James Carroll’s Unholy Crusade: A Critique of the Film Constantine’s Sword

Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, recently raised a commotion by trying to educate his country’s youth: Every fifth grader, he said, should adopt the story of one of France’s 11,000 Jewish children killed during the Holocaust, in order to teach them about prejudice and the evils of genocide. But the idea immediately came under attack-first from French nationalists, who would prefer that dark chapter in history remain forever obscure; and second (more honorably) from those who worry that children that age are simply unprepared, psychologically and emotionally, to deal with such horrors. “Adding to the national fracas,” reports the New York Times, is that “Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an ‘absence of God.’”[[See “By Making Holocaust Personal to Pupils, Sarkozy Stirs Anger,” by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, February 16, 2008. Due to the controversy, the proposal, has apparently been abandoned: See “Sarkozy’s Holocaust Study Idea Buried,” Reuters, February 29, 2008.]]

That may have been the most controversial aspect of all. In many quarters, and not just secular France, it is still accepted as wisdom that the Holocaust was caused by devotion to God—specifically, the Christian God. Never mind that the Nazis murdered millions of Christians, and that it was Christians who primarily defeated the Nazis; and put aside that Nazi hatred of Christianity often rivaled its insane hatred for Jews. (“The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity,” railed Hitler in his Table Talk, “was the coming of Christianity”).[[Hitler’s comment during the night of July 11-12, 1941, as reported in Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944 (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), p. 7.]] Many opinion makers—academics, journalists, and even religious leaders—continue to draw a line, however crooked, from the teachings of the New Testament to the death camps at Auschwitz.

Among them is James Carroll, the well-known ex-priest (and notorious Catholic dissenter),[[For a biting critique of Carroll’s clash with the Church, see “Vichy Catholic,” by C.J. Doyle, Catholic World Report, March 2000; also available online via the Catholicculture.org website. Contrast Doyle’s well-documented critique with the wholly uncritical profiles of Carroll which have appeared in the secular media, e.g., “Devout Catholic Answers a Call to Challenge Church,” by Gina Piccalo, Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2007.]] whose controversial book Constantine’s Sword (2001) lays out this thesis in detail. At nearly eight hundred pages, the book is heavy—and repetitious—reading. Worse, it “is a book driven by theological animus and padded with irrelevant, distracting material from Carroll’s own obsessively chronicled life,” as Robert Wilken wrote in a devastating critique for Commonweal.[[See “Dismantling the Cross,” by Robert Wilken, Commonweal, January 26, 2001, pp. 22-28.]] (Writing in National Review, Daniel Moloney added “the book has factual mistakes and errors in interpretation on almost every page.”[[See “Sins of the Fathers,” by Daniel P. Moloney, National Review, March 5, 2001, pp. 50-52.]]) That said, anguish and sorrow about anti-Semitism is understandable. No one with a conscience can study Jewish history and feel anything but shame at the suffering endured by God’s chosen people-especially when their abusers claimed to be followers of Christ.[[For a thoughtful and sensitive history of anti-Semitism, written from a balanced Catholic perspective, see: The Anguish of the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Anti-Semitism by Edward H. Flannery (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1985). See also the obituary, “The Rev. Edward Flannery, 86, Priest who Fought Anti-Semitism,” by Eric Pace, New York Times, October 22, 1998.]] And because anti-Semitism has been tragically present throughout Christianity, Carroll is able to focus on Christian hypocrisy and guilt, compiling just enough evidence to make his argument appear plausible.

