Catholic Church - Constantines sword: the church and the Jews. A history

A Mariner Book
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK

First Mariner Books edition 2002

Copyright 2001 by James Carroll
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carroll, James, date.
Constantine's sword : the church and the Jews : a
history / James Carroll.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-395-77927-8 ISBN 0-618-21908-0 (pbk.)
1. Christianity and antisemitismHistory. 2. Catholic
ChurchRelationsJudaism. 3. JudaismRelations
Catholic Church. I. Title.
BM 535. C 37 2001
26l.0'6'09dc21 00-061329

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Robert Overholtzer

QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Portions of this book appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following authors and publishers for kind permission to
reproduce material in this book: The Confessions by Saint Augustine. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin.
Copyright 1961 by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. The City of God by
Saint Augustine. Translated by Henry Bettenson. Copyright O 1972 by Henry Bettenson. Reprinted by
permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Heavenly Powers by Neil Asher Silberman. Copyright 1998 by Neil
Asher Silberman. Reprinted by permission of Grosset and Dunlap (Putnam). Inquisition and Society in
Spam by Henry Kamen. Reprinted by permission of Weidenfeld 8c Nicolson. Marpingen by David
Blackbourn. Reprinted by permission of the author. Toward a Sew Council of Florence by Nicolaus of Cusa.
Translated by William F. Wertz, Ir. Reprinted by permission of the Schiller Institute, Inc. Helena Augusta
by Ian Willem Drijvers. Reprinted with the kind permission of C Koninklijke Brill N.V., Leiden. The
Netherlands. The Jews and the Crusades by Shlomo Eidelberg. Reprinted by permission of the author and
the University of Wisconsin Press. Ideology and Experience by Stephen Wilson. Reprinted by permission of
the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, Oxford, U.K. A Social and Religious History of the Jews by Salo
Wittmayer Baron. Copyright 1969 Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
European Jewry and the First Crusade by Robert Chazen. Copyright 1987 The Regents of the University of
California. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Dreyfus: A Family Affair by Michael Bums. Reprinted
by permission of the author. Hloise and Abelard by tienne Gilson. Copyright 1950, C 1978 by the Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. Reprinted by permission of the copyright owner. Vatican
Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust, 19391943 by John F. Morley. Reprinted by permission of Ktav
Publishing House, Inc.

FOR BILL AND MARGARET
AND FOR DON

For it is the bitter grief of theology and its blessed task, too, always to have to seek (because it does not clearly have present to it at the time) what in a true sensein its historical memoryit has always known ... always providing that one has the courage to ask questions, to be dissatisfied, to think with the mind and heart one actually has, and not with the mind and heart one is supposed to have.

Karl Rahner, S.J.

PART ONE

The Cross at Auschwitz

1. Sign of Folly

2. Stumbling Block to Jews

3. The Journey

4. My Mother's Clock

5. Passion Play

6. My Rabbi

7. Between Past and Future

PART TWO

New Testament Origins of Jew Hatred

8. My Great-Uncle

9. Jesus, a Jew?

10. The Threshold Stone

11. Destroy This Temple

12. The Healing Circle

13. Paul, the Martyr of Shalom

14. Parting of the Ways

15. The Lachrymose Tradition: A Cautionary Note

PART THREE

Constantine, Augustine, and the Jews

16. The Heart of This Story Is a Place

17. The Story of Constantine

18. The Cross and the Religious Imagination

19. The Vision of Constantine

20. The True Cross

21. Augustine Trembling

22. The Seamless Robe

23. The Danger of Ambivalence

PART FOUR

From Crusades to Conversionism

24. The War of the Cross

25. The Incident in Trier

26. Mainz Anonymous

27. The Blood Libel

28. Anselm: Why God Became Man

29. Abelard and Hlose

30. Thomas Aquinas: Reason Against the Jews

PART FIVE

The Inquisition: Enter Racism

31. One Road

32. My Inquisition

33. Convivencia to Reconquista

34. Convert-Making: The Failure of Success

36. The Roman Ghetto

37. The Religious Response of the Jews

38. Shema Yisrael!

PART SIX

Emancipation, Revolution, and a New Fear of Jews

39. Karl Marx, Second Son of Trier

40. Spinoza: From Rabbis to Revolution

41. Voltaire and the False Promise of Emancipation

42. Jew as Revolutionary, Jew as Financier

43. Revolution in Rome: The Pope's Jews

44. Alfred Dreyfus and La Croix

45. The Uses of Antisemitism

46. Lucie and Madeleine

PART SEVEN

The Church and Hitler

47. From Christian Anti-Judaism to Eliminationist Antisemitism

48. Setting a Standard: The Church Against Bismarck

49. Eugenio Pacelli and the Surrender of German Catholicism

50. The Seamless Robe in 1933

51. Maria Laach and Reichstheologie

52. Pius XII: Last Days of the Roman Ghetto

53. Edith Stein and Catholic Memory

PART EIGHT

A Call for Vatican III

54. The Broad Relevance of Catholic Reform

55. Agenda for a New Reformation

56. Agenda Item 1: Anti-Judaism in the New Testament

57. Agenda Item 2: The Church and Power

58. Agenda Item 3: A New Christology

59. Agenda Item 4: The Holiness of Democracy

60. Agenda Item 5: Repentance

Epilogue: The Faith of a Catholic

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

T HE CROSS IS MADE of stout beams, an intersection of railroad ties. It stands in a field of weeds that slopes down from the road. The field is abutted on one side by the old theater, where gas canisters were stored, also looted gold; where, much later, Carmelite nuns accomplished cloistered works of expiation, sparking fury; and where, now, a municipal archive is housed. On another side, the field runs up against the brick wall, the eastern limit of the main camp.

At more than twenty feet, the cross nearly matches the height of the wall, although not the wall's rusted thistle of barbed wire. Immediately beyond are the camp barracks, the peaked roofs visible against the gray morning sky. The nearest building, close enough to hit with a stone thrown from the foot of the cross, is Barracks 13, also known as the death bunker or the starvation bunker. In one of its cells the Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe was martyred. He is now a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Kolbe is the reason for this cross.

In 1979, Karol Wojtyla came home to nearby Krakow as Pope John Paul II. He celebrated Mass in an open field for a million of his countrymen, and on the makeshift altar this same cross had been mountedhence its size, large enough to prompt obeisance from the farthest member of the throng. Visiting the death camp, the pope prayed for and to Father Kolbe, who had voluntarily taken the place of a fellow inmate in the death bunker. The pope prayed for and to Edith Stein, the convert who had also died in the camp, and whom he would declare a Catholic saint in 1998. She was a Carmelite nun known as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, but the Nazis murdered her for being a Jew. In his sermon that day, the pope called Auschwitz the "Golgotha of the modern world."