J’accuse

James Carroll was first inspired to write this book when he visited Auschwitz and came upon the cross which Pope John Paul II had planted in a field alongside the eastern wall of the camp during his visit in 1979. The pope had said Mass in this field for a million fellow Poles and had prayed for and to Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun whom he would later canonize as a Christian martyr, even though the Nazis had killed her for being a Jew. The pope also called Auschwitz “the Golgotha of the modern world” and expressed the hope that there would one day be a place of prayer and penance built at the camp to honor the Catholic martyrs and to atone for the murders committed there. In 1984, when Carmelite nuns responded to the pope’s call and moved into the old theater beside the field, where the gas canisters had been stored, Catholics were shocked by the vehement protests of Jewish groups throughout Europe, the United States and Israel, who were appalled that the Church should try to Christianize Auschwitz and claim it as a Christian tragedy. When Carroll visited Auschwitz and saw the cross for himself, his gut reaction was that it did not belong in this place. “Constantine’s Sword” is his attempt to show why.

In part, this is a personal story. Carroll intertwines his own recollections with his history of Catholic-Jewish relations. We read about his childhood friendship with a Jewish boy in Virginia; his teenage years in postwar Germany, where his father had been posted by the Air Force; and the vision that he had of the cross, which helped him to decide to become a Catholic priest. His mother played a crucial role in his young religious life. Together they went on a pilgrimage to holy relics and passion plays in Germany without once considering the role of the Catholic Church in the Shoah. The first seeds of disquiet were sown in Carroll’s mind in 1965 by “The Deputy,” a controversial play by the German Protestant Rolf Hochhuth, who charged Pope Pius XII with a primary responsibility for the Holocaust. This unease was compounded by the ferment of the Vietnam War; Carroll could not help comparing the silence of the American bishops with the earlier fatal silence of the German Catholic bishops. In 1973 at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Carroll acknowledged that it was time for him to leave the priesthood, but he has remained a loyal Catholic, concerned especially with Jewish-Christian reconciliation.

The bulk of the book is concerned with the history of hatred of Jews in the Catholic Church. Carroll goes back to the Gospels, which hold the Jews responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion, but he points out that Jesus and St. Paul, Jesus’ most influential apostle, were both devout Jews who had no intention of breaking away from Israel. What happened, in Carroll’s view, was that the friends and disciples of Jesus, who were trying to make sense of his death in a violent, troubled world, studied their scriptures, sang their psalms and meditated upon biblical texts which seemed to foretell Jesus’ tragedy. His cry from the cross “My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” for example, was “predicted” in Psalm 22; the darkness that fell on the land at the moment of Jesus’ death had been prophesied by Amos. The narratives that resulted from this “grief work” were not intended as historical accounts, but later generations came to regard them as factual. Since it seemed so clear that Jesus “fulfilled” what Christians were beginning to call the “Old Testament,” the fact that Jews seemed unconvinced was disturbing. From a very early date, Carroll believes, the Jewish refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah was seen as a willful rejection of God’s final word to humanity.

The cross, therefore, played a vital role in the conflict technically known as “supercessionism” (from the Latin supersedere: to sit upon), which means that the Church had effectively replaced the Jews as the chosen people of God. The pope’s planting of the cross at Auschwitz was a supremely hurtful instance, but supercessionism is so deeply ingrained in the Christian consciousness that most Catholics could not see this. A key theme in Carroll’s argument is the aggressive role of the cross, which for Christians is a symbol of God’s redemptive love, in the suppression of Jews and Judaism. A decisive moment came in 312 when Constantine, soon to become sole emperor of the whole Roman Empire, had a vision of the cross and heard a heavenly voice saying: “By this sign you will conquer.” Constantine at once, the story goes, converted to Christianity and gave his soldiers a new standard to carry into battle. Eusebius of Caesarea, the historian who was also Constantine’s spiritual advisor, describes the standard: “A long spear, overlaid with gold, formed the figure of the cross by means of a transverse bar laid over it.” The cross had been turned into a lethal weapon.

From this point, Carroll argues, Constantine made the cross more central to Christianity than ever before. He believes that it was crucial to the doctrine of the Incarnation, which was formulated for the first time at the Council of Nicaea, held at Constantine’s insistence in 325. Carroll greatly exaggerates Constantine’s theological influence. He may have forced the bishops to sign a creed at Nicaea to promote the unity of the Church, which he hoped to use to bring cohesion to his vast empire. But Constantine’s interest in and understanding of theology was minimal, to put it kindly. After Nicaea, the bishops went on teaching exactly as they had before, and the controversy about the divine nature of Jesus was not finally resolved for the Western Church until 451 and for the Greek Orthodox Church until the end of the sixth century. The Eastern churches would evolve a quite different Christology from Roman Catholics in the West, in which the cross was of little importance. Nevertheless, there was and continues to be a strong anti-Semitic tradition in Orthodox Christianity, cross or no cross.

