Is "Constantine's Sword" Worth All the Hype? By: Msgr. George Higgins

James Carroll's book, “Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews” (Haughton-Mifflin, 2001), has been launched with a full-scale publicity campaign. Is it worth the hype? Let me put this gently. The book Carroll wanted to and perhaps should have written was written 35 years ago and much better by my late friend and colleague, Father Edward Flannery. It aptly was called “The Anguish of the Jews” (Macmillan, 1965).

Whereas Father Flannery stuck to his topic, however, Carroll tries to make Jewish-Christian relations over the centuries the paradigm for all of church history and all the evils he still sees rampant in today's church. I agree that the sad, sinful mistreatment of Jews over the centuries must be confronted and that the theological polemics directed against the Jews negatively affected not only Jewish history but Christian self-understanding. But to reduce all of those 2,000 years to this one symbolic referent is a bit of a stretch.

In his jubilee year liturgy of repentance in St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John Paul II included the anti-Jewish history of the church as one of seven major categories for repentance. But there were six other no-less-central millennial sins. Carroll is a master storyteller. His description of the massacre of thousands of Jews by a leaderless mob who missed the First Crusade and tried to straggle after it, killing all the Jews found on the way, is riveting, as is his narration of the Dreyfus affair in the late 19th century. And the links he finds between such archetypal events and Christian anti-Judaism are by no means strained.

Carroll is right, too, in his central thesis that the church's attitude toward Judaism has been “ambivalent” from the start. This ambivalence, at once theologically polemical and pastorally protective, explains why Judaism alone, of all the religions in the Roman world at the time of Constantine, was given a legal place in Christendom and allowed to survive. It also explains Christian society's increasing oppressiveness toward Jews following the heinous events attendant upon the First Crusade, which were condemned by the pope and against which St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached vigorously, as Carroll acknowledges.

Carroll is a novelist, not a historian. His book has the architecture, in many ways, of a novel, complete with overarching and recurring symbols, especially Constantine's sword turned into a cross, with the result that the Christian cross, in Carroll's view, ultimately became for the Jews a sword, an instrument of murder, not of expiation for the guilt of the sins of humanity. Indeed, so much freight is placed on the cross that in the disastrous last portion of his book Carroll can calmly call the cross placed on the grounds of the now-closed convent just outside of Auschwitz not merely insensitive (as indeed it was and is) but “blasphemous.”

In so many places, for example in condemning Pius XII not simply for being “silent” (a word that itself has little justification in historical fact) but “complicit” with Nazism in the Holocaust, Carroll's pen simply gets the better of his judgment. Likewise the novelist's convention of introspection often muddies Carroll's interpretation.

Carroll, in this book as in some earlier writings, is almost obsessively self-referential. For example, he seems to believe that the entire 2,000-year history of Jewish-Catholic relations can be encapsulated in his own failed relationship with his father, to which he keeps coming back. A projection of the author's own personal struggles into the landscape of history can work in a novel or play but is of little if any help to a reader trying to make sense of the history of Jewish-Catholic relations.

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Is "Constantine's Sword" Worth the Hype?

By Msgr. George G. Higgins

The Yardstick

February 26, 2001