Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews"Carroll, whose love for the Catholic Church . . . is not only matched by a lovingly critical eye. . . but an urgent plea that Rome set another course." -- Boston Globe In this bold and moving book sure to spark heated debate, novelist, cultural critic, and National Book Award-winning author James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic. More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture. The Church's failure to protest the Holocaust -- the infamous "silence" of Pius XII -- is only part of the story: the death camps, Carroll shows, are the culmination of a long, entrenched tradition of anti-Judaism. From Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus on the cross, to Constantine's transformation of the cross into a sword, to the rise of blood libels, scapegoating, and modern anti-Semitism, Carroll reconstructs the dramatic story of the Church's conflict not only with Judaism but with itself. Yet in tracing the arc of this narrative, he implicitly affirms that it did not necessarily have to be so. There were roads not taken, heroes forgotten; new roads can be taken yet. Demanding that the Church finally face this past in full, Carroll calls for a fundamental rethinking of the deepest questions of Christian faith. Only then can Christians, Jews, and all who carry the burden of this history begin to forge a new future. Drawing on his well-known talents as a storyteller and memoirist, and weaving historical research through an intensely personal examination of conscience, Carroll has created a work of singular power and urgency. Constantine's Sword is a brave and affecting reckoning with difficult truths that will touch every reader. |
Contents
Sign of Folly | 3 |
Stumbling Block to Jews | 13 |
The Journey | 19 |
My Mothers Clock | 24 |
Passion Play | 31 |
My Rabbi | 37 |
Between Past and Future | 58 |
My GreatUncle | 67 |
Expulsion in 1492 | 341 |
The Roman Ghetto | 361 |
The Religious Response of the Jews | 383 |
Shema Yisrael | 389 |
Karl Marx Second Son of Trier | 399 |
Spinoza From Rabbis to Revolution | 404 |
Voltaire and the False Promise of Emancipation | 412 |
Jew as Revolutionary Jew as Financier | 424 |
Jesus a Jew? | 71 |
The Threshold Stone | 89 |
Destroy This Temple | 100 |
The Healing Circle | 120 |
Paul the Martyr of Shalom | 133 |
Parting of the Ways | 142 |
The Lachrymose Tradition A Cautionary Note | 148 |
The Heart of This Story Is a Place | 153 |
The Story of Constantine | 163 |
The Cross and the Religious Imagination | 170 |
The Vision of Constantine | 176 |
The True Cross | 193 |
Augustine Trembling | 206 |
The Seamless Robe | 218 |
The Danger of Ambivalence | 227 |
The War of the Cross | 235 |
The Incident in Trier | 244 |
Mainz Anonymous | 255 |
The Blood Libel | 266 |
Anselm Why God Became Man | 276 |
Abelard and Heloise | 288 |
Thomas Aquinas Reason Against the Jews | 299 |
One Road | 311 |
My Inquisition | 317 |
Convivencia to Reconquista | 320 |
ConvertMaking The Failure of Success | 331 |
Revolution in Rome The Popes Jews | 437 |
Alfred Dreyfus and La Croix | 448 |
The Uses of Antisemitism | 462 |
Lucie and Madeleine | 465 |
From Christian AntiJudaism to Eliminationist Antisemitism | 473 |
Setting a Standard The Church Against Bismarck | 477 |
Eugenio Pacelli and the Surrender of German Catholicism | 493 |
The Seamless Robe in 1933 | 499 |
Maria Laach and Reichstheologie | 509 |
Pius XII Last Days of the Roman Ghetto | 521 |
Edith Stein and Catholic Memory | 534 |
The Broad Relevance of Catholic Reform | 545 |
Agenda for a New Reformation | 557 |
Agenda Item 1 AntiJudaism in the New Testament | 559 |
Agenda Item 2 The Church and Power | 568 |
Agenda Item 3 A New Christology | 575 |
Agenda Item 4 The Holiness of Democracy | 586 |
Agenda Item 5 Repentance | 597 |
The Faith of a Catholic | 603 |
Acknowledgments | 617 |
Chronology | 620 |
Notes | 626 |
Bibliography | 694 |
Index | 718 |