Constantine's Sword

...Most alarming, their treatment of Jesse Jackson's orderly protests seemed to suggest that any time an African American speaks forcefully about civil rights concerns to other blacks a riot has taken place...

...Carroll does give space to dissenting voices...

...The council must also address the oppression of women, patriarchal autocracy, dishonesty, clericalism, exclusion of the laity in decision making, denominational narcissism, harmful views on sexuality and clerical celibacy, all of which, Carroll believes, stem from the church's theology of the Jewish people...

...The "entire structure of the Gospel narrative," he says, "is unworthy of the story it wants to tell...

...The abbot, according to a speech cited by Carroll, gave his blessing to the "new form of the State...

...But clearly this catalogue of vices is driven by something more than the church's relation to the Jews...

...But some material is less familiar, as for example the discussion of Abbot Ildefons Herwegen of the famous Benedictine monastery of Maria Laach in Germany...

...Its subject is Christian theology tout court and its polemic springs from the currently fashionable "ideology of religious pluralism," what might be termed horror at strong opinions...

...The question of the Jews is only the first item on the agenda...

...The leitmotif of early Christian thought is precisely that the devine Son took on our condition in order that we might share in God's life...

...At Vatican II it would have been easy to transpose Paul's present tense "support" into the past tense, "supported...

...Of even greater theological significance, Nostra aetate cites Saint Paul's words in Romans 11: "If some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches...

...In particular the church must dismantle the Cross (and by that Carroll means "removing the horizontal beam"), banishing it as a symbol of Christian faith, and abandon her belief that Christ is the savior of the world...

...No doubt many of the Catholics who attended were supporters of the Reich, and some were themselves Nazis...

...This council, he says, will be "centrally Catholic," but will also include "Jews and Protestants, people of other faiths and of no faith, clergy and laity and, emphatically women...

...And the new openness of the church to the Jews has led to a dramatic transformation of relations between Jews and Christians...

...Just this last year a group of Jewish thinkers produced a remarkable document the first ever by Jews on Christianity and one that would have been inconceivable before the developments within Christian thinking a generation ago...

...It is this belief, according to Carroll, that is the source of the church's anti24 Semitism, and also the exclusionary creed adopted at Nicaea (because of its assertion that Christ is God), and the triumphalism of Pope Boniface VIII (and John Paul II...

...Carroll forces everything through a very particular sieve, or to use his image, all actions that relate to the Jews are seen through the single lens of "religious hatred...

...It is apparent in Carroll's discussion of Anselm that there is something much deeper at work here than historical explanation...

...There was something frightening about the bullyboy tactics of the imported demonstrators and the consistent liberties that Baker and his surrogates took with the truth...

...Carroll knows about the church's response over the last generation to its dealings with the Jews in the past, but deems it insufficient...

...This mindset seemed to legitimize in29 (Continued from page 29) timidating black voters, doctoring absentee ballot applications in Seneca and Martin Counties, the reckless purging of voter rolls to reduce the number of black voters, and the stonewalling of the Florida secretary of state's office...

...That hardly demonstrates that the "arc" of Christian history "curves from Jesus to the Holocaust...

...In the years leading up to the World War II, resistance of Christian leaders to Nazi ideology was often too little and too late...

...He will not be satisfied until the "foundational assumptions of Christian faith" are challenged...

...With that in mind, we encourage the continuation of recent efforts in Christian theology to repudiate unequivocally contempt of Judaism and the Jewish people...

...Anselm's preoccupation with Christ's death leads Carroll to the unsupported conclusion that the death of Christ became the central saving event in Christianity, thereby making the situation of the Jews even more precarious...

...Titled "A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity," it speaks directly to Carroll's concerns: "Without the long history of Christian anti-Judaism and Christian violence against Jews, Nazi ideology could not have taken hold nor could it have been carried out...

...Which brings me to Carroll's conclusion...

...Carroll tells a familiar and now predictable story (for Pius XII he relies heavily on John Cornwell's discredited Hitler's Pope...

