By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s derogatory statements to Pope John Paul II last week on Jews and Judaism figuratively set Christian-Jewish relations back a couple of millennia. Worse still was the Pope’s silence.

Thankfully, rational commentary on this unfortunate, archaic interchange and history is not solely resigned to Jewish organizations. Former priest, noted author [9 books to date], playwright, civil rights worker, antiwar activist, community organizer and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll has always written from the soul of reason.

Carroll’s eloquent and poignant Judaic-themed columns have long graced the pages of the Globe. From his stark questioning of the Vatican’s track record towards Jews, divining of universal human themes in our origins and long struggle, defense of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem to outright embrace of the religion, one nearly wonders why he hasn’t voluntarily joined it. His recent, 700+ page book "Constantine’s Sword" is the culmination of these varying, reflectively impartial streams of consciousness.

So powerful is this work, so scholastically sound, that John T. Pawlikowski, in the Feb. 2, 2001 edition of the National Catholic Reporter, termed it "a story we must hear."

The American Jewish Committee’s Rabbi James Rudin has commented, "Carroll brilliantly lays out the entire wretched history of the church’s many verbal and theological assaults upon the Jewish religion…[he] is unsparing in recounting the frequent murderous attacks that were the inevitable and preordained result of negative Christian teachings and actions against Jews and Judaism."

Carroll ends his book with heartbreaking agony: "the pope’s silence is better seen…not as the indictment…of Catholicism’s moral failure...but as the evidence…of the worst thing about my church, which is the worst thing about myself. I offer (the book) as my personal penance to God, to the Jewish dead, and to my children."

Former Congressman Rev. Robert F. Drinan, another enlightened Christian scribe, attends a yearly seder at the home of his friend David, an escapee from 1939 Warsaw. "How could there have existed through the centuries ghettos, pogroms, persecutions, and the Holocaust?" he asked in another past Globe column. "Could there be a reconciliation between Jews and Christians in our generation, or at least in the next millennium? What is God trying to tell me at David’s Seder?"

"[God] is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," Drinan drove away thinking one Pesach eve. "He is…the God who made the Jews his chosen people and through them imparted his love to all of God’s 6 billion children."

Carroll has likened the pathos of the Jews to the American experience. "Breaking away from the ancient cyclical religions," he wrote in a column on Madeline Albright’s acknowledgment of her Jewish roots, "Hebrew religion introduced the idea that starting over is an authentic human possibility. It is not incidental that the foundation myth of America…is the great Mosaic story of the crossing of the sea to a new land where a fresh beginning is not only possible, but holy."

As for last week’s debacle, "Assad’s grotesque display of anti-Semitism," Carroll wrote in May 15th’s Globe, "exploited the pope’s well-intentioned effort to honor Islam." "[It] quickly shifted to the failure of John Paul II and the Vatican, speaking then or later, to firmly repudiate the Syrian’s reiteration of the blood libel."

He went on to list many points the pope might have raised, but didn’t, including that "the church has completely renounced the idea that Jews…can in any way be held responsible for the death of Jesus." … "as the enemy of Jesus (himself a Jew to the day he died) — much less as the enemy of God."

"John Paul II could have insisted," Carroll charged, "that Paul, too, remained a faithful Jew to the day he died, and that, indeed, Paul warned Gentiles against contempt for the religion of Israel (Romans 9-11)." "By teaching that Christianity became a ‘new religion’ only gradually,...[he could have conveyed that] the religions can be siblings without being rivals."

"When the pope prayed at the Western Wall in 2000," Carroll reminded all Globe readers, "he was reversing an ancient Christian denigration of the Jewish Temple."

That the pope failed to make these and other stated points, including that the claims to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are rooted in history, Carroll lamented, was both a disappointment and a clear sign of how much more work needs to be done.

Nonetheless, he and Drinan cling to hope.

"One of the feelings that becomes more vivid to me each year at David’s Seder," wrote Father Drinan a few years back, "is the conviction that Catholic-Jewish relations have probably improved more in the last 20 years than in the precious 20 centuries."

"That is also the opinion," he adds, "of Rabbi James Rudin, a nationally recognized ecumenical figure associated with the American Jewish Committee."

"Unlike that of proselytizing religions," Carroll writes, "the Jewish ethic boils down to the injunction: Let other people be other people."

"That those same others have so consistently refused to let Jews be Jews," he pronounces, "is a mortal sin of history."