Plausible but not convincing. In preparing for Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate declaration On Non-Christian Religions, Augustin Cardinal Bea, its chief architect, frankly acknowledged prejudice among Christians but stated: “We are all aware that there are many reasons for anti-Semitism which are not religious at all but are political, national, psychological, social and economic.”[[See The Church and the Jewish People by Augustine Cardinal Bea, S.J. (New York: Harper and Row Publishers).]] Add to that the often overlooked fact that anti-Semitism began well before the onset of Christianity,[[For evidence of this, see Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World by Peter Schafer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).]] and that quite anti-Christian phenomena-such as the French Revolution, Darwinism, and the eugenics movement[[For evidence of this connection, see Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1990), especially, pp. 57-84 on the French revolution; see also From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany by Richard Weikart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).]]—have a much better claim to paving the way for Hitler than does Christianity, and the Carroll thesis begins to come apart. But it persists. A few years ago, the U.S. Holocaust Museum drew serious objections after sponsoring a film that blamed the Holocaust on Christianity. In an editorial asking “Did Christianity Cause the Holocaust?” the editors of Christianity Today rebuked the museum for defaming a whole faith and people: “As a museum of conscience, the U.S. Holocaust Museum has a responsibility to report how Jews have suffered, in large part because of morally repugnant stereotyping. How ironic and sad that its own film should foster inaccurate stereotypes of Christianity!”[[See “Is the Holocaust Museum Anti-Christian?” by Mary Cagney, Christianity Today, April 27, 1998, as well as the accompanying editorial in the same issue, “Did Christianity Cause the Holocaust?”]] Even before that controversy, Milton Himmelfarb published an essay in Commentary assailing the notion that Christian anti-Semitism led to the Final Solution. His title said it all: “No Hitler, No Holocaust.”[[See “No Hitler, No Holocaust,” Commentary, March, 1984, pp. 37-43; also, “Milton Himmelfarb,” by Joseph Bottum, First Things online, January 7, 2006; and “Milton Himmelfarb, 87, Witty Essayist on Jewish Themes,” New York Sun, January 11, 2006.]] And in response to Rosemary Reuther’s claim that the Holocaust was the inevitable result of oppressive Christian legislation during the Middle Ages, Professor Yosef Yerushalmi commented: “Between this and Nazi Germany lies not merely a ‘transformation’ but a leap into a different dimension. The slaughter of Jews by the state was not part of the medieval Christian world order. It became possible with the breakdown of that order.”[[“A Response to Rosemary Reuther,” Auschwitz: Beginning of an Era? (New York: Ktav, 1977), p. 104.]]

Undeterred by such correctives, Carroll has forged ahead, now starring in a new documentary, Constantine’s Sword, based on his book. It premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival last year and has now been released nationally.[[The film’s official website is: http://www.constantinessword.com.]]

Carroll’s partner in making the film is Oren Jacoby, who has a reputation as a thoughtful, accomplished filmmaker. His previous documentaries include an enjoyable tribute to Benny Goodman,[[See Benny Goodman: Adventures in the Kingdom of Swing (1993), available on DVD.]] as well as the Academy Award-nominated Sr. Rose’s Passion, about the late Sr. Rose Thering,[[For a description of Sr. Rose’s career, as well as Jacoby’s documentary about her, see the obituary, “Sister Rose Thering, Nun Dedicated to Bridging Gap with Judaism, Dies at 85,” New York Times, May 8, 2006.]] a feisty Catholic nun who devoted her life’s work to strengthening Catholic-Jewish relations. Why Jacoby suddenly decided to make a film about James Carroll’s far less inspiring story is anyone’s guess, but his talents have not been well served.

Constantine’s Sword wastes no time getting to its bottom line: the violent nature of Christianity and the threat it poses to non-Christians, especially Jews. Focusing on anti-Semitism as Christianity’s original sin (and the source of its alleged modern intolerance)—“Why do we blame the Jews? Generation after generation, where does this contempt come from?”—Carroll points to his own experience as a young Catholic raised in the preconciliar Church: “I knew who the Jews were: They had killed Our Lord, then they had refused to believe in Him.” Whether this emotion was typical of American Catholics—who’ve had much better relations with Jews than European Christians—is never questioned, only assumed. So too is the anti-Semitism of the Catholic liturgy: “At every Good Friday service, with the reading of that Passion narrative-‘the Jews, the Jews, the Jews,’ it really hits the ear. . . . Jesus is against the Jews. I don’t know how else Christians can hear this story.”

But of course they can, and do. Carroll makes the mistake of projecting his own apprehensions onto Catholics in the pews; it doesn’t occur to him that Catholics who’ve participated in the Good Friday liturgy have always asked forgiveness for their sins and taken responsibility for the crucifixion themselves. After all, long before Vatican II the Catechism of the Council of Trent put the onus for Christ’s death on humanity, not any one group: “In this guilt [for Jesus’ death] we must deem all those to be involved who fall frequently into sin; for as our sins compelled Christ to undergo the death of the Cross . . . certainly those who wallow in sins and iniquities, as far as in them lies, crucify again the son of God, and make a mockery of him.”[[As cited in Three Popes and the Jews by Pinchas Lapide (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967), p. 76.]] [italics mine]

