Rating: 
Summary: Stunning
Review: This is a stunning work of scholarship.The author very effectively unmasks Catholic anti-Semitism by discussing contraception, women priests, his favorite restaurants in Jerusalem, why he dislikes his father, the war in Vietnam, and how he'd like to rewrite the Bible. He doesn't sully his hands with working with texts in original languages or in dusty archives. If he doesn't like some Church condemnation of anti-Semitism (like Mit Brennender Sorge of Pius XI), he just ignores it. If his material is thin, he just makes up quotes, like the obvious howler he attributes to John XXIII. This is stunning scholarship. How dare any of these reviewers imply that this defrocked, excommunicated prist is anti-Catholic!
Rating: 
Summary: A unbiased view of church jewish relationships.
Review: As a Jew I enjoyed reading a Catholic view of church antisemitism. I found the book to be well researched, documeted and fair in appraising all sides. It was extremly informative and I did learn many new things. I highly reccomend this book to anyone who is interested in history, Judaism, Catholicism or ways of improving relations between people of different backgrounds.
Rating: 
Summary: Courageous
Review: Carrol has the courage to question the basic tenets of the catholic church. He does an good job of showing that all of these tenets are in fact man-made tenets, many developed for political purposes. We need more God knowing men and woman with the courage to challenge antiquated religious dogma, dogma which has for centuries turned many of our more intelligent men and women away from organized religion and sadly away from God. It is encouraging to me to see books appearing on the scene like Constantine's Sword, An Encounter With A Prophet and Conversations With God - books which are more concerned with truth than conforming to any religious dogma no matter how ingrained that dogma is in our society.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing....
Review: I understand and agree that Carroll has concerns with how some members of the Catholic Church has handled Catholic-Jewish relations in past human history. However, it does seem that Carroll goes beyond that and has an ax to grind with the Catholic Church, an institution that he used to be more intimately involved with. The book uses the tragedies of the Jews over the centuries in order to make quite unrelated and entirely internal Christian point that the author thinks the church should be structured differently than it is-i.e. as a democracy-and that its Christology is too high. Whether one agrees with Carroll's theology, however, the point remains that he has absolutely no right to use Jewish suffering over the centuries to push it forward. There is a self-centered character to this book. I first recommend people to read more about the history of the two institutions (Catholicism and Judiasm), and their respective treatments throughout history, before buying this book.
Rating:
Summary: Misleading
Review: This is not a serious work of history. The author, a novelist, clearly has a problem with the Catholic Church's teaching on issues of sexuality and authority. He is gripped by an inexplicable hatred of John Paul II, a courageous foe of anti-Semitism. The result is an anti-Catholic fantasy disguised as a history of anti-Semitism. Many reviewers have noted the outrageously unfair use of sources and the obvious suppression of evidence. This serious issue deserves far more than the cavalier, biased rantings of this novelist, who cannot separate history from his own bitter autobiography as an ex-priest. How sad that this work of prejudice could be taken as serious history by anyone.
Rating:
Summary: an investigative meditation
Review: James Carroll's well researched and well written book is about Christian-Jewish relations over the last two thousand years, but it may also have broader application. An examination of what has separated Christians and Jews may serve as a starting point for looking at what separates Jews and Palestinians, Buddhists and Hindus (Sri Lanka), Hindus and Moslems (India-Pakistan), Catholics, Orthodox and Moslims (former Yugoslavia) and other violent divisions of the human race. (Atheists are not exempt from this fault.) Constantine's Sword examines Christians and their illusions, for it was their (our - I am Catholic) sense of possession of Christ, as if we had a deed to him or he were a magic jewel, that allowed us to separate the world into 'us' and 'them', the 'saved' and those who refused to be 'saved'. Christians turned Christ into an idol. We felt our possession of Christ, the Truth, allowed us to use any club, the bigger the better, to subdue others. The others, by bowing to our violence, bow, not to Christ, but to us. And so we feel like gods. We snatched slavery (our own)from the jaws of freedom. Simone Weil wrote that she would not join the Church because of feat of "attaching (herself) as if to an earthly country." "The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love." We might add 'unreasoning' creatures as well. Carroll's book does not fail to mention that many Christians never fell into the trap of anti-semitism. Noe does he forget the efforts of the Pope, however obscure and minimal, to stop the holocaust. Accusations of one-sidedness or of being anti-Catholic not only miss the point, they are grossly unfair. What he gives us is the opportunity to meditate on how our beliefs, however sincere, often allow us to fail to see our own evil. And, with that meditation, to become children of God. It is time to seek forgiveness: Christ's and, in particular, those we have destroyed, sometimes in his name.
Rating:
Summary: CONSTANTINE'S SWORD - A BRIEF REVIEW
Review: James Carroll's work is exceptional by any standard. I, as a Jew, have long sought a better understanding of the historical threads of anti-semitism which culminated (hopefully) in the Shoah. Carroll, in this detailed and highly readable text, has provided that insight. It is a must reading for Jew and Gentile alike, for though the emphasis is on the past, Carroll has with great intelligence and insight prescribed a means by which the future can be made different. I thank him for his effort.
