• Introduction
• About the Author
• A Conversation with James Carroll

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"Palaces and emperors, mythologies, ancient enmities, saints and fanatics, killers and plotters come marvelously alive in Carroll’s hands . . . Constantine’s Sword is a triumph, a tragic tale beautifully told, a welcome throwback to an age when history was a branch of literature rather than a narrow academic specialty." —Charles R. Morris, The Atlantic Monthly

"This magisterial work will satisfy Jewish and Christian readers alike, challenging both to a renewed conversation with one another . . . fans of An American Requiem won’t be disappointed." —Publishers Weekly starred review

National Book Award–winner James Carroll confronts the long and dark history of antisemitism in the Church in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Houghton Mifflin; January 10, 2001). From the birth of Jesus to Constantine’s vision of the Cross, from the Crusades to the Inquisition, from the Jewish ghettos to the Dreyfus Affair, Carroll shows that the infamous silence of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust was not an aberration in Church history but a culmination of nearly 2,000 years of entrenched anti-Judaism. This is a serious work of historical research, but Carroll also uses his skills as a novelist and memoirist to recount a past that provoked a crisis in his own faith as a Catholic, and may do as much in any Christian who confronts it honestly. The result is a tragic history laid bare and a demand that the Church finally face this shameful past in full.

Carroll begins his story at the controversial cross at Auschwitz. The rage expressed by Jews all over the world when the cross was erected forced him to question what this most prevalent Christian symbol represented. Was the cross truly memorializing Christians who died at Auschwitz or was it a thinly veiled attempt to steal the legacy of the Shoah and "Christianize" the Jews that were massacred?

Anti-Judaism began to emerge in the gospels, Carroll writes, but it wasn’t until the forth-century when the Emperor Constantine united the remains of the Roman Empire under Christianity that the hatred became institutionalized. The cross became a central Christian icon only now, and only then did the full weight of sacred hatred begin to fall on Jews. Yet even here the story has a powerful positive counter-current, as Carroll shows by describing the decisive intervention on behalf of Jews that St. Augustine made in asserting their right to survive within Christianity.

One of Carroll’s main objectives is to show that antisemitism is not an impersonal force of history, but a consequence of choices made at pivotal moments down through the centuries. Beginning with the First Crusade in 1096, Pope Urban II defines violence as a sacred act; Jews are massacred in the heart of Europe or kill themselves rather than convert. Martin Luther posts his Ninety-Five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517; he defines the Jew as the born enemy of the German Christian. Gian Pietro Caraffa, the Grand Inquisitor himself, becomes Pope Paul IV in 1555; he ratifies blood purity laws and orders the Roman ghetto built. After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Pope Pius VII immediately reestablishes the Roman ghetto whose walls Napoleon had demolished. Hitler comes to power in 1933; his first bilateral treaty is the concordat with the Vatican, negotiated by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would become Pope Pius XII. The facts of history are immutable. What Carroll shows is that one person or event does not lead directly to the Holocaust. Rather, thousands of individual actions over the centuries, all rooted in a religious contempt for Jews, tilled the soil out of which grew the lethal antisemitism of the Nazis.

Carroll points out the instances where this staggering history did not have to be, where roads were not taken, and where heroes were forgotten. Peter Abelard in 1130 insisted that the point of Christ’s life was to exemplify God’s love for all human beings, not to set one against another in the name of a holy superiority. Nicolaus of Cusa in 1453 argued for religious respect, including respect for the Jews, when Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks. Closer to our own time, Bishop Angelo Roncalli personally rescued Jews during the Holocaust, and then, as Pope John XXIII, began to root out antisemitism from the Church. And there are roads to be taken yet, writes Carroll; history is not finished. Pope John Paul II understands this. What he accomplished with the papal apology and his historic visit to the Western Wall in 2000 was a beginning, not an end. This book makes explicit what the pope was apologizing for, and it lays bare how much further the Church must go in its moral reckoning with this past.

Constantine’s Sword shows that the Church’s attitude towards Jews and Judaism is at the dead center of its biggest problems: power, intolerance, suspicion of democracy, and a vision of Jesus Christ that dishonors His faith as a son of Israel. Carroll calls for a Vatican Council III, a true reformation, which will prepare the Church for an authentic and complete act of repentance for the mortal sin of antisemitism in the only way that matters—by ending forever the attitudes, traditions, and structures that made it possible in the first place.

