BOOK REVIEW

A call for a Catholicism that renews parental ties

By Paul Wilkes, 01/07/2001

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ddly enough, it proved to be one of those seminal, theological, teaching moments when Bob Dylan proclaimed the gospel of the Revolution, "Blowing in the Wind," and the homilist, none less than Pope John Paul II himself, rose to interpret the inspired words for an adoring crowd of kids in Bologna, Italy. "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" Dylan posited the mystical question.

One was the pope's unqualified answer to this '60s koan. It's Christ. Take that, Bobby Zimmerman!

While it may not rank with the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the Inquisition, or the Vatican's failure to stop Jews being shipped out to Nazi death camps from beneath its very windows, that moment on a stage in 1997 might serve as a recent window into the mentality that has contributed to, if not spawned outright, Rome's horrific sins of omission and commission toward Jews, its forebears in faith, and toward Judaism, Christianity's very bedrock.

For since Jesus Christ's followers proclaimed him the messiah the Jews had so long yearned for, and a religious tributary ever so gradually branched off from God's chosen river -- one from which it was perhaps never intended to depart -- there has been an unholy conflict between the two. And not the most of it brought on by Jews.

If the pope's exegesis of Dylan's theology may not make the history books, surely Constantine's moment in 312 at the Milvian Bridge near Rome has. Faced with Maxentius, his political and military rival, Constantine believed he was presented not only a vision of the Christian cross, but a mandate that would give him a decided edge over his fellow pagan: "In this sign, conquer." He went on not only to victory -- and to toss the vanquished Maxentius into the Tiber -- but to his own, his troops', and a good chunk of the then-known world's conversion to the faith symbolized by this elegiac sign.

So, it is Constantine's apparition that provides the crucial hinge for James Carroll's sprawling, capacious book, this moment at once great and sad as a persecuted minority -- Christians -- became a prime shaper of not only religious belief, but world politics as well. Concurrently the church found it necessary to not only pray for the conversion of the faith to which it was still somewhat linked -- Judaism -- but to eventually oppress it in manifold ways that still haunt the church's collective memory.

Of course, an interesting question is: What if Constantine had seen a menorah?

And another: Christ forgave those who nailed him to that cross and bid his followers not to so much as raise an eyebrow in his defense. To "conquer" under the aegis of a cross?

Carroll is better known as a novelist, essayist, National Book Award winner for "An American Requiem," and Globe columnist than as a historian. He calls himself a professional writer, but an amateur Catholic, "holding to faith out of love."

But after a visit to the cross planted outside Auschwitz, both that faith and that love propelled him upon a journey into the heart of darkness many Catholics might want to avoid. The result is a hefty read, but one charitably cut into bite-sized chapters that those of us of modest intellectual ware might more easily digest.

Carroll's thesis is clear, oft-repeated, and substantiated with examples: The Catholic Church's self-imposed most-favored-religion status has caused it to have a somewhat pathologic aversion to Judaism that has caused the church -- and allowed others, Hitler being the most odious example -- to persecute, Oedipal-style, the very parent that spawned it. The son wanted to kill and subsume the parent, history revealed. Christianity simply could not let Judaism rest until it had seen the fullness of God's revelation to humankind.

Carroll marches through church history, delineating signal events with great sophistication. Yet, there seems a young boy's amazement with an institution allegedly founded on the highest of divine principles, buffeted by human history, ruled by mad men and saints, given at times to such greatness and at others to vindictive pettiness.

Well into the fourth century, Christianity and Judaism were still linked through a fluidity of interaction between two monotheistic religions that seemed not that disparate to people on both sides of the aisle. Then came Constantine, and the Council of Nicea formulated the litmus test of Christian belief in a creed still used today. The divide was pronounced.

Christianity, formerly the refuge of the poor and lower classes, ascended to great moral -- and then temporal -- power. The ways of Rome preached against by Jesus Christ proved to be the template for Christian governance. (The curia and dioceses are just two examples.) And an obsession developed with these Jews -- themselves not bent on proselytizing -- who would not go along. So, the Jews as Christ-killers replaced the Romans who actually did the crucifying. What better way to brand them (distinctive clothing would follow in a few centuries) than to indict them for murder?

The First Crusade in 1096 saw the slaughter of many Jews, the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 banned them from public office, imposed special taxes, and commanded that as Christians were to be known by their love, Jews would be known by the clothes they were now mandated to wear. Do we hear some distant rumbles of the Third Reich?

Talmuds were burned en masse in 1242 as a way to cleanse the world of Judaism, the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 (mingling with Christians was feared), and in 1555 the Vatican created the first Jewish ghettos.

As adversity will often provide, this marginalization and decimation of a thriving Jewish culture led to not a lessening but a deepening of a commitment to their covenant with God and an unprecedented spiritual awakening. Sadly, it did not soften the heart of the church (especially after the Reformation had split the river once more) which until Vatican II, and within the memory of many of us cradle Catholics, continued to lay the death of Jesus at the Jews' feet, thus providing fuel for whatever brand of anti-Semitism one might feel justified in igniting.

Carroll, whose love for the Catholic Church -- to which he once vowed his life as a priest, but later recanted as the winds of change not only blew through Bob Dylan's curly locks, but Vatican windows as well -- is not only matched by a lovingly critical eye to church and temporal history but an urgent plea that Rome set another course.

He calls for a Vatican III in which the Catholic Church would honestly confront not just its past. It was not only individual, misguided Christians who oppressed and marginalized Jews, but the "church as such." In other words, the high command at headquarters was calling the shots, not just some low-ranking privates in the field.

He hearkens back to such church figures as Clement of Alexandria, Peter Abelard, and Cardinal Newman, who maintained in various times and ways that the imperious claim to the "fullness of faith" that Catholicism claims (and recently claimed in the ill-conceived and ill-received Vatican declaration Dominus Iesus) is not in keeping with a God-made-man who preached forbearance and forgiveness. In other words, as the Kingdom of God unfolds, we have more to learn. There is no reason to shrink-wrap supposed truth -- like so many seeds or dough -- thus removing all air for fear it exhibits new life.

There is an image from Karl Rahner that might prove the coda for this fine book as well as the beginning of a new era in Roman Catholicism. For Rahner, God is the distant horizon, visible and inviting all but equally distant for all. If Catholics could invite other faiths to join it with that perspective, the very basis for anti-Semitism would be diminished and the need for religious wars largely forgone. For, Carroll and Rahner would assert, God is indeed beyond our minds, imagination, or -- for the Catholic Church -- exclusivist claims. What a powerful example the church could set, while continuing to proclaim that the path to righteousness is narrow. For centuries it has boldly attempted that navigational feat, in acknowledging that God's embrace is wide indeed.

Paul Wilkes's books on a priest ("In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest") and a rabbi ("And They Shall Be My People: An American Rabbi and His Congregation") were recently reissued in paperback. He teaches writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

This story ran on page K1 of the Boston Globe on 01/07/2001.
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