But Carroll is certainly right about the lethal role of the cross in the West. The Crusades, which were simply the “wars of the cross,” inspired the first pogroms in Europe in 1096, when a group of German crusaders (not the whole crusading army, as Carroll implies) attacked the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley. That same year Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, wrote his definitive thesis “Cur Deus Homo,” which placed the Crucifixion at the center of the Western Christian vision forever and made the cross indispensable to salvation. Henceforth there could be only one way to God: through the God-man whom the Jews had put to death.

Carroll traces the sorry tale to the present day: the Good Friday pogroms; the accusations that Jews poisoned the wells of Christendom and murdered a Christian child each year at Passover. We follow the Inquisition, directed initially in Spain against the Jewish population, the expulsions of Jews from one city in Europe after another, dwelling particularly on their expulsion from Spain in 1492. We trace the papal edicts which forced the Jews of Europe to wear distinctive clothing and to live separately from Christians. This led to the establishment in many cities of a Jewish ghetto, which Cardinal Edward Cassidy, the head of the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, has called “the antechamber of the Holocaust.” Carroll adds little new to this long history of anti-Semitic hatred and persecution. It is for many a tragically familiar story, but Carroll’s narrative is heartfelt and eloquent. Most important, he writes as a committed Catholic. He cannot be accused of hostility to the Church or of anti-Catholic bias. Carroll understands the reluctance of his fellow Catholics to own up to this terrible legacy because he has made his own painful journey to acknowledgment of his Church’s sins. His book could, therefore, do what the Vatican has signally failed to do: to help Catholics accept the truth, as a first step to repentance.

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When dealing with the controversial issue of Pius XII, who became pontiff as World War II broke out in 1939, Carroll agrees that Hochhuth’s portrait in “The Deputy” is exaggerated, but he refuses to exonerate the pontiff entirely. As papal nuncio to Germany before his accession to the papacy, Eugenio Pacelli was responsible for the concordat of the Vatican and the Nazis, signed in 1933, which was of the utmost importance to Hitler: It immediately disempowered the Catholic Center Party, which was one of the last effective obstacles to his dictatorship. When that same year the Nazis burned Jewish books and boycotted Jewish businesses, Pacelli put in only a timid plea for Jewish converts, whom he called “non-Aryan Catholics.” It was a clear signal that, as far as the German Catholic Church was concerned, the Jews were on their own. When the Germans invaded Rome in September 1945 and attacked the Roman ghetto in October, imprisoning some 1,200 Jews in the Italian Military College a few hundred yards from the Vatican, loading them into the boxcars two days later, there was no word of protest from Pacelli, who was then Pope Pius XII.

The point that Carroll makes is that though it would be inaccurate to say that the Church “caused” the Holocaust, Pius XII’s behavior was entirely consistent with centuries of papal policy. Had it not been for the Church, there would have been no Roman Ghetto, no antechamber which had the Jews conveniently gathered in preparation for the death camps. Yet still the Vatican finds it impossible to admit the guilt of the Church per se. It will condemn only the anti-Semitic sins of individual Catholics and refuses to attach any blame whatsoever to Pius XII. The Vatican seems paralyzed by its cult of power, which always corrupts, but absolute power, like that of the papacy, seems to corrupt absolutely. Even John Paul II, who has done more than any other pope to heal Jewish-Christian relations, appears to feel that sympathy with the Jews will suffice: His official pronouncements are always careful to absolve “the Church as such.” Further, the cause of Pius XII is being considered with a view to his canonization, which undercuts all the positive gestures of John Paul II. If Hochhuth’s portrait is a distortion, the sainting of Pius XII would surely be another that is just as damaging to the truth. What are Catholics, who look to the pope for guidance, and Jews, who are naturally wary of Rome, to make of the fact that the Vatican is also considering the canonization of Pope Pius IX, who approved the forced baptism of Jewish children in the papal states and himself sponsored the kidnapping and christening of a Jewish boy?

The Vatican can continue this unacceptable ambivalence only as long as the Catholic faithful remain ignorant of the fact. This is why Carroll’s book is important. But the book is not perfect. Its chief flaw is that it is far too long. This is not a superficial objection. There is a slim, trenchant volume, expressing Carroll’s main thesis, that is yearning to emerge from this massive tome. The extra verbiage sadly weakens the impact of Carroll’s argument. Carroll is a novelist rather than a historian. The approach that he uses in “Constantine’s Sword” of revisiting the same facts repeatedly, each time from a different angle, and continually shifting the chronological sequence of events works well in fiction, but it becomes confusing in a history of this type, in which--by the very nature of the subject--clarity is of the utmost importance. Within a single chapter, we are likely to be introduced to an important character, such as St. Anselm or Thomas Aquinas; then suddenly find that we have backtracked a couple of centuries; then fast-forwarded to 20th century Catholicism or to Carroll’s own life, before we return to the original subject of the chapter. Readers who are unfamiliar with Church history are likely to find their heads reeling. We return to the same material again and again, rather like a plane circling endlessly before it is able to land, lurching erratically through the clouds, with poor visibility.

