Synopses & Reviews
“The Inquisition is a dark mark in the history of the Catholic Church. But it was not the first inquisition nor the last, as Cullen Murphy shows in this far-ranging, informed, and (dare one say?) witty account of its reach down to our own time, in worldly affairs more than ecclesiastical ones.” — Margaret OBrien Steinfels, former editor,
CommonwealThe Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826 — the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.
Gods Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews — and with burning at the stake — its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and “scientific” interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantánamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy.
With the combination of vivid immediacy and learned analysis that characterized his acclaimed Are We Rome?, Murphy puts a human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.
Review
"A deeply religious book written at levels of understanding and with clarity of insights rarely if ever reached in the telling of this painful story." Bishop Krister Stendahl, former dean, Harvard Divinity School
Review
"How can one categorize Constantine's Sword? It is in part a memoir of an American Catholic of a particular generation, a self-confessed 'lefty' whose political and spiritual awakening came during the Vietnam War. It is also a history of the long and bitter fruits of the schism among Jews two millenniums ago about the meaning of eschatology, messianism and faith itself the schism that finds its origin in the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth. And it is a book of a deeper sort a rigorous theological and moral dialectic that Carroll, the author of An American Requiem, never removes from the personal necessity of choice, for good over evil, for memory over denial and for love over power....The story is strong because it is framed within Carroll's own personal story..." From New York Times Book Review
Review
"James Carroll's Constantine's Sword is an astonishing work of historical research that sweeps you up in the scenes of revelation that open, one upon the other, to explore the Church's role in anti-Semitism, a tale that has been told, at best, by halves before this. To read this book is a thrilling experience. It reveals unhappy truths about Catholicism in a profoundly Catholic way. Carroll is a man who loves his faith but loves truth, too. He tells a story that every Christian must read and every Catholic must sense as an expression of a new consciousness of what it means to be a Christian Catholic." Eugene Kennedy
Review
"This book is a history written to change the way people live."--Talk
Review
"A deeply religious book."--Bishop Krister Stendahl, former Dean of Harvard Divinity School
Review
"A triumph, a tragic tale beautifully told. . .a welcome throwback to an age when history was a branch of literature. . ."--Charles R. Morris
Review
"Fascinating, brave and sometimes infuriating."
Review
"For two thousand years Jews have been longing for a Christian who would understand their experience."--Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
Review
"Whatever the solution, in the end, unsderstanding the conflict is half the battle. It's a battle Carroll wins in this historical tome." Boston Magazine
"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
"A triumph, a tragic tale beautifully told. . .a welcome throwback to an age when history was a branch of literature. . ."--Charles R. Morris Atlantic Monthly
"Fascinating, brave and sometimes infuriating." Time Magazine
"This searingly honest book is Augustinian in the way Carroll searches his own soul. . ."--Garry Wills, author of Saint Augustine and Papal Sin
"This book is a history written to change the way people live."--Talk
"A deeply religious book."--Bishop Krister Stendahl, former Dean of Harvard Divinity School
"For two thousand years Jews have been longing for a Christian who would understand their experience."--Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
"Sweeping. . . This magisterial work will satisfy Jewish and Christian readers alike, challenging both to a renewed conversation." Publishers Weekly, Starred
Review
"In his typically compelling style.....Murphy powerfully shows that the impulse to inquisition can quietly take root in any system—civil or religious—that orders our lives." --
Publishers Weekly "Entertaining, lively chronicle of the Inquisition, touching on a wide variety of issues across the centuries." --
Kirkus Reviews "Cullen Murphy's account of the Inquisition is a dark but riveting tale, told with luminous grace. The Inquisition, he shows us, represents more than a historical episode of religious persecution. The drive to root out heresy and sin, once and for all, is emblematic of the modern age and a persisting danger in our time."
--Michael J. Sandel, author of Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
"From Torquemada to Guantanamo and beyond, Cullen Murphy finds the 'inquisorial Impulse' alive, and only too well, in our world. His engaging romp through the secret Vatican archives shows that the distance between the Dark Ages and Modernity is shockingly short. Who knew that reading about torture could be so entertaining?"
--Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side.
