Constantine's Sword and Papal Sin

Dear Erik,

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Garry Wills' Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit and James Carroll's Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews explore the same dark subject: the Roman Catholic Church's response, or lack thereof, to Hitler and the Holocaust. Carroll's book is a 700-page loose baggy monster--a historical investigation of Christian anti-Semitism intertwined with his own autobiographical ramblings. Wills' book is a terse, devastating polemic charging the church with self-serving and self-protective dishonesty in a number of areas: Its failure to acknowledge the full record of its anti-Semitism and its passivity as the Jews of Europe were systematically murdered is his leading example, but he sees this as of a piece with the church's defensive and (he claims) nonscripturally based ban on homosexuality, women's ordination, contraception, abortion, and divorce--all in the service, he thinks, of preserving the papacy's hold on doctrine and power. Interestingly, the two authors have much in common. Carroll was a Liberation-theology Catholic priest for five years until he left over the American church's failure to oppose the war in Vietnam; Wills spent time in a seminary. Both men are prolific, fluent writers of books and articles--Wills for the New York Review of Books, Carroll for the Boston Globe. And both, despite their sweeping critiques of the institutional church and certain (rather major!) elements of the Christian tradition, profess themselves to be profoundly devout Catholics interested only in recalling their beloved church to Christ's real message. The books offer very different experiences to the reader. Carroll's is intermittently fascinating--he's done a tremendous amount of reading, traveling, and interviewing--but also long-winded, digressive, self-indulgent, and poorly organized. Let's hope the published book has an index, unlike the galleys! Wills', by contrast, is logical, blazingly clear, and authoritative. Taken together, they make quite a case.

In l965, the second Vatican Council formally retracted the age-old charge of deicide against the Jews. Apparently they (we? I? you?) did not "kill Christ" after all, a charge with which Jews had been saddled by, among others, St. John Chrysostom, who was a fifth-century master of sermons "contra Judaeos"--a whole literary genre, imagine!--and who is to this day revered as a doctor of the church and is the patron saint of preachers. Since that retraction, church policy toward Jews and Judaism has been marked by a series of "well-intentioned" gestures that manage to disturb and anger many Jews because they seem in one way or another to re-enact the original offense. Pope John Paul II, whom no one accuses of personal anti-Semitism--quite the contrary--seems particularly insensitive here. Just a few months ago, he canonized 19^th-century Pope Pius IX, who besides condemning just about every feature of the emerging modern world, from labor unions to democracy, re-ghettoized the Jews of Rome and forcibly removed from its parents--and never returned--a Jewish child who had been (maybe) secretly baptized by a servant. John Paul II canonized Maximilian Kolbe--a Polish priest who heroically volunteered to die in place of another Auschwitz prisoner but who also happened to be an aggressive and notorious anti-Semite in l930s Poland, when such views were anything but academic. (Specifically Kolbe believed in the protocols of the Elders of Zion, a czarist forgery still popular among conspiracy nuts, which claimed to show that a worldwide Jewish cabal ran the world, and he believed that Jews, communists, and freemasons were out to destroy Christianity). Then, in l998 the pope canonized Edith Stein, a brilliant German Jewish philosopher who became a Carmelite nun and was sent to Auschwitz when the Nazis rounded up converted Jews. To the pope, Stein was a Catholic martyr--but Stein was clearly murdered as a Jew, which was for Hitler a racial as well as a religious category. Wills is at his calm but slashing best in recounting the way the rules of canonization were bent for Stein, culminating in a suspect "miracle": A little girl, who just happened to be named for Stein by her Stein-devoted parents, recovered after a Tylenol overdose--as happens in 99 percent of such cases, her (Jewish) doctor testified to no avail.

The point of the Stein canonization, both writers argue, is to reframe the Holocaust as an attack on Catholicism, to make Catholics co-victims with Jews. That is the meaning of the convents and crosses erected at Auschwitz and Dachau--another flash point for many Jews, who do not want to be prayed for now by the very church that failed to come to their aid. Further exacerbating matters is the possible beatification of Pius XII, who as pope during World War II was famously silent.

It's funny, Erik. I'm not religious, I don't have a big sense of Jewish ethnic identity (my mother was Jewish; my father is Protestant), but I find I can hardly write, I am so appalled and offended by the story these books tell. The idea that Jews are supposed to be glad, or grateful, or even feel justly exonerated and triumphant, that after 1,500 years or more, after countless pogroms and massacres and exiles and all the rest of it, the church decided "the Jews" are not collectively responsible for the Crucifixion! Not only is that a pretty big thing to have gotten wrong all these years, even the retraction is an unjust assertion of a nonexistent authority.

My sweetie is planning to have a T-shirt made up for me that reads "I killed Christ ... ask me why." Should he order one for you, too?

Katha

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Is the Catholic Church anti-Semitic? This week our critics examine James Carroll's Constantine's Sword and Garry Wills' Papal Sin.

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