“Constantine’s Sword” is a thoughtful, disturbing attempt to trace the history of Christian anti-Semitism back to the last centuries of the Roman Empire, and an in-depth look at one man’s spiritual journey.

By John Hartl

Special to The Seattle Times

Casey Weinstein, a Jewish Air Force cadet, was called a Christ killer (and things less-repeatable in a family newspaper) when he arrived at Colorado Springs for training in 2004.

Forced to share meals over place mats advertising Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” he felt hounded by his evangelical companions to see the movie. To him, it proved just as anti-Semitic as its critics warned. He was deeply offended by Gibson’s version of the Crucifixion.

“I felt terrible,” he says in the thoughtful, disturbing new documentary “Constantine’s Sword,” which traces the history of Christian anti-Semitism back to the last centuries of the Roman Empire. In the process, it demonstrates just how lonely and vulnerable a member of a minority religion can be.

The film’s title reflects the belief of its co-writers, Oren Jacoby and James Carroll, that Christianity was essentially nonviolent until it was adopted as the state religion by the emperor Constantine. Later came the Crusades, Pope-approved Jewish ghettos, the Inquisition, other atrocities and the Vatican’s silence during the Holocaust.

The filmmakers visit Auschwitz, Rome and Jerusalem; talk with death-camp survivors and historians; then leave the arguments for converting to Christianity to evangelical spokesman Ted Haggard, who seems every bit as zealous as he was a couple of years ago in another documentary, “Jesus Camp.” (A postscript notes his subsequent fall from grace with a male prostitute.)

But mostly “Constantine’s Sword” deals with the spiritual journey of Carroll, a former Catholic priest who is now married with children. He turned against the Vietnam War (and his military upbringing) during his years as a priest, 1969-74, and fears that the Iraq war will repeat Vietnam’s mistakes. President Bush’s apparently naive use of the word “crusade” haunts him — and the film.

Jacoby, who was nominated for an Oscar for his similar 2004 documentary short, “Sister Rose’s Passion,” doesn’t always succeed in keeping the narrative focused or balanced. Haggard stands out partly because there are so few echoes of his viewpoint in the interviews.

Still, Jacoby and Carroll make their case skillfully, carefully excerpting key scenes from “Lenny” (with Dustin Hoffman doing a Lenny Bruce monologue on anti-Jewish prejudice) and “The Robe” (a 1950s Biblical blockbuster based on a dubious interpretation of Scripture).

While the subject matter might be better handled in a book (“Constantine’s Sword” is based on Carroll’s 2001 best-seller of the same name), the images, deftly accompanied by celebrity voices (Liev Schreiber is Constantine, Natasha Richardson is Auschwitz martyr Edith Stein), are used to surprisingly strong effect.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com

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As this documentary opens we learn of the lawsuit brought about by some Air Force Academy cadets who are not Christian, or as so gently put, non-believers. They were constantly being harassed and persecuted not only by other cadets but also by teachers and staff. Carroll, who lived on the Academy grounds as a kid because his father was a high-ranking Air Force General, had to go there and find out himself. Following Carroll’s journey, we learn why he became a priest and why he left the religion he loved but never lost his faith. For him, the church back then stood for values that would make the Christian Right in America today scream treason. ????? ??? ???????

This movie looks deeper into the Christian past, starting with Constantine’s fateful vision of the cross and the battle for Rome which he won and attributed it to, and then working its way through the Inquisition and Crusades all the way up to the Nazi occupation of Europe. As Carroll came to realize during this journey, those ideals he thought Christianity stood for back in the ‘60s, were a quick flash of hope in a world trying to break free from the fear and oppression of which this religion endorses completely.

The Gospels teaches the Jews killed Jesus so they became the enemy of every Christian, and deep down every Christian knows if the Jews don’t convert they too must suffer the wrath of God. When I say convert, I means accepting Jesus as their Lord and savior. The Inquisition was set up to does just that, and nations who wanted to stay in favor with God followed suit. Soon throughout Europe, Jews and non-believers were slaughtered.

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Yes, then there were the Crusades, which look to have started all over again; these battles were mainly to keep powerful landowners from fighting amongst themselves. The Pope, who has more money than God, but needs armies to protect it, paid his fighters to stop fighting amongst each other and to go take back the holy land from the Muslims.

