A Faithful Catholic Indicts His Own Religion

Last year, Pope John Paul II apologized to the Jews for generations of sins against them by Roman Catholics. Now, author James Carroll spells out exactly what those offenses are. They amount to a very substantial, and very troubling, new book. “Constantine’s Sword, the Church and the Jews” (Houghton Mifflin) fills 756 pages with history, biography, critique and proposals for change. Most of the key figures are popes or saints.

It might seem that only a disgruntled ex-Catholic, a Vatican basher or an angry insider would work so hard at such an unflattering portrait. Carroll doesn’t seem to be any of these. A practicing Catholic, an ex-priest who writes an opinion column on social issues for the Boston Globe, he does not come across in print as mean or accusing. In fact, he admits the book was disturbing for him too. “I’m exhausted,” he says in a phone interview from his home in Boston. “The sense of obligation I feel to be a loyal and faithful Catholic after all this is not easy.”

Boston-based Houghton Mifflin has made the book its lead title in the nonfiction category this season and already has printed 50,000 copies (the average serious nonfiction book sells about 5,000 copies). It is a Book of the Month Club alternate, and Carroll is currently visiting 11 cities on a two-month promotion tour.

Major reviews in the New York Times Book Review, Time magazine and the Atlantic Monthly applaud him for taking on the subject and conclude that his story needs to be heard. However, impromptu reviews on Amazon.com, where readers shoot from the hip, are mixed--readers said they found the book thought-provoking, controversial at its best, but also “too wordy,” too personal and, at worst, unbalanced.

Carroll says he was expecting worse. “I think there’s a shoe out there that’s going to drop,” he says. “This is a history the church has tried to deflect for a long time.”

That may be part of its attraction. For a history of religion to get so much attention, it’s got to tell us something we don’t already know. Much of the information in this book will be new to just about anyone who reads it, including Jews who have experienced anti-Semitism. And practically before it hits the bookstores, the book is fanning serious discussion and debate.

“It shows the importance of historical honesty and how long it takes to get to it,” says Arthur Green, a professor of Jewish thought at Brandeis University, where a two-day symposium featuring Carroll’s book begins Monday. “The presentation is relentlessly honest,” Green says. “He’s trying very hard to get past defending the church’s role.”

“It’s a small thing, but I’m grateful for the way Jim Carroll traces the villains and heroes from way back,” says Mary Gordon, a Catholic novelist and nonfiction writer who was part of a fiery panel discussion about the book this month in New York. “I didn’t know there was a pluralist situation.”

The whole history of Christianity plays out on these pages, with an eye for the religious leaders who promoted anti-Semitism, as well as those who opposed it. There were defenders of Jewry: Augustine of Hippo in the 4th century, who wrote of the Jews, “Don’t slay them,” and Bernard of Clairvaux, who in the 11th century condemned violence against the Jews during the Crusades. In modern times, Pope John XXIII made Catholic-Jewish relations a priority on the agenda for a Second Vatican Council, which he called in 1962.

Enemies included the Roman Emperor Constantine, who made Christianity the state religion, and Thomas Aquinas, an essential theologian of the medieval era who blamed the Jewish people for the death of Christ. Pope Paul IV established a Jewish ghetto in Rome in 1555 that remained in place for more than 300 years.

Carroll seems less concerned about pointing fingers than showing how things could have been different. He says the book is his personal examination of conscience, a practice associated with the Catholic sacrament of Reconciliation. “I’ve confronted the sinfulness of the Church, and I see myself as part of it,” he says, adding: “I have a home in this church.”

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Born in Chicago, son of an Air Force general and a devoutly religious mother, Carroll spent five years as a Paulist priest in the early 1970s before his ambitions as a writer led him away. Now 57, he writes novels--most recently, “The City Below” (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)--and nonfiction works along with his newspaper column. His most recent book, “An American Requiem” (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), was a memoir of the Vietnam War and how his antiwar protests tore apart his relationship with his father. The book won the National Book Award.

He includes more of his personal story in the new book, with scenes from childhood and his current life as a husband and the father of two grown children. This autobiographical aspect of “Constantine’s Sword” helps dramatize Carroll’s struggle in facing his own biases, like the time he included the Eucharist as part of a Seder, without realizing he was being offensive.

“I’d been looking for a way to write about the subject for a long time,” he says. At first he planned to turn it into a novel set in the Vatican during World War II. He has published nine novels, and his storytelling skills give “Constantine’s Sword” the tone of a dramatic narrative. The fiction idea didn’t work. “I didn’t know enough of the long history of failure that led to the Holocaust,” he says. “I couldn’t answer the question, ‘How could good people do bad things?’ ”

Two research fellowships from Harvard University and four years of research and writing went into the final version of the book. At Harvard, he studied the New Testament studies and Islam, interviewed professors and taught a course based on his book in progress. Pages of footnotes, an extensive bibliography and a separate chronology in “Constantine’s Sword” anchor the book in scholarship.