"God's Jury is a reminder, and we need to be constantly reminded, that the most dangerous people in the world are the righteous, and when they wield real power, look out. At once global and chillingly intimate in its reach, the Inquisition turns out to have been both more and less awful than we thought. Murphy wears his erudition lightly, writes with quiet wit, and has a delightful way of seeing the past in the present."
--Mark Bowden, author of Guest of the Ayatollah
"When virtue arms itself - beware! Lucid, scholarly, elegantly told, Gods Jury is as gripping as it is important."
--James Carroll, author of Jerusalem, Jerusalem
"There will never be a finer example of erudition, worn lightly and wittily, than this book. As he did in Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy manages to instruct, surprise, charm, and amuse in his history of ancient matters deftly connected to the present."
--James Fallows, National Correspondent for The Atlantic
"The Inquisition is a dark mark in the history of the Catholic Church. But it was not the first inquisition nor the last as Cullen Murphy shows in this far-ranging, informed, and (dare one say?) witty account of its reach down to our own time in worldly affairs more than ecclesiastical ones."
-- Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, former editor, Commonweal
Synopsis
In a book that is sure to spark heated debate, the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the 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 Jews 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.
Synopsis
“A rare book that combines searing passion with a subject that has affected all of our lives.”—Chicago Tribune
Novelist, cultural critic, and former priest James Carroll marries history with memoir as he maps the two-thousand-year course of the Churchs battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has sparked in his own life. “Fascinating, brave, and sometimes infuriating” (Time), this dark history is more than a chronicle of religion. It is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture to create “a deeply felt work” (San Francisco Chronicle) as Carroll wrangles with centuries of strife and tragedy to reach a courageous and affecting reckoning with difficult truths.
Synopsis
A narrative history of the Inquisition, and an examination of the influence it exerted on contemporary society, by the author of ARE WE ROME?
About the Author
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. Carroll attended Georgetown University before entering the seminary to train for the Catholic priesthood. He received BA and MA degrees from St. Paul's College, the Paulist Fathers'seminary in Washington, and was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1969. Carroll served as Catholic Chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974 and then left the priesthood to become a writer.In 1974 Carroll was Playwright-in-Residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, MA. In 1976 he published his first novel, Madonna Red, which was translated into seven languages. Since then he has published nine additional novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Mortal Friends (1978), Family Trade (1982), and Prince of Peace (1984). His novels The City Below (1994) and Secret Father (2003) were named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Carroll's essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Daedalus, and other publications. His op-ed page column has run weekly in the Boston Globe since 1992.Carroll's memoir, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us, received the 1996 National Book Award in nonfiction and other awards. His book Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, published in 2001, was a New York Times bestseller and was honored as one of the Best Books of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and others. It was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and won the Melcher Book Award, the James Parks Morton Interfaith Award, and National Jewish Book Award in History. Responding to the Catholic sex abuse crisis in 2002, Carroll published Toward A New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform. In 2004 he published Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, adapted from his Boston Globe columns since 9/11. In May 2005, he published House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power, a history of the Pentagon, which the Chicago Tribune called "the first great non-fiction book of the new millennium."Carroll is a regular participant in on-going Jewish-Christian-Muslim encounters at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Carroll is a member of the Council of PEN-New England, which he chaired for four years. 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. He is a trustee of the Boston Public Library, a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University, and a member of the Dean's Council at the Harvard Divinity School. Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University.James Carroll lives in Boston with his wife, the novelist Alexandra Marshall. They have two grown children.
