Constantine's Sword

4.5 stars

This book is heavy in every conceivable way: its length, its subject matter, its theological articulation. But it's really good, really important, and I really recommend it.

This book is an outsider's point of view in one sense, and an insider's in another. Carroll is, in one way, telling a history of European Jewry, a community to which he does not belong. On the other hand, he's also telling a history of European Christendom, which he knows intimately. I would like to read a similar book written entirely from a Jewish perspective (I'm sure it's out there--I just haven't gone looking yet), but I think it is truly valuable for a lifelong Catholic to at least attempt a reckoning of the Catholic church's antisemitism.

Caroll does not flinch from the Church's culpability in pogroms, ghettos, the Shoah, all the many, many ways in which European Jewry suffered at the hands of Christians in the name of their cross--I almost want to say that 'culpability' is too weak a word here. In fact, he explicitly states that attempts to "exonerate 'the Church as such,' or even to reduce the Church's failure to what it did not do between 1933 and 1945, are so evasive and, finally, immoral." He is saying: "We did this," which is more than the Catholic church (or the Church universal) has ever said. Another example quote: "When 'the Church as such,' as opposed to its 'sinful members,' is absolved of any guilt in relation to Nazism, and when what Christian failures there were are reduced to sins of omission, as if the only crime were silence, then the real meaning of this history is being deflected. However modern Nazism was, it planted its roots in the soil of age-old Church attitudes and a nearly unbroken chain of Church-sponsored acts of Jew hatred. However pagan Nazism was, it drew its substance from groundwater poisoned by the Church's most solemnly held ideology--it's theology." [emphasis in original]

This is certainly a historically-grounded book, but it's as interested in theological history as it is in social and political history. Carroll is explicit in exploring the connections between theology, Catholic teachings, clerical voices, papal positions, etc. on the lived reality of Jewish people in Catholic Europe. This book needed to be written by someone who understood the theology just as much as he understood the history; thankfully, it was. He is unafraid to say, outright, "When you teach [x], it is unsurprising that people will commit [y] act, even if you're telling them not to commit that act." Carroll also frequently contrasts the more mainstream antisemitic Catholic voices with alternative voices that ended up being drowned out by history. (I was particularly taken by his chapter on Abelard.) He is intent upon showing that both theology and history could have gone a different way if only different theology was pursued, and that that different theology was there and ready to be used, but was instead rejected. He ties antisemitism specifically to an obsession with the cross of Jesus as the central focus of Christian theology as opposed to the life of Jesus (or the incarnation, or the resurrection, or anything else); this is a deeply important point, but not one I've seen articulated in any Christian writing I've ever read. (I would not be at all surprised if Jewish writers had written about this at length.)

Another interesting throughline is the relationship between papal authority (culminating in Vatican I and the claim of infallibility) and the pope's relationship with Jews. That was not something I anticipated, and I was surprised to find that it came up again and again. I appreciate also Carroll's perspective as a Catholic who is adamantly opposed to the infallibility claim. Honestly, the book goes into all sorts of directions of Church history and theological development that I would never have anticipated, proving, once again, how deeply tied to everything about Western Christianity antisemitism is.

Carroll's understanding of antisemitism as the original sin of Christendom reminds me very much of the understanding of racism and slavery as the original sins of the United States. The latter is coming to be more and more central to any dialogues about American history; the former, unfortunately, still gets overlooked too much of the time. Carroll sees the antisemitism of (specifically Catholic, European) Christianty as snowballing over the centuries, all of it leading to the Shoah. He is quick to reiterate that this snowballing was not inevitable but that it happened because of a series of choices that Christian leaders made and that the laity (mostly) then acted on.
The last few chapters are dedicated to the intellectual and theological work it would take to drain the antisemitism out of the Church. Carroll envisions a Vatican III (which he's written about in other context elsewhere, including about opening the priesthood to marriage and allowing the ordination of women so obviously I'm a big fan) that would do this work and outlines what areas should be focused on. This section would actually stand on its own outside the context of a book on the Church's antisemitism, but that only goes to prove how deeply-rooted that antisemitism is in the worldview the Church has adopted over the past two thousand years. (I love reading anyone attacking neo-Platonism in Christianity, so I ate this up.)

Carroll also tries, to a limited degree, to trace how Jewish theology reacted to antisemitism. I appreciate that--it's an incredibly interesting topic, and he wants to make sure that readers don't forget that Jewish people weren't just sitting around, passively letting things happen to them--but though he clearly has studied a great deal and draws on a lot of sources, this is one of the weaker parts of the book. That said, he always writes about the Jewish perspective with compassion and respect; in fact, he writes about it so admiringly that it's kind of a wonder to me that he hasn't converted. He seems to have far more respect for Jewish faith traditions than Catholic ones and writes about them very beautifully, if narrowly. (I guess it's the Protestant in me that got to the end of the book and said, "Well, damn, dude, why are you still Catholic???")

Carroll frequently uses his own experiences (mostly as an Army brat growing up in the Rhineland, then as a young Catholic priest) as a frame for the book. This tendency in nonfiction frequently frustrates me (I nearly always find the subject of the book vastly more interesting than the story of how the writer pursued that subject), but I find it less annoying here than usual, probably because Carroll is just such a good writer. I'm torn about its use, though. On the one hand, making the ties between antisemitism and Catholicism explicit through the story of one individual man is fairly effective; on the other hand, the book is already so long that it might have benefited from removing that stuff, just so the text could be shorter and not as intimidating to people. I worry that the sheer length of the book is off-putting and that people will be discouraged from reading it, when I think it's an incredibly important book.

The editor could have been a little more heavy-handed, too. It's a pretty repetitive book in a lot of ways; surely they could have cut out fifty or a hundred pages just of the repeated stuff? On the other hand: that very repetition does a really good job of making the reader realize how ubiquitous this stuff was. How the same actions repeated themselves over and over again. How the story of Christendom's feelings about Jews is indeed one story, whether you're looking at Constantine or at Hitler. It's one seamless robe.

I think this book needs to be paired with books on the topic written by Jewish writers--for all its length, it's insufficient on its own--but I do think it's an invaluable and admirable contribution to a reckoning that needs to happen.