To the Editor:
I leave historical refutations to the professional historians, but I question COMMENTARY’s providing a forum for the sweeping attack on Catholicism mounted by Robert S. Wistrich in his review of James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews [Books in Review, April]. I refer to Mr. Wistrich’s provocative, over-the-top rhetoric, like his observation about “the primary role played by the Catholic clergy in fin-de-siècle French anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus affair—a kind of dress-rehearsal for fascism and Nazism.” And then there is his assertion that “Nazi anti-Semitism could never have aroused the response it did had it not been planted in groundwater poisoned by Christian theology.”
Poisoned groundwater? Will Mr. Wistrich next be telling us that Christianity is—to borrow a phrase from Louis Farrakhan—a “gutter religion”? It is dismaying to find such simplistic Catholic-bashing in COMMENTARY, which is ever-vigilant in rejecting outrageous attempts to demonize Jews.
In the course of his review, Mr. Wistrich does manage to reveal the true purpose of Carroll’s diatribe by noting that “satisfying some of [Carroll’s] theological demands would involve not a reformation of the Church but its virtual dissolution.” Indeed, as other reviewers have suggested, Carroll’s aim is to justify the efforts of “progressive” Catholics like himself to control the future of the Church. In this fight, the biggest stick available against traditional Catholics is the Church’s position toward the Jews, especially during the Holocaust.
Mr. Wistrich has the professionalism to note that Carroll has no credentials as a historian, is “dismissive of clashing or more cautious interpretations,” and is guilty of “some serious omissions and flaws.” But he understates the matter. Carroll’s approach is that of a trial lawyer, setting forth all the evidence that is favorable to his case and, when compelled to acknowledge unfavorable evidence, presenting it in the most critical light.
Why, then, would Mr. Wistrich declare, as if with booksellers’ blurbs in mind, that Constantine’s Sword “adds an important dimension to the debate,” “achieves often moving effects,” and “is marked by a basic integrity and honesty”? Perhaps because he, too, is acting like a trial lawyer.
Thomas M. Comerford
Dallas, Texas
_____________
To the Editor:
I was dismayed by Robert S. Wistrich’s review of Constantine’s Sword. In the penultimate paragraph, he admits that “satisfying some of [James Carroll’s] theological demands would involve not a reformation of the Church but its virtual dissolution.” Indeed, even a superficial reading of recent attacks by some Catholics on the Church, particularly the popes of the 20th century, makes clear that their underlying agenda is precisely this dissolution.
In my opinion, nothing could do more damage to Jewish-Catholic relations than for our Jewish partners to take part in the culture war now raging within Roman Catholicism. My own involvement in such ecumenical discussions, both intra-Christian and with Jews, has made evident to me that they can take place under two different rubrics.
There is, in the first place, what I call the ecumenism of accommodation, whose (often implicit) presupposition is that each side speaks for a tradition that it wants to move away from, toward a more enlightened, bien-pensant view. The second is what I call the ecumenism of conviction, which frankly admits that ideas about religious truth are precisely what is not up for grabs.
Robert Wistrich’s praise of Constantine’s Sword has given us a new category in this taxonomy. If I read him correctly, he seems to be recommending an ecumenism of capitulation.
Edward T. Oakes, S.J.
Denver, Colorado
_____________
Robert Wistrich writes:
Many historians, long before James Carroll, have pointed to the virulence of the Catholic anti-Semitic campaign in fin-de-siècle France (and elsewhere), with its plethora of conspiracy theories that were later picked up by the Nazis in Germany. Far from this being “provocative, over-the-top rhetoric” on my part, it has been firmly established in historical scholarship of which Thomas M. Comerford is evidently all too ignorant.
Similarly well-founded is Carroll’s proposition that Nazi anti-Semitism was “planted in groundwater poisoned by Christian theology”—a metaphor I borrowed from him. Many prominent Catholic scholars, including Friedrich Heer and Father Edward Flannery, have provided chapter and verse for this and related assertions. To dismiss all this as mere “Catholic-bashing” is not only crude but foolish.
Edward T. Oakes charges me with advocating “an ecumenism of capitulation” and reproves me for intruding on internal Catholic culture wars. None of this is applicable. In my review I could hardly avoid referring to a central thrust of Constantine’s Sword—namely, the call for a radical reformation of the Roman Catholic Church and its Christological understandings, especially with regard to the Jews. While I think the latter objective is necessary and desirable, what Catholics in general choose to believe is a matter on which I expressed no position, it being entirely their affair. Without accepting every one of Carroll’s specific contentions, I praised his honesty in facing painful truths about the Church’s relations with the Jews. Surely anyone genuinely concerned with Jewish-Christian dialogue should welcome serious moral reckoning of this kind on either side, rather than seeing it as a cause for dismay or as a sinister plot by “progressives” to seize control of the Catholic Church.
_____________
Corrections
In Joseph Epstein’s article, “The Critics’ Club” (July-August), George Santayana’s The Last Puritan was mistakenly referred to as The Last Pilgrim. In a book review on page 63 of the same issue, the date of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was misstated as 1952; the year was 1953. We regret these errors.—Ed.
_____________
