. But as I say, that's the beginning of something, not the end. What has to happen is the attitudes and structures that have underwritten and caused Christian anti-Judaism down through the centuries have to be redressed.
They go to things as basic as the way we read the scriptures. Do we have to read the Jewish scriptures and the Christian scriptures in tension with each other? Do we have to say that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament? Do we have to say that the Covenant that God made with the people of Israel ended with Jesus? Does that mean that Jewish religion since the life of Jesus is somehow less authentic? Do we have to say that Christian religion, and in particular Catholic religion, is by definition superior to other religions, especially the Jewish religion? These are basic questions that must be addressed, and that's just the beginning of it. There are all kinds of other questions about the way in which the Church exercises power, the kind of authority the Vatican claims for itself and so forth. All of which are tied to the knot of the way in which the Church has thought of itself in relationship to the Jewish people.


FEED: It has been argued -- notably by the British Jewish scholar Hyam Maccoby -- that Christianity has a great deal in common with the pagan mystery religions, with their ritual drama of a killed and resurrected god. In this drama, the so-called sacred executioner, who kills the god, must of course be reviled and punished for his crime, and yet he fulfills a necessary and holy function. Because unless the god dies, he can't bring salvation to the believers. In the Christian version of the drama -- the Crucifixion -- the Jews are the sacred executioner, so they have to be hated but never killed off entirely. They're like Cain; they have a mark on them, and they have to stick around. Which explains why Christianity was anti-Semitic but not eliminationist in its anti-Semitism. In Maccoby's model, it would probably be impossible for Christianity to completely rid itself of anti-Semitism.
CARROLL: In doing this work, I began to realize that this emphasis on the Crucifixion is problematic. This notion that the grotesque death of the Son of God was the only way to change God's attitude toward creation from an attitude of damnation to an attitude of salvation, this suggests such a sadistic and -- well what to say? -- cruel God when one begins to think about it.
But, in fact, the Crucifixion wasn't the main story for the first century-and-a-half of the Church's existence. What's interesting, and this returns us to Constantine, is that the Crucifixion as the central emblem of Christian hope only comes into Christianity with Constantine. Now, it's certainly true that the Crucifixion is central to the Gospels and is a theological linchpin for St. Paul, but only in the context of the larger mystery of the Resurrection. Only in the context of the New Life that comes out of his death, that's where the emphasis is. Constantine was a man who, for reasons of his own, too complicated to go into here, found it necessary to put to death his own son. That happened in the same year that Constantine was insisting on the Cross as the central symbol of Christianity. The Cross, which was a weapon.
FEED: By which a father kills his son.
CARROLL: By which a father kills his son. And it's the same year or within a year of the mythic discovery of the True Cross found by St. Helena, Constantine's mother -- in the story she's led to the remnant of the True Cross in Jerusalem by a Jew. All of this, at the time when Constantine is having to solidify his hold over the Roman Empire. In other words, this powerful symbol of the Cross comes into play in the Christian imagination for contingent historical reasons having little or nothing to do with the proclamation of Jesus. So once you understand that, you can dare to do what is an unthinkable thing in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century, which is to ask Christians to reconsider the centrality of the Cross in the Christian imagination, which is what this book is doing.
A foundational problem for Christians is that the Gospels tell the story of Jesus as a story of conflict between Jesus and his people, the Jews. The Gospel of John begins with the phrase "He came unto his own and his own received him not." There's a way in which the dramatic structure of the story of Jesus depends on the rejection by his own people. And that's made dramatic at the moment of the Crucifixion when we see Pontius Pilate in the story, the Roman procurator, who had authority over the life and death of these captive people. We see Pontius Pilate basically declaring that Jesus is innocent and shouldn't be put to death, and he's overruled by the Jewish people who cry, "Let his blood be upon us and upon our children." Now, it's very, very important for Christians to confront the fact, remember the fact, enshrine the fact that that is not the way it happened.