Table of Contents
Contents Part one The Cross at Auschwitz 1. Sign of Folly 3 2. Stumbling Block to Jews 13 3. The Journey 19 4. My Motherand#8217;s Clock 24 5. Passion Play 31 6. My Rabbi 37 7. Between Past and Future 58 Part two New Testament Origins of Jew Hatred 8. My Great-Uncle 67 9. Jesus, a Jew? 71 10. The Threshold Stone 89 11. Destroy This Temple 100 12. The Healing Circle 122 13. Paul, the Martyr of Shalom 135 14. Parting of the Ways 144 15. The Lachrymose Tradition: A Cautionary Note 150 Part three Constantine, Augustine, and the Jews 16. The Heart of This Story Is a Place 155 17. The Story of Constantine 165 18. The Cross and the Religious Imagination 172 19. The Vision of Constantine 178 20. The True Cross 195 21. Augustine Trembling 208 22. The Seamless Robe 220 23. The Danger of Ambivalence 229 Part four From Crusades to Conversionism 24. The War of the Cross 237 25. The Incident in Trier 246 26. Mainz Anonymous 257 27. The Blood Libel 268 28. Anselm: Why God Became Man 278 29. Abelard and Hand#233;lodse 290 30. Thomas Aquinas: Reason Against the Jews 301 Part five The Inquisition: Enter Racism 31. One Road 313 32. My Inquisition 319 33. Convivencia to Reconquista 322 34. Convert-Making: The Failure of Success 333 35. Expulsion in 1492 343 36. The Roman Ghetto 363 37. The Religious Response of the Jews 385 38. Shema Yisrael! 391 Part six Emancipation, Revolution, and a New Fear of Jews 39. Karl Marx, Second Son of Trier 401 40. Spinoza: From Rabbis to Revolution 406 41. Voltaire and the False Promise of Emancipation 414 42. Jew as Revolutionary, Jew as Financier 426 43. Revolution in Rome: The Popeand#8217;s Jews 439 44. Alfred Dreyfus and La Croix 450 45. The Uses of Antisemitism 464 46. Lucie and Madeleine 467 Part seven The Church and Hitler 47. From Christian Anti-Judaism to Eliminationist Antisemitism 475 48. Setting a Standard: The Church Against Bismarck 479 49. Eugenio Pacelli and the Surrender of German Catholicism 495 50. The Seamless Robe in 1933 501 51. Maria Laach and Reichstheologie 511 52. Pius XII: Last Days of the Roman Ghetto 523 53. Edith Stein and Catholic Memory 536
Part eight A Call for Vatican III 54. The Broad Relevance of Catholic Reform 547 55. Agenda for a New Reformation 559 56. Agenda Item 1: Anti-Judaism in the New Testament 561 57. Agenda Item 2: The Church and Power 570 58. Agenda Item 3: A New Christology 577 59. Agenda Item 4: The Holiness of Democracy 588 60. Agenda Item 5: Repentance 599 Epilogue: The Faith of a Catholic 605 Acknowledgments 619 Chronology 622 Notes 628 Bibliography 696 Index 720
Reading Group Guide
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. "Here is the question a Christian must ask," Carroll insists. "Does our assumption about the redemptive meaning of suffering, tied to the triumph of Jesus Christ and applied to the Shoah, inevitably turn every effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust into a claim to be the masters of Jews in the other world?" Why must a Christian confront this question? How do you answer that question? How does Carroll answer it?
2. "The Shoah throws many things into relief," Carroll writes; "the human capacity for depravity, the cost of ethnic absolutism, the final inadequacy both of religious language and of silence. But it also highlights the imprisonment of even well-meaning Christians inside the categories with which we approach death and sin. Christian faith can seem to triumph over every evil except Christian triumphalism." What does Carroll mean by the phrase "Christian triumphalism"? How does Christian triumphalism relate to the first two sentences of this quotation?
3. "The Final Solution was a contradiction of everything Christianity stands for," Carroll declares. Yet one of the main arguments of his book is that Christianity was a determining factor in the Shoah. What connections between Christian history and the Shoah does Carroll identify and emphasize? To what extent is he justified, or not, in insisting upon a connective relationship as opposed to a causative relationship?
4. Carroll straightforwardly states, "I presume to measure the sweep of history against the scope of my own memory." How acceptable or unacceptable is this presumption? What are the advantages and drawbacks of writing history through the prism of individual conscience and memory? Does Carroll's acknowledgment of his "limited ability to represent the Jewish side" of the history of the Jewish-Catholic conflict compromise his arguments and presentation?
5. "The monstrous question," which Carroll directs to all Western Christians, "is How could you have not cared that the Nazis prepared to murder, and then did murder, the Jews in front of you? How could that murder not have been experienced as directly involving you? And finally, when the roundups and deportations and transports began
, when the killing of Jews replaced the war effort as Hitler's main purpose, why did you not see that your passivity had effectively become collaboration?" How do you answer these questions? How do you answer Cynthia Ozick's apposite question, quoted by Carroll: "Hoping to confer no hurt, indifference finally grows lethal; why is that?"