Let us not forget about the in-house fighting among those who consider themselves Christian, along with the conversion of savages in the Americas and Africa. Christians themselves don’t always get along. Violence between Catholic and Protestant was alive and heating up to the latter part of the 20th century, including Hitler who called himself a Christian and said he was doing the Lord’s work by killing the non-believing Jews. The church at this time, epically the Pope didn’t do a thing while trainloads of Jews were hauled off to concentration camps. The Christian world said nothing, because remember, the Jews killed Jesus. We think it’s just Islam who will kill you if you don’t convert, well, their brother religion here has a lot more blood on its hands, and not just because it’s been around longer.

A film like this must be watched for it proves to the viewer this religion of love is being used as a religion of hate, and this hate is pouring out into the American landscape. American history is trying to be re-written as if the Bible was and is the only cornerstone of our nation, and that the Constitution was designed after the Bible and the Ten Commandments, which is a lie. Constantine’s Sword reminds us why governments and religions should respectfully stay separated as it says in the First Amendment. This documentary lays out the facts like a history book and, unlike The Da Vinci Code

and Fox News’ “War on Christmas” this documentary is true with facts and evidence. There is no denying the reality of what is happening in this country today with almost a new mega-church popping up a day. Rev. Ted Haggard even took time from doing meth and having gay sex to let us know of this good news. He said that saving everyone was every Christian’s mission, no matter whom it is or where they are at.

Non-believers like myself will find this interesting and kind of scary, and though we think we live in an age of logic and reason, of science and math, there are those who wish to go backwards in time, to forget theories learned and freedoms won. They do this for reasons beyond they’re own comprehension, but yet follow it blindly with no questions asked. Me, I love to ask questions; this is one reason why I don’t believe. As for the lawsuit against the Air Force Academy, the court dismissed it because there was “no bodily harm” done. You know, nobody was crucified or thrown to the loins.

This is Fumo, looking over his shoulder a little more often now.

Written by Fumo Verde

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So how do we reconcile our cultural upbringing and faith – our inherited views on the world – with what’s true; and not just that, but also take responsibility for the consequences when disingenuous hands pull the cords of government in Christianity’s name?

When I saw Oren Jacoby’s documentary film Constantine’s Sword, a discerning exploration of Christian-influenced political power, violence, and war, I grasped for the first time how Christian hegemony institutionally feeds militarism. The film explores the life and work of James Carroll, a journalist, author, and former Roman Catholic priest who became politicized during the US war against Vietnam and who wields his continued faith to interrogate the “things people do in the name of God.”

Adapted from Carroll’s 2001 book, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History , in the space of 95 engaging minutes the film focuses on the roots of Christian zealotry in US political affairs – and the consequences for Jews.

Carroll grew up Irish-Catholic. His father, a devout Catholic, was an FBI agent who became an Air Force general and headed the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Cold War and the war in Vietnam. Speaking very personally, Carroll insists that “we have some clear reckoning with history to do.”

As a current sign of the relationship between Christianity and the military, the film details the growing conservative Christian evangelical movement headquartered in Colorado Springs – which is also home to the United States Air Force Academy – and exposes attempts within the school to convert non-believing cadets, including Jewish ones.

But more importantly, the film reviews how contemporary Christian militarism in the US fits into the long centuries of violent Christian anti-Semitism. As one scholar in the film says, “If you want to understand anti-Semitism, don’t study Jews, study non-Jews.” Carroll takes us back in time to do that, journeying to the Vatican; the Rhine River valley in Germany, a site where, in the 11th century, European crusaders wiped out entire Jewish settlements; and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

The film revisits Constantine I, who in the fourth century CE took over Rome after supposedly having a vision of his sword in the form of the cross. As the newly crowned emperor of the Roman Empire, Constantine established Christianity as the state religion. The film claims that Constantine (who killed his eldest son and wife) used Christianity to “strengthen his hold on power” by uniting Rome under the cross.

Carroll says that before Constantine invoked the cross as a symbol of execution and the celebration of military might, Christians had tended to favor religious images of life – the fish, lamb, and shepherd.

Carroll asks, “How did Jews get cast as the villain?” The film confronts the supposed role of Jews in Jesus’ death on the cross, and the blame placed on the heads of all Jews by Catholic and Protestant leaders down through the centuries. ???? ????? ??????? ????

He traces the murderous use of this anti-semitic slander. Carroll reflects deeply on how “people paid with their lives for the way that story was told.” Jews were blamed for sickness throughout Europe, and persecuted through forced Christian conversions, ghettoization, pogroms, expulsions, and killings. Religious attacks on Jews were supplemented with persecutions based on “blood,” through racial laws upheld by the Roman papacy.