I think it's important to think historically about our belief and to understand that everything about us as human beings is historical, comes about, that is, through the contingencies, movements, mistakes, acts of freedom that we call history. It's liberating to understand how the Gospels came to be written. It's liberating to understand that there was a period before the Gospels were written when much that we think of as absolute and fixed wasn't absolute and fixed at all. Why is that important? Because the basic questions underlying all of this are: Is Christianity endemically and ontologically and basically anti-Semitic or not? Is Christianity inevitably anti-Jewish, leaving aside the racial aspect of anti-Semitism? Is Christianity inevitably anti-Jewish? If it is, then I and many other people would want nothing to do with it.
The reason to do this work is to understand that, first of all, there is nothing endemic or ontological about Christian hatred of Jews. The basic fact: Jesus, himself,  a Jew to the day he dies, as are his earliest followers. And what we have is a manifestation of a perennial human problem, the way in which people invent a creation story in one generation and then in subsequent generations forget that it's invented. I cite Joyce Carol Oates to that extent, at a certain point in this book, that human beings are the creatures who invent creation stories and then later forget they're created and begin to treat them as given from God. Christians aren't the first ones to do this. This is basically built into the human impulse. The story of Jesus was invented based on certain historical facts. Jesus died. He probably committed something that the Romans regarded as a crime, and he was put to death by the Romans. His death was a trauma to the people who loved him. They were Jews, all Jews. They sat around and did what Jews do. They understood their experience in the light of Torah, in the light of scripture, in the light of the psalms that they would sing, and as they did that, they began to sing certain psalms and read certain passages from the scriptures that told them the meaning of what they had been through with Jesus. And those psalms, scriptures, stories, were attached and elaborated the incidents of what we might call the facts of Jesus' life and death, which is the source of the Gospel stories. The turn that takes place in this history, that makes it destructive, is when a later generation forgets that the Passion story is in this way invented.
FEED: If you follow what you're saying all the way to its conclusion, could it be that your radical Catholicism calls for a return to Jewish practice? If the religion of Jesus himself, the ultimate primitive Christianity, is really Judaism, then shouldn't Catholics essentially be Jews?
CARROLL: Well, history forbids us to ask that question, in a way. I mean, I think the fact is that two religions that have evolved separately are now independent and separate religions and need to respect each other as such. The way you put the question, I think, would have been lively and possible in the first century when it wasn't clear at all that the Jesus movement wouldn't continue to be a form of participation of the people of Israel.
FEED: Messianic Judaism.
CARROLL: Yes, yes. And remember that before the Temple was destroyed, there were -- scholars now tell us there were four or five, maybe even six, identifiable separate strains of Jewish religious practice, all of which understood themselves as of Israel. And the Jesus movement could have continued to understand itself as within the people of Israel. But history didn't go that way, and so I'm not saying now that Christians need to, in effect, Judaize Christianity. Actually, I think it would be somewhat dangerous if we began to do that, especially when there are a billion Roman Catholics and thirteen or fourteen million Jews, one of the ways in which that often manifests itself is that you really, below the surface, are saying, "Well, if we just begin to incorporate Jewish symbols and rituals and language, then the Jews will actually finally come around, and join us in this." I think we need to absolutely affirm that these are radically separate religions and need to be respected as separate.
So I'm not advocating a Jewish Christianity -- Jews for Jesus, and so on, people who basically say we really should be together. I think that history makes that a moot question. The separate integrity of Jewish religion is to be protected and affirmed, and this isn't a Jewish problem. This is a Christian problem. Christianity must rediscover and reclaim its Jewishness -- the authentic relationship to the Jewish Jesus. Because finally what Christianity is, is a way for non-Jews to be part of the Covenant that God made with Israel. So when we read St. Paul talking, for example, about celibacy being better than the married state, in the Christian memory that's turned into a kind of anti-sex puritanism. But that isn't what it was. He was talking about the fact that since history was about to end, there's no need to reproduce. We're the last generation. Marriage is about procreation. Procreation is meaningless now because history is over. I mean, he was in the Jewish tradition of radical apocalypticism. That doesn't make him, as a Christian, different from Jews. That makes him a kind of Jew.

John Dorfman is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Other articles by John Dorfman

Back to Article