6. What are the principal components of "supersessionism," the Christian belief that Christianity"the Jesus movement"replaces Judaism as "the new Israel" and that Christians replace Jews as "the chosen people"? What have been the implications of supersessionism, for Christians and Jews, at the various stages of their shared 2,000-year history? When and how did replacement come to imply elimination, and with what consequences?
7. Carroll refers on several occasions to an "ambivalence" that, at various times in history, has characterized Christianparticularly Catholicattitudes toward and statements concerning the Jews. What is the cumulative nature of that ambivalence, and what have been its major manifestations? How did "the pattern of ambivalence" become set, and how has it served to preserve and carry forward Christian antisemitism? What examples can you note of "the positive side of contemporary Catholic ambivalence"?
8. What primary indicators of Jesus' Jewishness does Carroll identify? On the basis of available evidence, where did Jesus most likely fit within the multifaceted Judaism of his time? How might conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Christians, Jews for Christ, and others react to statements that Jesus, even in his supposedly redemptive death, was first and foremost a Jew? Why does Carroll insist that "the Church must learn to speak of Jesus Christ in a way that honors his Jewishness not only as something past but as something permanent"?
9. How might a revised view of the Gospels as being the result of "prophecy historicized" (in John Dominic Crossan's phrase) lead to a revision of Christians' view of Jesus and, subsequently, of Jews' view of Jesus and his followers? How did the "blurring of 'history remembered' and 'prophecy historicized'
come to form the supersessionist prophecy-fulfillment structure of Christian attitudes toward Jews"?
10. What was the political and religious significance of Constantine's conversion to Christianity? How did his political exploitation of the Christian religion cause a lasting confusion within Christianity between political power and religious faith? How, beginning with Constantine, did "the triumphalism of an empowered Christianity [lead] to a betrayal of faith" and to Christianity's anti-Judaism?
11. Carroll singles out Constantine's conversion to Catholicism as one of those events that could have gone in alternative ways. He asks us to wonder how history "would have unfolded had the young emperor been converted to Judaism instead." How might history have unfolded from such an event? How might Judaism have fared "as the locus of political and religious domination"? On the basis of rabbinical Judaism's writings, beliefs, and observances, what extrapolations can we make from the imagined triumph of a Jewish Constantine?
12. What is the continuing importance of Augustine's thinking and writing about Jews and acceptable Christian attitudes and actions concerning Jews? In what ways does "subsequent history resound with the cry of Augustine
: Do not slay them!"? In what ways is "the legacy of Augustine's teaching on the Jews
a double-edged sword"? At the same time, do you agree or disagree with Carroll's coda on Augustine: "Are we reduced to gratitude for the day when one of us found a way, through a jury-rigged theology if ever there was one, to justify the cry 'Do not slay them!'? Yes, we are."
13. What shape does the story of the Crusades take when told from the point of view of its first victims, the Jews of Europe? How might a historically accurate modern-day retelling of that story, widely disseminated in church and synagogue, affect the ways in which Christians and Jews look back upon their shared history and at the issues that divide them today?
14. What have been the consequences of the First Crusade's sparking of an era in which, "for the first time in Christian history, violence was defined as a religious act, a source of grace"? How did the vow of the Crusaders to free the Holy Land by slaughtering Muslims (and Jews) transform the Catholic Church into the Church Militant? In what ways was the Crusaders' "peacemaking" "a heretofore unthinkable militarization of Christian religion"? What intra-Christian antagonisms are part of the legacy of the Crusades, and how have those antagonisms intensified Christian hatred of and violence toward Jews?
15. What were the origins of the stereotypes of Jews that have taken hold of the popular Christian imagination over the centuriesmoneylender, greedy capitalist, revolutionary, for example? What effect have these stereotypes had on Christian-Jewish relations, on Christian views of Jews, and of Jewish views of themselves? What comparable stereotypes of Christians may have played a similar role on the Jewish side of the relationship?