JAMES CARROLL was born in Chicago in 1943 and raised in Washington where his father, an Air Force general, served as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He attended Georgetown University before entering St. Paul’s College, the Paulist Fathers’ seminary in Washington, D.C., where he was graduated with B.A. and M.A. degrees. In 1965 he studied poetry with Allen Tate at the University of Minnesota. He was a Civil Rights worker and community organizer in Washington and New York. In 1969 he was ordained into the priesthood.

The Paulist fathers and Richard Cardinal Cushing assigned Carroll to Boston University, where he served as Catholic Chaplain from 1969 to 1974. During those years he published numerous books on religious subjects and a weekly column in the National Catholic Reporter, which earned him awards from the Catholic Press Association and other organizations. He studied poetry with George Starbuck, and eventually published a book of poems. He remained active in the antiwar movement until the Vietnam War ended.

Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer. In 1974, he was Playwright-in-Residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1976 he published his first novel, Madonna Red, which was translated into seven languages. Since then he has published eight additional novels, including Mortal Friends (1978), Prince of Peace (1984), and The City Below, a New York Times Notable Book of 1994. Carroll writes a weekly op-ed column for the Boston Globe and is an occasional contributor to numerous journals, including The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. His memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us, won several prizes, including the 1996 National Book Award in Nonfiction.

Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on its Committee for International Security Studies. He is member of the council of PEN/New England, of which he served for four years as chair. He has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School, where he remains a Research Associate. Carroll is also a Trustee of the Boston Public Library, and a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University.

He lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Alexandra Marshall, and their two grown children.

Q) You are well known for your novels and your memoir, An American Requiem, but Constantine’s Sword is a very different kind of book. What led you to tackle the history of the Church’s war against Judaism?

A) When I was a seminarian training for the Catholic priesthood in the mid 1960s, I was shocked by the charges leveled at Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church, that both had failed to oppose the Holocaust. Like most Americans, I came slowly into an awareness of the anti-Jewish genocide, but for me that awareness was intimately tied to a new and challenging religious doubt. I came to see that the Church’s failure was rooted, in part, in a long history of Christian contempt for Jews. This was the occasion of a profound crisis of faith for me, and for many years I grappled indirectly with the question of whether Christian faith as such was somehow essentially antisemitic.

When I was a priest serving as a chaplain at Boston University, the question of Jewish-Christian relations assumed major importance for me, and I was actively engaged in interfaith dialogue. The more I learned about the history of the relationship, though, the more troubling it seemed to me. And it did not seem to me that the Church was really facing the true meaning of this question. As a Catholic, I felt obliged to take it up. I was looking for a way both to accomplish a moral reckoning with this history, and to save my faith as a Catholic. This book not only records that struggle, but, in effect, accomplishes it.

Q) The book contains a wealth of historical and religious sources, much of it scholarly—yet this is not an academic book. How does your background qualify you to write this book?

A) My work as a long-time writer of essays, political commentary, and cultural criticism is the ground of my work on this book. I began actively researching it more than ten years ago, at first with a view to writing a novel about the Vatican during World War II. But I soon realized both that the subject would be better treated in nonfiction, and that the scope of the question went far beyond events of the twentieth century.

In 1996, I applied for and received a fellowship at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where I did preliminary research on the Shoah. I wrote a long article for The New Yorker about Pope John Paul II, with a focus on how his evident wish to improve Jewish-Catholic relations is tragically undermined by his inability to fully face the moral failure of his predecessor, Pius XII. I applied for and received a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School. In the academic year 1997–98, I led a seminar at the Divinity School entitled "The Cross at Auschwitz." I lectured on the subject at Harvard, Boston College, the University of California at San Diego, Holy Cross College, and other places. As a Harvard Fellow and Research Associate, I have spent two years doing research and two years writing the book.

As a Harvard Fellow, I participated in the high-level Jewish-Christian theological dialogue at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem in 1998, and again in 2000. Over these four years I traveled, in several trips, to Auschwitz, Germany, Rome, Spain, and Jerusalem, visiting all of the major places where the story of Constantine’s Sword unfolds.

Despite this scholarly work in the classroom, library, and at colloquies, I approach this material more as a novelist and storyteller than as an academic. Otherwise I would not have dared to take on such an enormous canvas, and I would have missed entirely, as many academics do, the broad human implications of this narrowly theological and political conflict.