Recent news events reassured Carroll that people were finally ready to hear what he had to say. Swiss banks agreed to return millions of dollars to Jewish families whose ancestors were killed in Nazi concentration camps. Art museums have begun to investigate the provenance of works in their collections that might once have been confiscated by the Nazis. “The time is ripe in the broad culture to reckon with the unfinished legacy of the Holocaust,” Carroll says. “That reckoning includes the Catholic Church.”

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While he follows the Catholic thread, he does not mean to be exclusive. “Most of what I argue applies to the Christian Church as a whole,” he says. Martin Luther, the founder of the Lutheran Church in the 16th century, is included in Carroll’s book. In recent years Lutheran leaders have made public apologies for his anti-Semitism.

It is a convoluted history that Carroll sets forth, woven through with personal reflections. But he points out what he believes are the watershed events that led to institutionalized hatred.

The New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all separate out “the Jews” as opponents of Jesus. Carroll quotes from the book of John, Chapter 8: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning.” That is Jesus, speaking to his Jewish opponents. Carroll contests the passage, based on current scholarship that accounts of Jesus’ life were composed decades after his death. “Priests have to be compulsive about preaching against these anti-Jewish texts,” Carroll says.

In the 4th century, Emperor Constantine had a vision of a cross in the sky. It led to his conversion, and the cross became the symbol of Christianity. Christ died on a cross, so blame and revenge seemed justifiable. That attitude, and growing political power, helped launch the Crusades.

“The first mistake was for the followers of Jesus to define themselves against the Jews,” Carroll says. “Constantine imposed the image of the cross with drastic consequences. Violence became an element.”

Augustine saw Jews as witnesses to Old Testament prophesies of the coming of Christ. Not good enough, says Carroll. “That frame of mind about Scripture suggests anti-Semitic thinking,” he argues--it assumes that Judaism is incomplete and not valid on its own.

It would be easy to dismiss these events as irrelevant in the modern world. But all these years later, Jewish author Cynthia Ozick says she has personally experienced their effects. The 72-year-old essayist and short story writer recalls growing up in New York City. “As a kid,” she says, “I was regularly called a ‘Christ killer’ and stoned on my way past the Catholic school in my neighborhood.” Ozick, who was also part of the New York panel discussion about Carroll’s book, called the book “an astonishment.”

Most disturbing, perhaps because it is so recent, is the role of Pope Pius XII, whose relationship with the Nazi regime is still being examined. Eva Fleischner, a retired professor of religious studies who now lives in Claremont, is part of the Vatican committee to investigate the question. “The hope is that scholarship will shed light on Pius XII,” says Fleischner, 75, who will be part of the Brandeis panel on Carroll’s book.

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Fleischner was born in Vienna. At the start of the war, her father, who was half Jewish, took his family out of the country. “Mr. Carroll’s book succeeds by being very evenhanded and accurate,” says Fleischner, who has worked on Holocaust studies for 30 years. “Many Roman Catholics feel we haven’t expressed repentance in a way that has no strings or qualifies attached.” This book shows why it is needed, she says.

In the last chapter, Carroll proposes a Vatican Council that would outline programs for reform. His agenda calls for a repeal of anti-Jewish language from the New Testament, repentance by Catholics for crimes against the Jews and a restructuring of the Church hierarchy. He also calls for the repeal of the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility.

“The myth of absolute virtue for the church is a misunderstanding,” Carroll says. “The good news is, God makes a home among people, not perfect people.”

Eugene Fisher, who oversees Catholic-Jewish dialogue from the office of the U.S. Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., says that some of what Carroll proposes is already happening. Scripture translations have been improved and religious education in Catholic schools has changed. “What my daughter has in her textbooks is very different from what I had,” he says. After 30 years in the field, Fisher finds Catholics to be more aware of the history Carroll writes about. “I used to start a talk by having to define the term ‘Holocaust,’ ” he says. “That doesn’t happen anymore.”

For all the troubling information this book pours into a reader’s lap, Carroll is optimistic that the future can be different. “I really do believe we’re on the verge of a major reform in the church,” he says.

“Carroll’s book isn’t one of anger,” says Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College who will join a panel discussion on the book at Harvard next month.

“He doesn’t reject Roman Catholicism. The book shows how one can be angry at their religious tradition and still love it. Jews will appreciate that.”

In Los Angeles, the Anti-Defamation League will host a panel discussion with James Carroll on Feb. 20. Information: (310) 446-8000.