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Falling on Constatine's Sword By Msgr. George G. Higgins The Yardstick March 12, 2001 Readers who think they will learn something significant about the present or the future of the church from “Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews,” by James Carroll (Houghton-Mifflin, 2001), are seriously misled. While there is some good writing in the middle, the book, from a scholarly point of view, begins badly and ends badly. In both cases the reason lies in injudicious reliance on one or two sources where the author needed to study many more. In the book's early part, for example, Carroll allows the work of the Jesus Seminar (which doubts there is much, if anything, authentically historical about Jesus in the New Testament) to frame his understanding. Carroll's goal here is laudable. He wishes to cleanse Christian understanding of the New Testament of the barnacles of polemics encrusted onto it over the centuries, beginning, as Pope John Paul II has said, as early as the second-century church fathers. But one does not need to follow the destructive path of the Jesus Seminar to accomplish this goal, as anyone who has studied the works of the late renowned Scripture scholar Father Raymond Brown will know. As for the middle of the book, its best part, Professor Robert Wilken's devastating critique in Commonweal (Jan. 26) exposes errors of historical fact and theological understanding too numerous to mention in a short column. Since Wilken, unlike Carroll, is a professional historian who himself has written seminal works on anti-Jewish polemics in the church fathers, I am inclined to go along with his assessment of the essential unreliability of Carroll's book as history. If Carroll's history is off, so must be his interpretation, which finds its novelistic climax in what he sees both as the church's great moral failure during World War II and its continuing failure to confront its own sins in Vatican Council II and especially in the present (for him) failed pontificate. According to Carroll, little has been done to implement in the church's life the great vision of the council, certainly not in Jewish-Catholic relations. He seems blissfully -- but, in my opinion, inexcusably -- unaware of the vast array of statements by the Vatican, by bishops' conferences and by local bishops throughout the world. It's as if the past 35 years of Catholic history never happened. Perhaps for him, to judge by the interwoven personal narration that mars the book, almost nothing has happened since shortly after the council when he left the priesthood to take up the quite honorable callings of novelist and journalist. Carroll acknowledges briefly that there have been changes in Catholic textbooks, but he seems completely unaware of how profound those changes have been. Philip Cunningham, whose 1992 doctoral dissertation for Boston College analyzed Catholic teaching materials, concluded that the ancient “teaching of contempt” could not be reconstructed today from post-Vatican II textbooks. Contrary to Carroll, the council's 1965 statement on the Jews has indeed been extremely effective in bringing about the change in church teaching that it mandated. But Carroll seems to need Vatican II to have failed, since he desperately wants to call Vatican III. (Here, the old adage of being careful of what one prays for comes to mind.) He has five points on his agenda. The second and fourth would, indeed, take a council to achieve, since they involve drastically restructuring the church itself. The first, third and fifth, which deal with Jewish-Christian relations, are already well on the way toward implementation and have been a formal part of the efforts of the U.S. bishops' Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs since it was established by the bishops immediately after the council. Papal Social EncyclicalsOther Catholic Social TeachingsGeneral Articles of InterestCatholic Worker Connection Msgr. George HigginsHome Page E-Mail: Fr. Sinclair Oubre