The film charts the complicity and influence of popes who supported governments from Constantine’s to those of our current time. In one example, the future Pope Pius XII (then a Cardinal) forged a bilateral concordat with Hitler in 1932, which Carroll sees as a “symbol of the alliance between church and state.” As Pope, he later refused to speak out publicly and explicitly against the Nazi persecution of the Jews. He even ignored a letter of warning from Edith Stein, a Jewish philosopher who had converted and become a Catholic nun, and who later was killed in Auschwitz.

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For Carroll, this trajectory details the immorality of using “religion as a possible sponsor of war,” and he laments that Protestantism has come to adopt that same program.

Carroll’s exposé of the crimes of the first Crusades is relevant to understanding George Bush’s “crusade” against terrorism. The institutional treatment of a religious-ethnic group with “intolerance, suspicion, and hatred” is not new. In a political climate in which it is increasingly acceptable to target Muslims with vitriol and violence, Carroll points out, “Islam is accused of the problem [of religiously motivated violence], as if Christianity is innocent.”

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Searching but un-preachy, Carroll bears witness with deep reflection, sorrow, and concern. At Birkenau, he rests his hand on the shoulder of a crying survivor of the death camp who daily walks visitors through the verdant grounds, which are now marked by a towering cross.

Constantine’s Sword is a personal and historical investigation that’s daring and necessary – an earnest warning that “no war is holy.” If you miss it in the theater, look for the film on DVD starting in August.
by Melony Swasey

From Peacework Magazine Issue 387 – July-August 2008

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“Every religious person has to take responsibility for the way in which their tradition promotes intolerance and hatred.”

These are the words of author, former priest and disenchanted Catholic James Carroll, and they drive home one of the central themes of Oren Jacoby’s documentary Constantine’s Sword. The film looks at several historical examples of a fused church and state and documents the marginalization, oppression and death such a merging produces—often in Christianity’s name.Constantine’s Sword is an adaptation of Carroll’s 2001 book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History. The movie begins with Carroll’s trip to the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where there are reports of commanding officers pressuring cadets to convert to evangelical Christianity.Through his ever-present shit-eating-grin, former pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life evangelical megachurch ardently defends proselytizing cadets. Haggard asserts that Christians have the right to go anywhere and express their opinions to whomever they’d like, even nonbelievers. “I drink Coke, and I have to listen to Pepsi commercials,” Haggard uses as rationale. After the film was made, revelations about Haggard’s involvement with a former male prostitute forced him to relinquish his title as a minister.

The film then rewinds back to the fourth century AD, where the Roman Emperor Constantine is about to leave his mark on Rome and religion forever. It was Constantine, the film explains, who made the cross a popular Christian symbol back in the early 300s. Before then, Carroll says, Christianity had used symbols of life such as the fish or the shepherd. It was only after the cross, a symbol of death, became its predominant symbol, that Christianity mimicked its violent iconography.

The film then delves into the death and destruction caused to Jews during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust. Constantine’s Sword also examines the current War on Terror and the potentially negative effect that President George W. Bush’s good vs. evil rhetoric has had on the Muslim community worldwide.

The grand historical narrative the film follows is interspersed with segments about Carroll’s personal life. His father was a devout Catholic who went from being a slaughterhouse worker to an Air Force General. Carroll was a priest during the Vietnam War, but his pacifist views caused him to feel alienated from the church. He left the priesthood in the ’70s.

Carroll’s tone is far from whimsical, but he has a calm demeanor that’s comforting, especially during the film’s more disheartening moments. He has not lost all faith in Catholicism and notes that his relationship with God remains strong.

But he does not shy away from criticizing Catholic leaders. Carroll and others in the film reprimand Pope Pius XII for signing a secret agreement with Hitler that said he would not do anything to protect the lives of unconverted Jews. A less harsh scolding is leveled upon current Pope Benedict XVI for blaming the Nazis’ racist ideology on “neo-paganism.” Carroll accuses the Pope of not telling the whole truth about the Catholic Church’s roll in perpetuating the extermination of Jews.

At its most fundamental level, Constantine’s Sword is about power and its relation to religion. Carroll is adamant that religions should own up to their role in major atrocities, and he cites clear examples where historical truths are obfuscated by religious leaders.