...Too many Christians participated in, or were sympathetic to, Nazi atrocities against Jews...

...If Carroll is genuinely interested in the church and the Jews, he knows that for almost half a century Christian thinkers, church leaders, and catechists have made extraordinary efforts to come to terms with the "teaching of contempt...

...After Bush became president-elect, Rush Limbaugh angrily dismissed suggestions that Republicans should turn away from an "orgy of hate" to seek conciliation and pursue moderation...

...With logic such as this it is pointless to argue over the interpretation of persons or events in the Christian past or present...

...It can only fill the Christian reader with sorrow and shame and a yearning for repentance...

...He noted that it was anger that finally brought the party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress...

...The church must free itself from any claim that "salvation, redemption, grace, perfection" have come in Christ...

...and that the redemption of mankind had to take place as presented in the Gospels...

...We recognize with gratitude those Christians who risked or sacrificed their lives to save Jews during the Nazi regime...

...But granted that the facts are correct, it is not clear what this incident proves except that during the Third Reich Catholics (and other Christians) were complicitous with Nazi authorities...

...The GOP chairperson of one Florida county told the New York Times that "our lives" were at stake...

...But Nazism itself was not an inevitable outcome of Christianity...

...Anselm, an early scholastic theologian (1033-1109), was the author of a famous book, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), in which he argued that Christ's death was a sacrifice offered by God's perfect son to satisfy divine justice...

...The church received the revelation of the Old Testament from the Jewish people, and she "cannot forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree onto which have been engrafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles...

...For too many centuries Christians had grown accustomed to depicting the Jews as inferior, as adherents of a decadent religion, as the killers of Christ...

...One purpose of the council will be for the 25 church to purge itself of the "anti-Jewish consequences of the New Testament...

...In these few lines the council laid to rest "supersessionism," the theological idea that Christianity has replaced Judaism...

...Whether one thinks of the decree Nostra aetate of Vatican II and other Catholic statements over the last two decades, or the various declarations of the World Council of Churches and Protestant denominations, the depth and seriousness of Christian engagement with Judaism and the Jewish people is unprecedented in Christian history...

...In Carroll's brave new world there will be neither Jews nor Christians...

...We applaud those Christians who reject this teaching of contempt, and we do not blame them for the sins committed by their ancestors...

...Christians are guilty for being Christians...

...For the church which "betrayed Jesus in the first generation has been betraying him ever since...

...Other Christians did not protest sufficiently against these atrocities...

...The Jews are the victims par excellence of the excesses of revealed religion...

...What we have then is a rather conventional cultural critique of Christianity...

...In one of the most astonishing sections of the book he singles out Anselm of Canterbury for particular censure...

...But what the decree says is, "draws suste26 nance from the root of that good olive tree...

...The point of Anselm's book was to demonstrate according to philosophical reason, that the Incarnation was necessary (hence "Why did God become man...

...One might have expected, two thousand years later, to read, "drew sustenance" from the Jewish people...

...Last spring the pope led a service of repentance in Rome in which there was a "confession of sins against the people of Israel," and on his journey to Jerusalem last year he made a pilgrimage to the holiest site of the Jews, the Western Wall of the Temple, and deposited this prayer of confession in a crack in the wall...

...In cultural warfare, the stakes seem that great and call for extraordinary exertion that sometimes crosses the bounds of civility and lawfulness...

...Repentance not only requires transforming the church into an egalitarian and democratic institution ("conversation is our hope"), it will mean a thorough revision of Christian belief...

...There is no question that Christian teaching helped create an environment in which Nazi ideology could take root...

...In the words of Saint Athanasius: "He became man that we might become divine...

...At the end of the day, in spite of the enormous effort to lay bare the sins of the church over two millennia, Constantine's Sword is not really a book about Christian theology of the Jews...

...It is a sordid tale and the violence of Christians against Jews in the Middle Ages is a very dark chapter in the church's history...

