Once again checking out the archives at "one of the country's most widely read intellectual venues" ((c)tekboy) , we find the following interesting bits and piece. First, from a reviewer who wrote a lot better under editorial supervision than he does in his current warblogger incarnation, there's this:
Christianity's Original Sin By Andrew Sullivan
(review of CONSTANTINE'S SWORD
The Church and the Jews: A History.
By James Carroll.)
query.nytimes.com
IN 1989, the priest turned writer James Carroll took his family to Europe to witness the end of the cold war. They were in Berlin and came upon the site of Hitler's bunker almost by accident. Before Carroll realized it, his young children, Pat and Lizzy, were running up to the mound of earth ''like beagles going after prey.'' Then panic broke out: ''I saw a slab of concrete protruding from the dirt, and I thought, Pat is now going to touch what Hitler touched. 'Get away from there,' I ordered, swooping down on them. . . . 'This was Hitler's place!' And I led them away.'' It was only then perhaps that Carroll fully realized his own -- and his church's -- adamancy about keeping an almost neurotic distance from the unequaled crimes of the Reich. No, Carroll was not a Nazi, the Roman Catholic Church wasn't the Nazi Party, and responsibility for the Holocaust should not be diffused by being spread too widely. But Carroll's church's history, the very fabric of its being, is wrapped up in attitudes that, in his narrative, surely paved the way for the Shoah. And ''to accept responsibility for those attitudes, as a Christian, is to go much farther along the road of moral reckoning than I ever imagined I would have to.'' . . .
Holding this ambitious edifice together is an argument. What Carroll wants to show us above all is that the relationship with the Jews is not merely one issue among many for the modern church. It is the central issue in church history and inextricable from the core of what Christianity is about. To make his case, Carroll has to go back to the very beginning and show an alternative history -- a history of what might have been, a history in which the followers of Jesus were neither hostile to Judaism nor threatened by it.
Carroll begins by restating, along the lines of the revisionist scholarship of the Jesus Seminar, the essential Jewishness of Jesus. Jesus was not, so far as we know, a man alien to the culture or politics of his time. He lived and died in a region controlled by an imperial power, and asserted in that context an intense form of Jewish spirituality, animated by a kind of love that was clearly shocking and inspiring to many of his contemporaries. It was only in the later context of the struggles between Jesus-following Jews and other variants of Judaism that the Gospel story came to be told as a conflict not between a Jewish rebel and a brutal Roman Empire but between the founder of a new religion and ''the Jews,'' a monolithic term that began the process of demonizing the other.
Carroll's narrative picks up steam with the arrival of Constantine and the fusion of Christianity with imperial power. He neatly rebuts the notion of Constantine's conversion as some sort of divine intervention, seeing it more as a canny political move, shoring up support in Rome. And from Constantine's sword, designed in the shape of a cross, the fusion of a religion opposed to power with power itself is the core of the corruption of Christianity. When Christians used this secular power to persecute, banish, murder Jews, they were betraying not just the essence of the faith of Jesus, they were embodying the very power that killed Christ -- not the evil Jews, but the power of the state. Mercifully, the injunction to save Jews, to convert them, to see them as pre-eminently worthy of salvation, was a strong check on the demonization of Jews. But under the Inquisition, the church itself innovated another definition of Jewishness -- not of faith but of blood -- pioneering expulsions and then a demarcated Jewish ghetto in a quarter of Rome, to house refugees from elsewhere. The picture of the displaced Jews' arrival in the capital city is as fresh as the images from Srebrenica. One contemporary wrote: ''You would have thought that they wore masks. They were bony, pallid, their eyes sunk in the sockets; and had they not made slight movements, it would have been imagined that they were dead.'' Even then, Christian friars offered bread only on condition of conversion. After creating the ghetto, the church in the mid-16th century laid down what Jews could do and earn and how they could live. By the 17th century, the Jesuits had instituted the forerunner of the Nuremberg Laws, barring anyone from becoming a Jesuit ''who is descended of Hebrew or Saracen stock'' -- a baldly racist provision not formally ended until 1946.
Is there a continuous link between this Jew hatred and the final act of vengeance in the Holocaust? Carroll is wise not to say yes. The uniqueness of Nazi evil, the fact that eliminationist anti-Semitism, to use Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's phrase, found full fruition only in one state at one point in history, places earlier Catholic anti-Semitism in some perspective. Indeed, compared with Luther's vicious rhetoric about the ''pest in the midst of our lands,'' the Jesuits were relatively restrained. But, as Carroll points out, ''the fact is that the Inquisition moved Christian suspicion of Jews to a whole new level of irrationality.'' It was a touchstone for the church at moments of insecurity -- in the 19th and early 20th centuries -- and, although the persecution never regained the insane passion of Torquemada, it certainly never missed an opportunity to acquiesce in popular anti-Semitism.
CARROLL'S account of Pope Pius XII is particularly damning. His early pact with Hitler was a foundation stone of the Shoah. The church was capable of resisting state power in Germany. It had doggedly survived and prospered under Bismarck's Kulturkampf. But Pius XII's elevation of Catholic self-interest over Catholic conscience was the lowest point in modern Catholic history. That he barely bothered to protest the deportation of Jews from the Roman ghetto within sight of the Vatican is eloquent enough. Yes, there were many instances of Catholic heroism. But no honest Catholic can look objectively at what Pius XII did and did not do without simple shame. The notion that he could be canonized is beyond this particular Catholic's comprehension.
Well. The Pius XII canonization thing has spawned a bunch of other books reviewed as below:
The Close Reader; The Case of Pius XII By Judith Shulevitz query.nytimes.com
A Deafening Silence By V. R. Berghahn
(review of HITLER'S POPE The Secret History of Pius XII.By John Cornwell. ) query.nytimes.com
Before the Holocaust
By Garry Wills (review of THE POPES AGAINST THE JEWS
The Vatican's Role in the Rise
of Modern Anti-Semitism.
By David I. Kertzer. )http://query.nytimes.com/search/full-page?res=9C0CE2DA1038F930A1575AC0A9679C8B63
The Silence By Christopher Duggan
(review of UNDER HIS VERY WINDOWS
The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy.
By Susan Zuccotti. )http://query.nytimes.com/search/full-page?res=9A04EFDE173FF937A35751C0A9679C8B63 |