Constantine’s Sword is an engaging, un-obtuse and thoroughly intriguing documentary that grapples with some of the biggest issues facing religion. The film makes a powerful case that unless these problems are met head-on, they’ll never go away.  Read at alibi.com

Oren Jacoby’s Constantine’s Sword, which opens today at the Belcourt, takes a careful and extensive look at a subject that almost always invokes strong reactions whenever discussed: religion.

It is based on the book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, which was written in 2001 by acclaimed and award-winning author, journalist and former Catholic James Carroll. Carroll’s also the focal point of the documentary.

His primary focus involved examining the roots of Anti-Semitism within the Catholic Church, though he extends his study into many other areas. The film contains lengthy portions devoted to the Crusades and Inquisition, and explores links between religion and intolerance, violence and war.

Though clearly unhappy and dissatisfied in many ways with the faith that was once the centerpiece of his life, Carroll is quick to disavow any notion he doesn’t consider religion important, nor understand the value and impact it still enjoys in many people’s lives.

Carroll also ponders why so many ugly and negative things have been done in the name of religion. He focuses on such key figures as Pope Pius XII and Pope Benedict XVI, discussing what he sees as gross failures to address issues ranging from the Holocaust to more recent sex scandals.

There’s also a conversation with Ted Haggard, who when he spoke with Carroll was the pastor of the New Life Megachurch. Haggard later had to step down after a scandal involving a male prostitute, something that makes some of his comments rather suspect.

But Carroll never comes across as combative or angry. Instead, he’s inquisitive and truly interested in seeking answers to complex difficult questions.

Raised in a devout (and military) home, Carroll had to decide whether to follow the father he idolized and join the Air Force (his father was a general) or pursue the priesthood, which he ultimately selected. But his ardent anti-war views led to clashes with papal authority plus an estrangement from his father.

Carroll was eventually ousted from his position as priest in the early ‘70s, though he’s since participated in many interfaith gatherings over the years between Catholics, Jews and Muslims. He maintains friendships and relationships with his former church, and considers himself a disillusioned rather than lapsed Catholic.

Constantine’s Sword is outstanding investigative reporting. Whether the setting is Germany, Rome, or in Carroll’s former home in Colorado, there are consistently insightful discussions and exchanges.

No matter your views on religion and its place in society, Oren Jacoby’s film offers plenty of information and opinion to carefully consider, debate and analyze.

Constantine’s Sword
Directed by: Oren Jacoby
Starring: James Carroll
Rating: No rating
Time: 93 minutes
Our view: Magnificent and thorough, examining a vital subject with clarity and in a fair, if at times controversial, fashion.

*Constantine’s Sword Former priest turned bestselling author James Carroll is our guide through the long history of complicity between Christianity, military force, and the persecution of others, with a focus on anti-Semitism. Troubled by “the things people are doing in the name of God” today, he notes that “Jews were considered Christ-killers from the start of Christianity as a state religion” under Emperor Constantine, who may well have converted out of political expediency —

or because it was the only faith that could stretch far enough to forgive his own myriad sins. (In one year alone he had his wife and eldest son killed.) The Crusaders targeted Jews before going after Muslims; the Inquisition followed suit; Roman Jews were virtually incarcerated in a walled ghetto for 300 years until the mid-19th century. Another hundred years later, the Vatican turned a discreet blind eye to the Nazis. Carroll finds all of this compelling on a personal level, as he was raised in a highly devout Catholic military family (which at one point was granted an audience with the Pope) and was once torn between choosing the priesthood and following his Air Force General father’s path. (They had a major falling out when Carroll joined Vietnam War protests, and, in disillusionment, left the church.) He worries now about the influence of religious zeal on political and military policies not just in the White House, but in ground-level training: stationed just a short hop from now-disgraced preacher Ted Haggard’s New Life megachurch, several thousand cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs found their dinner places embellished with flyers for The Passion of the Christ. This absorbing documentary directed by Oren Jacoby roams the globe and combs the archives to further fill out Carroll’s very strong case for keeping church and a hawkish state well separated. (1:35) Roxie. (Harvey)   Web link

More than 450 people came to the beautiful Coolidge Corner Cinema on Thursday night, May 29 for the opening night screening, followed by a Q&A with James Carroll and Oren Jacoby. The audience responded to the screening and so did the reviewers: Boston Globe review

by Stephen Holden

At the heart of Oren Jacoby’s screen adaptation of James Carroll’s book “Constantine’s Sword” lies a question to which each person of faith must find his own answer. When your core beliefs conflict with church doctrine, how far should your loyalty to the church extend? The same could be asked of loyalty to a government or a political party. (NYTimes.com)

Fallen Ones, The movie download Mr. Carroll, a former Roman Catholic priest and an acclaimed author whose memoir, “An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us” won a 1996 National Book Award, vehemently disagrees with the church on many issues but still embraces Catholicism. A former anti-Vietnam War activist, now in his mid-60s, he is an eloquent screen presence who conveys the same searching moral gravity that characterized other Catholic war resisters during the Vietnam era.