...Franz von Papen, vice-chancellor of the Reich, was in attendance and the gathering became a celebration of the Reichskonkordat...

...The columns of several highly respected Republican pundits read like James Baker's press statements...

...Any teaching, so the argument goes, that rests on the events in the Gospels, as for example the crucifixion of Christ in Jewish Jerusalem, and claims that in Christ's life, death, and Resurrection God was definitively made known, is incurably anti-Semitic...

...But Nazism was an anti-Christian ideology and something more will be required to draw a direct line from the Gospels to the Final Solution...

...Carroll wants a Christianity that celebrates a "Jesus whose saving act is only disclosure of the divine love available to all," and calls for a pluralism of "belief and worship, of religion and no religion, that honors God by defining God as beyond every human 27 effort to express God...

...Had this book been written fifty years ago it would have been noteworthy...

...But what Carroll forgets is that the Jews too believe in revelation...

...If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you...

...don swift Erie, Pa...

...On the other hand, they uniformly defended the conduct of the congressional staffers and others sent to Florida to stop the recount...

...If the Nazi exterminations of the Jews had been fully successful, it would have turned its murderous rage more directly to Christians...

...Constantine's Sword is behind the curve of history...

...But Carroll seems always to opt for the most malign interpretation and to claim that theological grounds were used to justify whatever Christians did...

...Especially in sermons preached in the later Middle Ages, one can see how old stereotypes of the Jews had deadly consequences...

...These tactics are very effective, but they also damage the fabric of our system...

...For Carroll repentance can only mean renunciation of Christ and of Christian faith, as he puts it, repentance "without Golgotha, redemption or sacrifice...

...no one comes to the Father, but by me...

...The second part of the book is taken up with an extensive description of Christian mistreatment of Jews in the Middle Ages, beginning with the Crusades, then tracing the rise of tales of blood libel, and ending with the forced conversion of Jews during the Inquisition, their expulsion from Spain in 1492, and the establishment of a Jewish ghetto in Rome...

...Coincidentally I read these words two days after hearing the epistle from the Mass on Christmas Eve: "For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men...

...28 (Continued from page 4) passions to win political support...

...What I find most puzzling is Carroll's strained attempt to trace everything back to the Cross...

...He notes that Gregory the Great opposed the forced conversion of Jews, that Bernard of Clairvaux spoke out against attacks on the Jews, and that certain bishops valiantly strove to protect the Jews from the passions of the populace...

...According to Carroll, Herwegen was host to a meeting of Catholic scholars that took place at the monastery in the spring of 1933, shortly after the concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican...

...The final section of the book deals with the Enlightenment, the nineteenthcentury papacy, especially Pius IX, the Dreyfus case in France, German Catholic intellectuals during the rise of Hitler, the reign of Pius XII and the fate of the Jews during World War II, etc...

...The politics of resentment created something almost akin to what Adorno called the authoritarian personality...

...But its message has been heard, digested, and acted upon...

...If Christians, on the basis of the Scriptures and Christian tradition, cannot confess Jesus as Lord, can the Jews, on the basis of the Scriptures and Jewish tradition, claim that they are the elect people of God...

...The church's failure to denounce publicly or privately early Nazi violence aimed at Jews...is rooted in the church's own antiSemitism...

...In 1980 Pope John Paul II made a historic visit to the Jewish synagogue of Rome where he called the Jews "our dearly beloved brothers," and on his visit to Germany in 1980 he said that the covenant with the people of God is "never revoked by God...

...It is thus of great significance that when Nostra aetate paraphrases Paul's words it retains the present tense...

...Salvation was possible only through the work of one who was at once true God and true man...

...Unfortunately, there was no way to verify this report since Carroll bases his account on an unpublished lecture delivered in Poland three years ago...

...Titus 2:11...

...That is really the message of this book, and in an interlude Carroll illustrates the problem with the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life...

...He proposes the convening of a Vatican Council HI...

...Pusillanimity there certainly was and moral myopia and misguided nationalism, but nothing that gives evidence of theological anti-Semitism...