In his book The New Encounter Between Christians and Jews, Monsignor John Oesterreicher, a pioneer in ecumenical relations, underscores the point:

The Church prefers that the Passion be read in dialogue form to make us realize our personal involvement. We-our sins-nailed Jesus to the Cross; they are forgiven because Jesus freely suffered the anguish and pain of death for us. Hence, it is not only important, but necessary, that we acknowledge our part in Christ’s death. Were we to pretend that we are without guilt, we would not be redeemed. Christ came to save sinners, not those who think themselves righteous. That the Lord’s passion is of our making, and not the work of the Jews or the Romans, is the teaching of the Church. . . . Even the best of popular devotion upholds this thought, thus giving the Passion narrative its true significance. The German original of the moving hymn “O Sacred Head Surrounded” contains this stanza:

O Lord, what You endured is all my doing
I caused [the pain] you bore.
Wretched sinner, deserving but Your wrath
Your mercy and Your grace I do implore.

Another Passion Chorale asks:

Who was the guilty?
Who brought this upon Thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, has undone Thee.
‘twas I, Lord Jesus,
I it was denied Thee;
I crucified Thee![[The New Encounter Between Christians and Jews by John M. Oesterreicher (New York: Philosophical Library, 1986), pp. 410-411. For more on this great priest, a survivor of Hitler’s Europe, see the obituary “J.M. Oesterreicher, Monsignor Who Wrote on Jews, Dies at 89,” by Wolfgang Saxon, New York Times, April 20, 1993.]]

Carroll cannot appreciate any of this because his theology is trapped in modernity, and thus is ahistorical and anachronistic. But the gospels cannot fairly be assessed by a post-Holocaust liberal sensibility; they have to be understood in the context of a passionate inter-Jewish struggle over Jesus and Judaism, carried out in a time when both sides were guilty of overheated polemics. (David Klinghoffer is particularly frank about this in Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History.[[Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History by David Klinghoffer (New York: Doubleday, 2005).]])

The documentary does not even try to offer balance on these controversies. Of all the people one might select to offer a thoughtful Jewish perspective on Biblical matters—Jacob Neusner and David Novak come to mind—Constantine’s Sword settles on Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, who once wrote that the shadow of the cross at Auschwitz, “with all due respect, is sickening.”[[“At Auschwitz, Decency Dies Again,” by Leon Wieseltier, New York Times, September 3, 1989.]] His comments in the documentary are no more charitable.[[In the film, Wieseltier stands before a statue of Christ and says, “When I stand before a figure like this I can appreciate them and be moved by them only on condition that I shut down a piece of my heart, and that I obliterate something of what I know about the actual consequences in the real world of these images and of these figures.” He also assails “the supremacy of the cross in European culture [which] was responsible for the death of many of my people, for centuries before I was born, and eventually for the death of my own family in Southeastern Poland.” Later, Carroll attacks the site of the cross at Auschwitz. Wieseltier and Carroll may wish to consider the testimony of Marianne Sann, a Polish Jewish survivor of the death camp, who stated:
“As a Jewish woman and a survivor of Auschwitz, I am deeply disturbed by the feud over the crosses there…. Because the Nazis preferred to incinerate more Jews than Roman Catholic Poles does not mean that Polish non-Jewish victims do not deserve a cross of remembrance and place of honor among their fellow Jewish victims. The Polish inmates felt the icy winds of doom just as acutely as I did. I want to, and must attest to the fact that I was saved by Catholic fellow prisoners, at their great personal risk, in Auschwitz and again in Mauthausen, Austria. I hope the Polish government will not be pressured to remove these symbols of respect….” (Letter to the Editor, New York Times, December 27, 1998).]] The film’s chief authority on the New Testament, Elaine Pagels, is best known for her strange theories about Gnosticism, not respect for orthodoxy.[[See Pagels’ book, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979) and, for a sharp critique of it, Raymond E. Brown, “The Christians Who Lost Out,” New York Times Book Review, January 20, 1980, pp. 3, 33; also, “The Gospel According to Pagels: Reconsiderations,” by Bruce Chilton, New York Sun, April 2, 2008.]] Following the notorious Jesus Seminar, she suggests that the apostles fabricated the series of events leading up to Christ’s crucifixion, shifting blame away from the Romans and onto “the Jews.” Calling the Passion narrative “an extraordinary twist” on what actually happened, she concludes: “It looks completely at odds with what we know about history.” That, however, is not the view of more accomplished exegetes, notably N.T. Wright,[[Wright’s views on the Passion, defending the accuracy of the New testament, are outlined in Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), comprising volume 2 of his acclaimed trilogy, Christian Origins and the Question of God. Volumes one (The New Testament and the People of God, 1992) and three (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003), also published by Fortress, are well worth reading.]] and the late Raymond E. Brown.[[Brown’s two-volume magnum opus on the subject is The Death of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1994). For Brown’s stature and accomplishments, also see the obituary, “Raymond E. Brown, 70, Dies; a Leading Biblical Scholar,” by Gustav Niebuhr, New York Times, August 11, 1998.]] Both have affirmed the essential historicity of the Passion narrative while warning against abusing the text. “The recognition that important Jewish figures in Jerusalem were hostile to Jesus and had a role in his death,” writes Brown, “need not of itself have produced anti-Judaism, any more than the fact that the Jerusalem priests and prophets plotted Jeremiah’s death would produce such a result.” He continues: “We Christians cannot dismiss or deny what happened to Jesus—that would be the easy way out. It would be wrong. In liturgically celebrating the truth and power of the Passion narratives, however, we must be equally energetic in proclaiming, as did Pope John Paul II in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Auschwitz death camp: ‘Never again anti-Semitism!’”[[“The Death of Jesus and Anti-Semitism: Seeking Interfaith Understanding,” by Raymond E. Brown, S.S., available online at: http://americancatholic.org/Newsletters/CU/ac0397.asp.]] Vatican II, thirty years earlier, taught this another way: “Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (cf. John 19:6), neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during His Passion” (Nostra Aetate, 4).