Rating:
Summary: Excruciatingly correct
Review: This is an unusual study of the "history" between Christians and Jews. Certain originalities should be applauded: 1. Most historians use primary sources. Carroll, however, has developed a new approach to history: the use of secondary sources, especially those having a clear anti-Catholic bias. I really admired the opening chapter when he told us that while other historians use primary sources, he is not bound by those rules. 2. The use of autobiography. Most historians write in the third person. They try to be objective in their use of evidence. But Caroll is free of such silly scholarly constraints. More than half of the book is autobiography: his hatred of his father, his favorite Jerusalem bars, the little literary prizes he has picked up along the way. This really illumines the history of anti-Semitism. 3. Thematic focus. Most old-fashioned readers might think that the theme of the book was anti-Semitism. How refreshing to read a book that claims to be about anti-Semitism, but is really about contraception, celibacy, exegesis, and, oh, how much the author hates his father. This breadth is so refreshing. 4. Full disclosure. Many authors feel the obligation to explain their status in the organization they are criticizing. It's wonderful that Carroll doesn't feel such obligations. The book is so much more convicing when you're not aware that the author is a defrocked and excommunicated priest. It might raise pointless questions about the author's objectivity. It's much better for the author to just keep repeating "I love my church, I love my church." It's so touching to see so many reviewers take up this lovely chant: "But he's a Catholic who really loves his church." How can some benighted people say that this original book is anti-Catholic? Don't they know that the New York Times loved it?
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Summary: From Crucifixion to Holocaust, by fermed
Review: It has been a very long road that Christianity and Judaism have traveled together, and an uncomfortable one; this book (600 pages of text) can only touch the highlights of the trip. In the year 70 Titus and his Roman legions marched through Jerusalem, destroying the temple, slaugtering 600,000 Jews, dispersing the survivors, and bringing an end to the Jewish War. Both the survival of the dispersed Jews and their maltreatment by Christianity, can probably by ascribed to Augustine (425) who opposed the actual extinction of the Jews for Biblical and theological reasons. He wanted these people to survive (but not flourish) in order that they be witnesses to the Biblical prophesies about a Messiah, and in order that their religion be continued as a foil that would enhance Christian doctrine. Had it not been for Augustine's opposition to their slaughter, it is likely that Jews would have disappeared under the power of the Church, just as pagans and heretics everywhere met with their obliteration, always fueled by early Christian theology. Whether there is a straight line uniting the history of the Church with an inevitable Holocaust of the Jews is certainly debatable (and is constantly being debated in modern times). This book advocates such a line in no uncertain terms, and as a reader that was dubious at first, the sheer weight of evidence over the many centuries covered by this book left me quite convinced that without doubt the teachings of the Church were responsible for much, if not all, of the Holocaust. James Carroll is a defrocked priest, and he may have an ax to grind over the institution he divorced; still, his hand is fair in the treatment of the facts, and he most certainly is not unreasonable in his advocacy of Church blame. Carroll's prose is splendid in its lightness and ease of reading. The material covered in this volume could easily have become a prose quagmire, but it did not. I found the reading a true pleasure because of its accesibility and the making of complex (and historically distant) notions easy to grasp and to digest. Even those who do not read history for pleasure will enjoy this book. For amateur historians, the book is extremely well referenced and indexed. The bibliography, however, does not include B. Netanyahu, a modern historian of the Iberian Jews. Netanyahu's views are controversial and perhaps unproven, but no one should write about the Inquisition and the Jew's expulsion from Spain without at least a nod in his direction. Despite this absence I give the book the best possible rating and recommend it highly.
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Summary: Carroll's Triumph over Evil
Review: James Carroll's love of his Church and his faith can only be explained by his ability to find the good in the very flawed Christian religion while rigorously attacking its obvious and historic flaws. Anyone with any extensive knowledge of western history and the Bible, already knows much of Carroll's material. However, he approaches the Christian Church's sinfilled history of violence against the Jews and it's own members who have questioned its own hate-full teachings, as one whose deepest wish is to reform, not to destroy, making his history poignant and lucid. He is much kinder to the terminal Piuses and those failed successors to the good Pope, John XXIII, than their record deserves. But as one whose aim is truly to reform as well as to accuse, he ends his history much like Edger Snow ended his extraordinary exploration of America's relationship to Asia in 1961 - The Other Side of the River - with an outline of a way for the Church and its faithful to both amend the sins of its past and to avoid the terrible results which its present path portends for the future. It is a dense and difficult read, which could have done with a little less reiteration, however, given the leaderships propensity to repeat the mistakes of their perdicessors again and again, perhaps iteration and reiteration and re-reiteration is necessary. Catholic fundamentalists will have as hard a time understanding Carroll position as protestant fundamentalists have with a reading of liberal Christian theology. Closed minds are never opened to rational thought and none are so blind as those which will not see.
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