Q) You focus, in this history, on the Catholic Church. Does this mean you are only writing about Catholics, or about other Christians too?

A) As I explained, I have undertaken this work as a Catholic, and for that reason my concern focuses centrally on the Catholic Church. But not exclusively so. I show how the Protestant tradition participates in the habit of Jew-hatred, both in the Reformation period, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in Lutheran Germany.

But really my subject is Western Civilization itself. Ordinarily, questions of the Holocaust, or of antisemitism, are relegated both by academics and by booksellers to subcategories like "Jewish Studies" or "Religion" or "Holocaust Studies." What sets my book apart from that impulse is its broad concern with culture itself. So while I consider theology (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, etc.) I also consider philosophy (Voltaire, Spinoza), politics (Napoleon, Marx), and art (Michelangelo, El Greco).

This is far more than a "religious" book, much less a merely "Christian" or "Catholic" one; and it is more than a consideration of "Jewish" themes, too. It is about nothing less than the core tragedy of Western Civilization, which is, after all, what became apparent at Auschwitz. Why else do we remain obsessed with that place?

Q) Could you explain the significance of the title, Constantine’s Sword?

A) It was only when Constantine became a Christian, and when the Roman Empire, following him, became Catholic, that the polemical conflict between Christians and Jews became lethal. Now one party to that already ancient dispute—the Church—was armed, and savage violence entered the story. The definitive break between synagogue and church occurs only now.

Constantine had a vision in the sky on the eve of a great battle with his rival for control of Rome. He saw in the sky a cross, and the legend "In this sign, conquer!" He ordered his soldiers to reconfigure their lances and daggers to resemble the sign he saw in the sky, and attacking behind this symbol the next day, Constantine’s soldiers were victorious in battle. But this was a disaster for the religious meaning of Christianity. Constantine had turned the symbol of love into a weapon.

Q) You make the provocative point that the history of the Church prepares the ground for the extermination of Jews in Europe during World War II. Are you saying that the Church directly caused the Holocaust?

A) As the philosophers say, Christian anti-Judaism was a necessary but insufficient cause of the Holocaust. The Holocaust could never have happened without the unprecedented and diabolical character of Hitler and Nazism, but Hitler could never have come as close as he did to annihilating the Jewish people without the long tradition of Christian Jew-hatred on which he built.

The Church is guilty both of not having seriously protested the Nazi war against the Jewish people and of having prepared the ground in European culture from which "eliminationist antisemitism" sprang. These are grave sins. But it is important to insist that the perpetrators of the Holocaust be explicitly identified as such, and they were the decidedly anti-Christian Nazis. They exploited the tradition of Christian contempt for Jews, but they made something wholly new of it, accomplishing an evil of an entirely other order.

Q) What is your reaction to the pope’s recent apology for Church failings and to his visit to the Holy Land? Was this enough to atone for the history of Church anti-Judaism, or must more be done?

A) The apology of John Paul II for anti-Jewish sins of Christians is the beginning of something, not the end. The first requirement was to admit that there has been and is a grave problem between Christians and Jews. That has happened, with the Church mainly acknowledging that the problem is on its own side. Now basic Catholic attitudes toward Scripture, toward Jesus, toward pluralism, and toward the absolute character of the Church’s own claims must be reexamined. It makes no sense, for example, for the Church to say, as it now does, that God’s Covenant with the Jewish people continues to this day, while simultaneously saying that the Jewish religion is somehow incomplete or unfulfilled because it does not honor Jesus Christ as God’s Son. Only in time will such complexities be resolved. John Paul II has set the Church on a path toward such change. Constantine’s Sword is one Catholic’s effort to imagine what that path will look like.

Q) How, after all that you now know about the Church’s profoundly troubling relationship to Judaism, can you remain a Catholic?

A) This story makes very clear what we Catholics stand in need of forgiveness for, but the admission of that need is the beginning. In writing Constantine’s Sword, I have felt a new sense of the Church’s flaws – but that is the point. The Church is an expression of the Biblical faith that God is a God of forgiveness. In seeing how "the Church as such" has sinned, and sinned gravely, I have learned freshly that the Church, too, is human and needs forgiveness. Which is why I, also human, can be at home, needing forgiveness, finally, as a Catholic.