“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

by James Carroll

The Vatican is on the defensive as Jewish groups object to its decision to move Pius XII, the wartime pope, toward sainthood. James Carroll on the church’s shameful bid to rewrite Holocaust history.

Arbeit Macht Frei was an instance of the Big Lie, a promise of liberation to those who labored in the Nazi death camps. The iconic sign bearing those words arching over the entrance into the prisoners’ area of Auschwitz was stolen last week. Five men have been arrested, and the sign, cut into three pieces, has been recovered. But the event has lasting resonance. The theft was a mortal offense not just because of the death camp’s sacrosanct status, but because it amounts to a removal of evidence. Nothing must be lost of the physical facts of the Holocaust—precisely so that, far into the future, it will be remembered for what it was.

The day after the theft at Auschwitz, as it happens, the Vatican engaged in its version of tampering with Holocaust evidence. While Hitler’s Big Lie stands in a moral category apart, the Roman Catholic hierarchy sponsored a large deceit of its own when it finally and formally declared that Pius XII was a figure of “heroic virtue,” advancing him along the road to sainthood. Obviously, the Vatican has come to a firm conclusion, but its assessment of the wartime pope, from the evidence that exists and the records that have been made public, is factually untrue. Pope Benedict XVI, presiding over this recasting of history, brings his own special edge to it as a German inclined to minimize guilt, and as a defender of absolute papal authority.

The case against Pius XII is well established: He knew early on of Hitler’s plan for the Final Solution of the “Jewish problem,” and never raised his voice against it. The Vatican counters this indictment by honoring him, for example in its 1998 declaration “We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah,” for “personally or through his representatives” having saved “hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives.” It is true that thousands of individual Catholic clergy and lay people acted independently to help Jews to survive, whether nuns in Vichy France, monks in Tuscany, or functionaries in the Vatican itself—yet they are remembered as agents of the pope, acting at his orders.

Meanwhile, Pius XII is not to be held responsible in any way for the millions of Catholics, and other Christians, who, in the absence of his challenge to conscience, either actively participated in the genocide or did nothing to inhibit it. Neither is he charged, more perplexingly, with any responsibility for those senior Catholic officials who helped run the infamous post-war “rat line,” enabling the escape of Nazi war criminals (like Adolf Eichmann) to Latin America.

The archives that might bolster Vatican claims for Pius XII’s extraordinary interventions for hundreds of thousands of Jews have not been open to researchers. Records so far made public show a timid, if anguished, figure—a man who had come to loathe Hitler, but who restricted what opposition he could muster to inconsequential gestures behind the scenes. Heroic? It was one thing for Pius to have said nothing about the fate of innocents in distant countries, but, in October 1943, more than a thousand Jews were rounded up in the Roman Ghetto at the foot of Vatican hill, within sight of the pope’s windows, and still he did nothing. That is a fact. Those Jews died in Auschwitz.

But the actions, or lack of actions, that Pius took during the war leaves aside the even graver question of the moral and political consequences of his strong affirmation of Hitler in 1933 when, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli and the Vatican’s foreign minister, he negotiated the so-called Reichskonkordat, which made the Vatican the first government to enter into a bilateral treaty with Hitler. In addition to giving Hitler enormous prestige when other governments were wary of him, that treaty, not incidentally, protected the rights of the Catholic Church in Germany while explicitly (and secretly) indicating the church would have nothing to say about the fate of Jews (unless they had accepted baptism). Pius never renounced the treaty. That too is a fact.

Despite charges brought against him by some of his fiercest critics, Pius XII was no war criminal, and no friend to Hitler. In many ways, he was like other world leaders at the time who had reason to know what was happening, and found reason to look away. But by what stretch of imagination was he an exemplar of “heroic virtue,” as the Vatican has just decreed? Albeit in a realm apart, this is the Big Lie all over again, and much more is at stake than the reputation of one man. Pope Pius XII’s infamous silence in the face of the Nazi onslaught against the Jewish people was not so much the crime, but the evidence—the evidence of a broad cultural failure, of something corrupt in the civilization that grew out of Christendom.

Pope Benedict’s action this week seeks to destroy the evidence, which is the point. If he were to have his declaration hoisted as a sign, it would say: “The Holocaust was the work of a few Nazis, period.” In fact, that has been a theme of his controversial papal statements on the subject. In Cologne, in 2005, he told an audience of German Jews that Nazi anti-Semitism “was born of neo-paganism,” as if it were unrelated to the long history of Christian anti-Judaism, embodied in the “Christ-killer” slander, and preached from nearly every Christian pulpit nearly every Good Friday for more than a thousand years. Speaking at Auschwitz in 2006, Benedict blamed the Holocaust “on a ring of criminals,” an exoneration of the larger German nation that is almost unheard of among the impressively self-critical Germans of Benedict’s generation. At the death camp, he went on to make the astonishing claim that by eliminating Jews, the Nazis were “ultimately” attacking the church. He complained of God’s silence, but not of the previous pope’s.

One needn’t lay particular guilt at the feet of the young Joseph Ratzinger for his having joined the Hitler Youth or having served in the Wehrmacht. Teenage Germans were not operating as free agents during the Third Reich. It is the mature Ratzinger who prompts troubling questions with his determination to rewrite history—precisely to protect what he would call the “hierarchy of truth” over which he presides. According to this schema, faith is over reason; Christian faith is over other faiths (especially Islam); Roman Catholicism is over other Christian faiths; and the pope is supreme over Roman Catholics, infallible in matters of “faith and morals.”