At once enthralling and troubling, the film, whose title has been simplified from the book’s “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History,” does about as good a job as you could hope of distilling a 750-page historical examination of religious zealotry and power into 95 swift minutes. Because the book was published several months before 9/11, the film adaptation, which was written by Mr. Jacoby and Mr. Carroll and uses the voices of Liev Schreiber, Philip Bosco, Natasha Richardson and Eli Wallach, updates the book’s pessimistic vision of how religions demonize one another to include Christian and Islamic fundamentalism as well as anti-Semitism.

What must Middle Eastern Muslims feel, Mr. Carroll wonders, when George W. Bush throws around concepts like good and evil and uses the word crusade to describe the Iraq war? Mr. Carroll worries that we may be heading toward an all-out holy war between state-supported religious extremists.

The movie begins in Colorado Springs where Mikey Weinstein, an alumnus of the United States Air Force Academy, describes the harassment of his son, Casey, a Jewish cadet, by evangelical Christians who over several days blanketed the student cafeteria with fliers promoting the Mel Gibson film “The Passion of the Christ.” There is no doubt in his mind that the film promoted an inflammatory view of Jews as Christ killers. He sued the Air Force, but the case never made it to trial.

Aggressively arguing the evangelicals’ right to proselytize is Ted Haggard, the former pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, who was filmed for this movie before his fall from grace in a scandal involving a former male prostitute. Fiery-eyed and grinning maniacally, Mr. Haggard suggests a Paul Lynde caricature of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. The evangelical fervor in Colorado Springs is the somewhat tenuous topical hook on which the movie’s exploration of religion and power is hung.

Woven into the film is Mr. Carroll’s family history. Born Irish Catholic, he is the son of a former F.B.I. agent who became a three-star general and an enthusiastic prosecutor of the Vietnam War. When Mr. Carroll was a boy, his family had a private audience with the pope, and he recalls his feelings of awe. Years later he became an ardent opponent of the Vietnam War. His estrangement from his father began when, shortly after becoming a priest, he referred to napalm in a sermon.

The movie then dives into the distant past for Mr. Carroll’s alternative, shadow history of the Catholic Church. He dates the notion of Christian militancy to the early fourth century, when the future emperor Constantine I, on the eve of a battle for control of the Roman Empire, had a vision of the cross in the sky inscribed with words promising that under its sign he would conquer. After the battle, in which he led a victorious army wielding a sword in the shape of a cross, he legalized Christianity and the cross, previously a minor symbol, became synonymous with Christian might.

He traces the origins of Christian anti-Semitism to Constantine’s birthplace in Trier, Germany, where Crusaders sailing down the Rhine systematically destroyed Jewish communities, which the pope refused to protect unless the people converted. Centuries later Trier was the site of an agreement between the Catholic Church and Hitler, negotiated with the future Pope Pius XII, whose later refusal to speak out during the Holocaust Mr. Carroll considers to be a great shame of the church.

In the most moving segment Ms. Richardson is heard reading a letter written in 1933 to Pope Pius XI by Edith Stein urging him to speak out against Nazi persecution of the Jews. A Jewish convert to Catholicism and a Carmelite nun, Stein died in Auschwitz in 1942. The letter, which went unanswered, was made public in 2003, five years after she was canonized.

Above and beyond criticizing the church’s refusal to stand up to Hitler, “Constantine’s Sword” is a cri de coeur about the abuse of religion when aligned with the state. Jesus, “the prince of peace,” Mr. Carroll insists, was not an intolerant warmonger.

“If you think of religion as a great lake,” he warns, “it’s a lake of gasoline, and all it’s going to take is someone to drop a match into it for a terrible conflagration.”

Alison Bailes and Jeffrey Lyons review the historical film that explores the dark side of Christianity.  Watch the video

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