Constantine's Sword and Papal Sin

Dear Erik,

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As we've both noted, Wills and Carroll are believing, indeed devoted, Catholics. This raises some interesting questions. For example, in the case of the church and its role in the Holocaust, both men go through all sorts of torments and dark nights of the soul--not to mention a great deal of historical and exegetical research--and reluctantly conclude that the failure of Pius XI and Pius XII to confront the Nazis on their persecution of the Jews was connected with anti-Semitism that was deeply woven into the historical, doctrinal, and institutional fabric of the church: "The Jews" killed Christ, rejected the true religion, joined with communists and freemasons to destroy Christianity, and so forth. But to whom, exactly, do these conclusions come as a surprise? Who believes that the Catholic Church was in the forefront of the fight against Hitler--who was never even excommunicated, not that he would have cared? (Compare the fate of Communist Party members, collectively excommunicated by Pius XII in l949.) If Carroll, in particular, had spent some time talking to ordinary Jews of my grandparents' or even my parents' generation--people who grew up before the liberalizing trends of the l960s made anti-Semitism impolite--he could have saved himself a lot of trouble.

Carroll writes as if he were only just now becoming aware of the full extent of Christian anti-Semitism, even in its most banal forms--only now, it seems, does he realize what it meant that his little friend Peter Seligman could not join the country club back in the l950s. (Didn't he ever see Gentleman's Agreement?) Unfortunately for those without an investment in preserving their faith and their relation to the church, the connection of Christianity with anti-Semitism, both as an idea and as a force in history, is an obvious and familiar story.

It's important to have these books today because it's important not to allow the historical record to be rewritten--as when Edith Stein is acclaimed as a Christian martyr when in fact she was murdered for her Jewish origins, not her adopted Catholic faith (indeed, Stein's church employers fired her from her teaching job as a "non-Aryan"). But it's hard for me to share the sense of discovery that animates Carroll in particular. It's a bit as if a Communist in 2001 were to write 700 pages about his growing conviction that, yes, Stalin did have all those people executed and imprisoned.

How essential a feature of Christianity is anti-Semitism in some form? Carroll accepts that the origins of anti-Semitism go back to the New Testament itself, especially the later Gospels, in which responsibility for the Crucifixion is shifted from Rome to "the Jews." He claims that there was no single, unitary Jewish religion at that time--no "the Jews"--but a variety of competing modes of Jewishness: the Temple-focused Sadducees, scholarly Pharisees (from this strand rabbinic Judaism would develop after the destruction of the Temple), ascetic Essenes, anti-Roman Zealots, and so forth. In this context, Christ and the apostles would have been just another tiny band of free-lance enthusiasts, who never for a moment saw themselves as anything but Jews. The second generation of Jesus' followers, however, were already beginning to see themselves as a distinct (though still Jewish) sect. In historical context, what was later read as anti-Jewishness was in fact an "intra-Jewish sectarian dispute" fomented by Rome and exacerbated by the experience of being conquered and massacred and occupied and humiliated by Roman imperial forces. Carroll even speaks of the Jesus movement as "self-hating"--a weird speculation that in effect locates the origins of anti-Semitism in Jewish psychology! Norman Podhoretz would be amused.

Let's say all this is true. What happens to Christianity then? According to Carroll, here is a religion whose foundational texts, the four Gospels, are no longer the word of God, or even of very trustworthy men: They are a tendentious, historically unreliable set of narratives written to advance a Jewish sect in its feud with religious rivals over issues that can barely be discerned today but that have been totally misinterpreted for two thousand years. In other words, there has been virtually no historical moment in which "Christianity" properly understood itself! From the very beginning of its existence as a self-conscious movement, it was on the wrong track.

Carroll thinks that by placing the origins of anti-Semitism in the second generation--the Gospel writers--rather than in Christ and his contemporaries--he has rescued the essence of Christianity. But what do we know of Christ besides what's in the New Testament? And if Christianity has been off the tracks not since Constantine transformed it into the Roman state religion but since Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, what's left?

The thing is, religion is not a form of archeology, it's a social practice--in the case of the Catholic Church, one that has evolved in particular ways over many centuries. Carroll is welcome to rediscover--or invent--a form of Christianity that leaves out the parts he disapproves of, and is, in his view, closer to what he believes--or wishes--Jesus to have had in mind, although how he would know what that was is hard to say. But that religion would not be Catholicism. It might not even be recognizably Christian. It might even be ... Judaism!

Best,
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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