| The Menorah and the Rosary - Together at Last James Carroll |  |
| The Menorah and the Rosary - Together at Last James Carroll | |
James Carroll is witty, wise, urbane, and a successful author, but these are not his best cards. What was palpable and compelling to the standing-room-only crowd at Temple Israel on April 8th, was that he is, first and foremost, a man of love.
 James Carroll is the author of nine novels and the memoir An American Requiem, which won the National Book Award. His columns on culture and politics appear weekly in the Boston Globe. He wrote Constantine's Sword while on fellowships at Harvard University, where he is a research associate at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Divinity School. Before becoming a writer, Carroll was a Catholic priest. He and his wife, the novelist Alexandra Marshall, live in Boston with their two children. |
The source of religious intolerance, he announced, and of all intolerance, can be summed up in the opening line from the old Saturday Night Live show: “Good Evening, I’m Chevy Chase - and You’re Not!” It is the human impulse to exclude, and humanity’s dark shadow of fear and hatred to blame the ills of the world on those excluded. Listen, listen closely to the story he tells.
No doubt intolerance began with the first fire-circle of cavemen - the more we imagine that others outside the circle are not like us, the more they are perceived as the Source of evil. Human intimacy seems to depend upon the dread we have for those who are not part of us.
How can religion promote prejudice, hate, even violence? Because it too, Carroll said, thrives on: “fundamentalism, exclusion, triumphalism and absolutism.” Well, I wasn’t quite sure what all those meant, but I knew it wasn’t good.
“I am an Irish Catholic,” he declared, “whose religion was hijacked by Irish terrorists to create religious fascism.” Carroll’s extraordinary new book, Constantine’s Sword, ties the epic Nazi crimes to Christian antecedents. (Oh boy, time to fasten my seat belt, I figured).
The mass murders were uniquely a creature of Hitler. The Nazi’s accentuate a European tradition of anti-Semitism, “but the holocaust also reveals something deadly wrong with the West and it’s religions. We use Nazi guilt as a way to feel ourselves innocent. We aren’t.”
Anti-Semitism grew out of the human impulse to denigrate outsiders. Observe how Pilate used it on a Jewish crowd before the crucifixion. Yet Jesus was a Jew all his life, including the day he died. But the struggle of Jews and Christians for which had the “true church” was peaceful - “the two lived as sibling rivals in a pagan world,” both children of the same God.
 In 324 AD, Emperor Constantine finally achieved full control over an undivided empire. He re-located the imperial headquarters to Byzantium, and changed the name of the city to Constantinople. He was a skillful politician who is popularly believed to have made Christianity the official religion of the empire because of his personal convictions. In actuality, that act was merely an expedient intended to harness the power of its "God" for the benefit of the state. Despite his outward enthusiasm for Christianity and its powerful God, he didn't close many pagan temples during his reign. He did, however, strip them of their former wealth and shifted it to various Christian churches. This produced the result that many of the fledgling churches were put on a very firm financial footing and many of their members enjoyed great prosperity. The persecution of Christianity had stopped, perhaps, but its co-opting had just begun. |
“Modern anti-Semitic racism began in the heart of the Christian church”, Carroll told us, but told with a deep, painful love for his flawed church. The inquisition began the concept of anti-Semitism: Jews were blamed as “causes” of the plague! Later, Christian leaders viewed the Reformation as a Jewish plot. (And so on, and so on, and then Auschwitz, OK, I get it.)
Carroll was not here only to give a history lesson, but to challenge us to a great reconciliation. “We study history to avoid repeating mistakes, “ he said, “how could history have gone another way - how could I now?”
| “If Jews and Christians can reconcile now, then so can Islam and Christianity, Islam and Jews…let us lead the way.” - James Carroll |
He sees a grassroots movement of Jews and Catholics - after all, two years ago the Pope apologized for the church’s complicity and led a reconciliation at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
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| Chevy Chase... philosophic seer??? |
We have the burden of intelligent reading - we must listen to what is good and true in scripture and listen for what was embellished and merely changing memories. We must hang on to what was good, wholehearted in the Church. Remember the Christian who acted with courage and mercy in those dark years. The church is still one of man’s best hopes, he seemed to say. However we got here, it is one billion strong. “The church alone cuts across national boundaries, rich-poor. The church must confront it’s failures, practice painstaking honesty and be a symbol of hope.”
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