Brown’s testimony is important because, if anything, he tends toward the liberal school of exegesis—criticizing a “literalist” approach toward Scripture but rebuking radical skeptics for theirs: “The other view I judge unacceptable discredits the Gospel passion narratives as almost totally the product of Christian imagination. Under the mantle of scholarly objectivity, advocates assert firmly but without proof that the early Christians knew little about how Jesus died and simply invented their narratives on the basis of Old Testament imagery. Indeed, some scholars (of Christian upbringing!) would paint the early Christians as creating lies precisely to vilify the Jews. . . . [T]his ‘imagination interpretation’ can have the effect of portraying Christianity as a false and hateful religion. Religiously sensitive Jews and Christians recognize that if either group of our respective first-century ancestors—Jews or Christians—is presented as liars who wanted to destroy their opposites, nothing has been gained in the ongoing Jewish-Christian dialogue. A careful examination suggests that the situation in the first century was far more complex than such overly simple reconstructions allow.”[[Ibid]]

Carroll conveniently skips over the persecutions of the early Christians; their sufferings do not interest him. What grips his imagination most is the story of Constantine’s conversion, which he sees as catastrophic for the history of the Church. Recounting the well-known story of Constantine’s vision of a cross in the sky, at the battle at the Milvian Bridge, the film quotes Constantine’s own words: “It bore the inscription, ‘By this sign, you will conquer.’ I described the marvel and its meaning to my men. I told them to reproduce it. A long spear crossed by a transverse bar forming the figure of a cross, to be carried at the head of all my armies.” Carroll then comments, mockingly: “They’re carrying their spears in the sign of a cross, and he comes onto this bridge, meets the enemy and—against all the odds—wins. Constantine goes into Rome, declares himself emperor, and-on the strength of that vision-he becomes a Christian!” The historian Jan Drijvers is brought on to question Constantine’s conversion, and ridicule every aspect of his “legend,” reminding us that he was a brute, dispatching one of his wives and son after suspecting them of incest. “It makes you actually wonder,” says Drijvers, “what kind of person Constantine was . . . quite another person from the ‘saint’ Constantine, the image a lot of people have. There’s even a source which says that Constantine had committed so many sins that there was no religion that could forgive his sins, only Christianity.” Drijvers is right about the boundlessness of Christian forgiveness but not for the cynical reasons he implies. That God sometimes works through broken vessels is never considered, nor is any value given to the relief Constantine provided persecuted Christians. Displaying frescoes honoring him in an old Roman convent, Carroll dismisses their message: “The great emperor falls to his knees as he shares his crown with the pope. This is the moment,” he intones dramatically, “when the cross and the sword become one: Christianity turns violent!” As proof, he notes, “When Constantine converted, there were almost the same number of Christians and Jews. Today, there are around 2 billion Christians—and only 15 million Jews.” How’s that for a non sequitur?