It seemed to me that there were three potential books uneasily yoked together in this baggy monster. First there is the history of Jewish-Catholic relations. The second book is Carroll’s personal story. I can see why Carroll wanted to include his own experience in this history. He wants to show that the hatred of Judaism was not confined to a few popes or intellectuals but had a profound effect on the piety of individual Catholics like himself. But the autobiographical passages as they stand have their own fascination, which tend to distract the reader from the central question of the Jews. One becomes intrigued with Carroll himself, especially if one is a European. Carroll’s book is peculiarly North American in its response to these horrors. In Europe we know in our bones that our civilization is old, corrupt and has done unspeakable things in the name of religion and in the name of empire; whichever side we were on during World War II, most of us know that we were all implicated to a degree in the Holocaust. People may not know the facts--though they should certainly learn them--but in general the history of the 20th century has made Christianity impossible for an increasing number of people in Europe. In Britain, for example, only about 8% of the population attend religious services on a regular basis, compared with more than 60% of regular worshipers in the United States. A few fervent Catholics in Britain will balk at the facts recounted in Carroll’s history, but most people will find that it simply confirms their worst suspicions. People in Europe expect very little of their churches, and this weariness is not a healthy state of affairs.

Carroll and I are almost exact contemporaries, but when we were growing up we could have been living on different planets. In Britain our cities were filled with huge mounds of rubble and, despite much nostalgic talk about “our finest hour,” we knew that we had been impoverished by the war and reduced to a second-class power. We were in our own way a defeated people, whereas the young Carroll arrived in occupied Germany as a proud and confident victor. He reminded me of an American character in a Henry James novel who struggles with the decadence of Europe. Throughout the book we sense his shock and dismay that, having come to the New World, an American like himself is still a participant in the crimes of the Old, simply by belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. This difference of perspective is revealing and may throw light on the Vatican’s crippling inability to tell the truth, which could be Rome’s version of this European malaise and lack of faith. As an American, however, Carroll still has hope that, despite everything, something can be done.

The third book that Carroll seems to have been trying to write was an entire history of the Catholic Church. A good deal of the material in “Constantine’s Sword” is not strictly relevant to its declared theme: “The Church and the Jews.” Of course, there is a connection, and one of the strengths of Carroll’s book is to show how this anti-Jewish prejudice infects almost everything, even devotions that Catholics hold dear and which seem on the surface so innocent. We find that familiar and beloved Catholic religious orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, the devotion to our Lady of Lourdes and even the liturgical revival of the 1950s and the “folk Mass” were all tainted by anti-Semitism. But in trying to write a Church history that aspires to be so complete and definitive, Carroll makes the informed reader highly conscious of what he has had perforce to leave out. The Jews were not the Church’s only victims. At the same time as Western crusaders were killing Jews at home, they were massacring Muslims in the Near East; the Muslim inhabitants of Spain were deported in 1492 alongside the Jews. Our Western hatred of Islam developed alongside our anti-Semitism, and the two histories of hatred are deeply interconnected. Similarly women have also been ostracized by the Catholic Church and are faring particularly badly during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. This is not to deny that the fate of the Jews has been uniquely terrible, but to give the impression, as this book inadvertently does, that the Jews have been the Church’s sole victims, is a distortion. Better and more accurate, therefore, to write what is obviously a monologue.

In the last section of Carroll’s book, we seem to enter a utopian fantasy. Carroll calls for a new reformation and a third Vatican Council to complete the work of the second. This council must establish a fresh and unprejudiced reading of the New Testament; divest the Church of all lust for power; lay the foundations for a new Christology, which does not focus so narrowly on the cross; replace the monarchy of the Church with more democratic structures; and lead the Church in a truly Christian repentance. The reader at this point is tempted to say: “Dream on.” It is surely hopeless to expect anything like this from the Vatican. The popes seem unable to move on; they cannot speak the truth; they cannot acknowledge the Church’s culpability toward the Jews; they have not even been able to change the rulings concerning artificial contraception and clerical celibacy; the Church refuses to fully acknowledge the guilt of those many priests who have sexually abused children and women. The present pope seems to have positively medieval views on the status of women.

So it seems absurd for Carroll to expect the Vatican to summon such a Council. But why wait for Rome to act first? Maybe this is a moment when the optimism of the New World can come to the aid of the Old. Carroll is unlikely to change the minds and hearts of the Roman hierarchy, but in grappling with these intractable problems so honestly and openly, Carroll may well encourage other Catholic priests and lay people to do the same and initiate a change from the grass roots.