16. "Christians
knew little or nothing about this Jewish high culture of the Middle Ages, both far away and near at handand that remains true today," Carroll writes. What kind of knowledge didand doChristians have of Jews, and how has that kind of knowledge affected their behavior toward Jews? How knowledgeable about Christian tradition and belief have Jews been? How might we explain the differences between the groups' levels of knowledge concerning one another? In what ways might increased knowledge and understanding on both sides be achieved, and in what ways might that increased knowledge ameliorate hatred, fear, and resentment?
17. How successful is Carroll in showing that Peter Abelard "could have represented an even more positive turn in the story" of Christian-Jewish relations than did Augustine? To what extent, and how, did Abelard lift "the pike on a road toward Jewish-Christian mutuality, a road leading to an end to hatred and the beginning of real respect"? What were the short-term and long-term consequences of the fact that Abelard's road was not taken? What did both the Church and the Jews lose as a result of Abelard's condemnation as a heretic? How is Abelard's position "consonant with the religion of Israel," and what hope might a reemphasis on his position hold for Christians and Jews?
18. In Carroll's view, what were the unique consequences of Catholic medieval absolutism as embodied in the institution of the Inquisition? How did the Inquisition signal a turning point in the Christian understanding of and attitude toward Judaism? What were the historical and religious reasons for this shift? How might the Inquisition be linked with modern antisemitic racism?
19. In what ways was the convivencia "a moment full of possibility, another of the roads not taken"? How might Catholics and Jews lead the way in the creation of a modern-day religious and political convivencia? What obstacles would have to be surmounted, and what new mechanisms put in place?
20. Carroll refers to the story of Clement VI, at Avignon, as "yet another of those all too rare chapels of heart in this grim history." What made it so? What are some of the other "chapels of heart" to which Carroll calls attention? What factors prevented these chapels of heart from permanently affecting Christian-Jewish relations for the better?
21. When and where did the invidious concept of the taint of "Jewish blood" come into play? What has been that concept's legacy? What similar bigotries based on the notion of tainted blood have infected various societies over the past five hundred years? Why does Carroll assert that "the shift from a religious definition of Jewishness to a racial one is perhaps the most decisive in this long narrative, and its fault lines
will define the moral geography of the modern age"?
22. Carroll underlines the irony inherent in the fact that Saint Teresa of Ávilawho founded the Carmelite order that, "centuries later, would attract the converted Jewish philosopher Edith Stein, who was inspired by Teresa's autobiographywas herself a New Christian, the daughter of a man who, as a boy, had repented a relapse into Judaism? What other ironies of history or biography inform the history of Christian-Jewish relations? How might these ironies prompt an enhanced mutual understanding between Christians and Jews today, as well as prompt a re-examination of the events that have determined those relations?
23. How did Martin Luther break from the Catholic Church and, at the same time, reinforce some of its deepest assumptions regarding Jews? What is the extent of his influence on the modern ChristianCatholic and non-Catholicattitude toward Jews and the attitude of modern Germany, through the Nazi period, toward the Jews? In turn, to what extent was Luther's position regarding the Jews "grounded in the theological heart of Christian proclamation," in his own nontheological, intensely personal sense of doom, and/or in a unique German context of antisemitism?
24. How do "We Remember," "Memory and Reconciliation," and other papal and Church statements"the Church's most solemn attempts at self-examination"address the issues of anti-Judaism, the actions of Church members and of the Church itself, and the Church's claim to a "constant teaching
on the unity of the human race and on the equal dignity of all races and peoples"? What additional questions are raised by these sometimes puzzling official statements? For example, what consequences might derive from the official Vatican distinction between the transgressions of individual members of the Church and the inviolability of "the Church as such"?
25. What twelfth-century events are associated with the rise of Kabbalah as "a source of new Jewish mythology and a new Jewish mysticism," and what sixteenth-century events caused it to flourish anew? How does the mystical theology of Kabbalah compare or contrast with the Christian mystical tradition, in terms of both origins and objectives?
26. What was Voltaire's unique contribution to Western antisemitism? From the Jewish point of view, why might Voltairean hatred seem little different from established Christian hatred?