Still relying upon Drijvers, Carroll builds to a crescendo: “The cross had never been an important Christian symbol until Constantine in the year 326. For two and a half centuries, Christians had used symbols of life—the fish, the lamb, the shepherd—now this image of execution is brought in to unify the empire under a single orthodox doctrine.” But here Carroll stumbles yet again. He just finished telling us that the poison inherent in Christianity began with the New Testament texts; now he is suggesting that Christian life was sweet and gentle until Constantine came along and ruined everything. Which is it? The contradiction never fazes him. Moreover, his claims about the supposed unimportance of the cross to Christians before Constantine are demonstrably untrue. In his aforementioned critique for National Review, Daniel Moloney commented: “Carroll is wrong to maintain that the Cross became important only after Constantine’s conversion. That’s why the death of Christ takes up so much of each Gospel, and why Paul’s letters are packed with such lines as ‘we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Corinthians 1:23).”[[“Sins of the Fathers,” op. cit.]] In his History of Christianity, the eminent Owen Chadwick has this to say about the burial sites of nascent Christianity: “The catacombs contain the first surviving Christian art and symbols. There are paintings and carvings on tombs dating from about 230. . . . The Cross is the symbol most often seen in the catacombs.” [italics mine][[A History of Christianity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 56.]] Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy adds: “In 298, pagan priests conducting the auguries at Antioch complained that the presence of Christian officials was sabotaging the ceremonies (the Christians had defended themselves from demons during the ceremony by making the sign of the cross).[[Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) p. 17.]] Thus, well before Constantine’s rise in the fourth century, the cross was at the very heart of Christianity, exalted and affirmed by its believers. What are we to make of a documentary whose central thesis is based on a historical lie?

As if that isn’t bad enough, Carroll feels the need to end his revisionist history on a note of blasphemy: “And why wouldn’t Constantine—a man who had murdered a son—be drawn to a God who required the death on the cross of his Son?” Even for an ex-priest, this is beyond the pale.

Because Christianity is not of this world, a case can always be made against church-state collaboration, but Carroll doesn’t make it. That discussion—if it is to shed any light at all—has to take place on a much higher plane. A good starting point might be the debate between Oliver O’Donovan and Stanley Hauerwas over the politics of Christendom.[[See the brilliant essay, “A Kingdom of Martyrs: The Politics of Christendom,” by Davey Henreckson, available online at: www.agnology.com/2007/05/a_kingdom_of_martyrs_the_polit.html. I’m indebted to Mr. Henreckson for bringing my attention to the Hauerwas-O’Donovan debate.]] In response to Hauerwas’ charge that Christians under Constantine attempted to “further the kingdom through the power of this world,” O’Donovan replied:

I am afraid I think it is simply wrong. That is not what Christians were attempting to do. Their own account of what happened was that those who held power became subject to the rule of Christ. Of course, clear-sighted individuals could see the temptations this situation posed. Criticism of worldly championship or papal pretension did not begin with the dawn of modernity. But they did not think this danger a reason to refuse the triumph Christ had won among the nations.[[The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 216.]]

The cultural and religious changes Constantine brought about, he continued, were compatible with Christianity—even if subject to its judgment:

With the vast changes of context catalysed by the Edict of Milan the question of how to understand the obedience of rulers came high on the church’s agenda. There is no point regretting this. The church of that age had to do contextual theology just as we do; nor did the evolution of the missionary questions into political ones strike anybody at the time as constituting a volte-face. This was the logical conclusion of their confidence in mission, the confirmation of what they had always predicted.[[Ibid, p. 194]]

In other words, the success of the early Christians, in establishing “Christendom,” need not be seen as a betrayal of their faith, or capitulation to the powers of this world; rather, it was the fulfillment of Christ’s command to evangelize and transform it. As O’Donovan puts it: “Christendom is response to mission, and as such a sign that God has blessed it. It is constituted not by the church’s seizing alien power, but by alien power becoming attentive to the church.”[[Ibid, p. 195]]

Blind to any of this, Carroll presses his case further, employing the zeal of an out-of-control prosecutor: “In an empire united under the cross, Jews were now in danger. They might well have been wiped out right then, but Church Fathers decided the Jews should wander in misery forever, without a home. The Roman Empire fell, despite its embrace of Christianity. The Western world descended into chaos that lasted for six centuries. Then the pope cried, ‘God wills it!’ calling for a crusade, a war of the cross, against Islam. Europe’s princes and their armies stopped fighting each other; they set out to fight Muslims in the Holy Land but turned first on the infidels they knew [Jews] along the Rhine.”