27. What were "the pair of masterly elaborations of anti-Jewish stereotyping of the nineteenth century," and how does Carroll associate Karl Marx with both? In what ways did both images reside most vividly in the Catholic imagination? What "special meaning" can we assign to Marx's attacks on Jews, and what "special consequences"?
28. Including the affirmation of papal authority, what actions and statements by Vatican Council I and Pope Pius IX constituted the Church's response to the perceived threat of liberalism? What was the impact on Christian-Jewish relations? How does Carroll show that the context of the declaration of papal infallibility "tells us everything we need to know about its meaning for Catholics and for Jews"? How have "absolutist theological claims and institutional universalism" through the centuries "led directly to Church oppression of Jews"?
29. By the time of a civilian court's reversal, in 1906, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus's conviction, Carroll tells us, "some Jews had drawn conclusions from the Dreyfus affair." What were those conclusions? Given that "the French army has never reversed its two verdicts against the Jewish officer," what residual lessons might the Dreyfus Affair still carry for Jews living in a predominantly Christian society? Why is it that many Christians think of Jews exclusively as Jews, regardless of individual Jews' insistence on a primary national identity, andat the same timeexpress resentment of Jewish support of Israel?
30. What inferences pertaining specifically to Christian-Jewish relations might both Jews and Christians draw from Charles Péguy's aphorism "Everything begins in faith and ends in politics"? In what ways might the entire history of Jewish-Christian relations be seen as a persistent sanctification of politics and politicization of faith?
31. "As has been discovered again by tyrants of all stripes," Carroll reminds us, "the great usefulness of mass antisemitism is its efficiency in offering an explanation for everything that people hate about their situations, if not their lives." That being so, and given the repeated revelation of the falseness of such explanations, why does "mass antisemitism" continue to be efficiently useful? How might it be discredited once and for all?
32. How successful is Carroll in showing that there was a direct link between historical Christian Jew-hatred and Hitler's Final Solution; that "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"; and that "however pagan Nazism was, it drew its sustenance from groundwater poisoned by the Church's most solemnly held ideologyits theology"?
33. How might Eugenio Pacellias the Vatican's cardinal secretary of state under Pope Pius XI and, later, as Pope Pius XIIhave facilitated Hitler's persecution and, ultimately, mass murder of Europe's Jews? What might Pacelliespecially as popehave done, or not done, to protect not only the Jews of Italy but Jews throughout the continent? How does Carroll account for Pius XII's behavior? How balanced is his treatment of this controversial topic and of the Vatican's apparent intention to canonize Pius XII as a saint of the Church?
34. "By focusing so much of the Jewish-Catholic dialogue on the question of Pius XII," Carroll writes, "the broader question of a massive Catholic failure is deflected." What factors does he identify as composing that "massive Catholic failure"and a more general Christian failureand what conclusions does he draw concerning that failure's origins and consequences? Beyond this quandary, how can we answer Carroll's further question: "How did a succession of popes prepare the way for the 'silence' of an entire civilization"?
35. In what ways might the Catholic Church's canonization of Edith SteinSister Teresa Benedicta of the Crossas a martyr for the faith be seen, from a Jewish perspective, as another act of Christian suppressionist sacrilege? How does her canonization focus the complex issues of history, theology, and doctrine that Carroll believes the Catholic Church must confront? In what ways is her story "an object lesson in Church denial"?
36. According to Carroll, what specifically Christian andperhaps more importantlywhat worldwide factors support a call for a third Vatican Council? In addition to "ending antisemitism forever," what other goals does Carroll envisage a Vatican Council III as having? With those goals in mind, how reasonable are Carroll's specifications regarding location, timing, participants, and agenda? What are the implications of his giving his Vatican III schema the title "Agenda for a New Reformation"?
37. What are the principal "unfinished questions" that Carroll identifies as deciding the primary agenda items for a Vatican Council III? How convincing are the rationales that he presents for the inclusion of each? How might a Vatican III correct the extraordinary errors of "the roads not taken" during the history of Christianity? What necessary affirmations must, in Carroll's view, emerge from Vatican III?
38. How might Constantine's Sword provide a model for anyone who wishes to examine, in depth and uncompromisingly, abuses of power or authority within his or her tradition or organization?
This Discussion Guide was written by Hal Hager & Associates, Somerville, New Jersey.