Carroll is confused, and a bit off here-by over half a millennium. The myth of the “Wandering Jew” did not take hold until the thirteenth century[[“The ‘Wandering Jew’ is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the thirteenth century….” (“Wandering Jew,” wikipedia.org). The earliest dating of the anti-Semitic legend “is recorded in the Flores Historiarum by Roger Wendover in the year 1228” (“Wandering Jew,” by Joseph Jacobs, JewishEncyclopedia.com).]]—but what’s seven or eight hundred years when you’re trying to score a cheap point against the Church Fathers? And the idea that the Crusades rose out of the blue (“then the pope cried, ‘God wills it!’”) is possible only if one ignores the Islamic aggression against Christians that preceded them. The pope who cried “God wills it!” had his reasons for doing so, even if they remain debatable. As Robert Spencer argues, “Pope Urban II, who called for the First Crusade at the Council of Claremont in 1095, was calling for a defensive action-one that was long overdue.” One of the biggest misperceptions of history, he says, “is the idea that the Crusades were an unprovoked attack by Europe against the Islamic world. In fact, the conquest of Jerusalem in 638 stood at the beginning of centuries of Muslim aggression, and Christians in the Holy Land faced an escalating spiral of persecution.” What ensued was “the destruction of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property. . . . Untold number of Christians converted to Islam simply to save their lives.”[[“Modern Aftermath of the Crusades: Robert Spencer on the Battles Still Being Waged,” Zenit News Agency, March 11, 2006. For the latest scholarship on the Crusades, see also, “Crusaders and Historians,” by Thomas F. Madden, First Things, June-July 2005, pp. 26-31.]] Is Carroll not aware of these assaults against human dignity, or has he simply chosen not to mention them? The crimes committed by Christians during the Crusades were evil and inexcusable, but to assail Christian abuses-and only Christian abuses—while airbrushing Islam, reveals either ignorance or bad faith. Ex-Father Carroll is obviously on his own unholy Crusade.

Further, his claim that the Christian West “descended into chaos” after the fall of Rome is right out of the Enlightenment school of anti-Christian propaganda. No one who has read Peter Brown’s Rise of Western Christendom[[The Rise of Western Christendom (Second Edition) by Peter Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).]], or studied the brilliant works of Christopher Dawson[[For an overview of Dawson’s many works and his unique contribution to Christian history, see Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson by Bradley J. Birzer (Front Royal: Christendom Press, 2007).]], can accept the myth of the Christian “Dark Ages.” Dawson, in particular, makes a point of stressing the inner dynamics, and irresistible nature, of Christianity, especially in its early development. If faith in Christ produced nothing but cruelty, intolerance, and fanaticism, it would have lost its appeal long ago. That it has survived—indeed flourished—even at times of great duress, indicates something more has been at work. Among the many failures of Constantine’s Sword is its refusal to acknowledge Christianity’s achievements. One would never know, watching this tract, how Christianity built on Judaism’s unique concept of monotheism and divine love. One would learn nothing about Christianity’s elevation of women, care for the poor, challenge to slavery, advances in science and medicine; nothing about its educational system, wondrous art, extraordinary religious orders-and yes, its philo-Semitism which has been documented every bit as much as have its sins.[[“We can find plenty of instances among Catholics of a similar lack of prejudice towards the Jews—from the far-sighted popes of the time of the Council of Trent right down to the present day. Leo XIII, for instance, in his Encyclical of 15 February 1882 urges both clergy and laity to treat all derogatory generalizations about the Jews as things to be condemned out of hand and energetically to reject anti-Semitism as something wholly contrary to the spirit of Christ.” (The Jews: A Christian View by F. W. Foerster, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961, p. 101); for additional evidence of this, see the books by