But the failure of Pius XII to pass the decisive moral test of the 20th century undercuts this hierarchy, and any meaningful claim to papal infallibility—which is why his failure must be denied at all costs. The evidence must be destroyed. That is why Pope Benedict and his circle go beyond defending the ineffectual Pius XII against slanders that say he was worse than others of his time, to declare him nothing less than an exemplar of “heroic virtue,” worthy of canonization. Why? Because—and even if they are convinced of it, that makes the point—“in the Big Lie, there is always a certain force of credibility,” as Hitler put it in Mein Kampf.

Read the story at The Daily Beast

February 5, 2009

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By RACHEL DONADIO

ROME — Responding to global outrage, especially in Pope Benedict XVI’s native Germany, the Vatican for the first time on Wednesday called on a recently rehabilitated bishop to take back his statements denying the Holocaust.

Late last month, the pope revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops, including British-born Richard Williamson, who in an interview broadcast last month denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.

A statement issued on Wednesday by the Vatican Secretariat of State said that Bishop Williamson “must absolutely, unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah,” or Holocaust, which it said were “unknown to the Holy Father at the time he revoked the excommunication.”

The unsigned statement seemed a clear indication that the Vatican was facing an internal and external political crisis.

The day before, in a rare case of a head of state criticizing the pope, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on the pope to clarify his position on the Holocaust, saying his previous remarks had not been “sufficient.”

The statement from the Secretariat of State noted Benedict’s remarks last week in which he expressed his “full and unequivocal solidarity” with Jews and condemned all Holocaust denial, yet it went far beyond the pope’s earlier remarks in which he had never mentioned Bishop Williamson by name.

The four bishops are from the traditionalist St. Pius X Society, founded in 1970 to protest the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including liturgical reforms and a document that absolved contemporary Jews of guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Last week, Benedict had called revoking the excommunication a gesture of “compassion” and a first step on a longer path toward the society’s full reconciliation with the church.

The statement from the Vatican on Wednesday also sought to address significant lingering questions about what conditions the society would have to meet before being fully welcomed back into the fold. It stated that the society would have to offer its “full recognition of the Second Vatican Council” in order to receive “recognition” by the church.

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Pope Reinstates Four Excommunicated Bishops

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: January 25, 2009

Among the four reinstated bishops, one had stirred outrage with comments denying the Holocaust.

New York Times article

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Many of the thousands of letters and emails they receive support the concerns we present, in our account of recent events at the US Air Force Academy, and suggest that  the phenomenon has spread to all branches of the Armed Forces.

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LETTER RECEIVED BY THE MILITARY RELIGIOUS FREEDOM FOUNDATION:

“Imagine yourself arriving to your local veterans administration office for help. You have served in fierce combat, been awarded medals and have been taxed physically by your time in the military. You happen to see a placard and frame of religious rhetoric. Your interest is piqued! You read the display. Your face goes from relatively slack to a faint scowl. That country you are in this office for, injured or otherwise, tells you that it is all for Jesus, because of Jesus. The flag you love and almost lost your life for and watched your buddies die for has been devoted to a religion you do not follow. Remember your Jewish buddy in basic? What about that Hindu soldier that helped pull you to safety after you were wounded? Why is that allowed to happen? Well, walk around a little more. You will find more to be distraught about… Shouldn’t the military remain neutral on these matters? How about a placard of a memorial to those fallen, regardless of faith?

–(Name and rank withheld) United States Army Soldier, 2 combat tours in Iraq” ??????????? ??????? ? ???????? ????????

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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

By Jason Leopold – The Public Record

A U.S. Army soldier was brutally beaten by other soldiers in his platoon earlier this month following two incidents in which a drill sergeants allegedly used anti-Semitic slurs to address the soldier.

Pvt. Michael Handman, 20, who has just completed his fifth week of basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, was recently released from a hospital where he was treated for a concussion, facial wounds, and severe oral injuries following the attack, according to the boy’s father, Jonathan Handman.

The soldier’s father said he received a disturbing telephone call last week from his son’s commanding officer “to tell me that my son is OK and out of the hospital.”

“Apparently he got his clocked cleaned and beat to the point that he was sent to the hospital by ambulance with a concussion,” Jonathan Handman said in an interview. “He was in bad enough shape that they did a head and neck [CAT] scan.”

Jonathan Handman said his son was lured into a laundry room at the Fort Benning Army base by other soldiers, knocked unconscious and beaten while he lay on the ground.

Michael Handman enlisted in the Army earlier this year. He wears a yarmulke with his uniform, which apparently led his drill sergeants to refer to him as a “fucking Jew” and a “kike” and a demand that he remove the yarmulke during dinner, according to his father. The soldier recently wrote a letter to his mother Randi recounting the anti-Semitism he has endured by his drill sergeants and members of his platoon since arriving for basic training at Fort Benning.

“I have just never been so discriminated against/humiliated about my religion,” Michael Handman wrote his mother. “I just feel like I’m always looking over my shoulder. Like my battle buddy heard some of the guys in my platoon talking about how they wanted to beat the shit out of me tonight when I’m sleeping. It just sucks. And the only justification they have is [because] I’m Jewish. Maybe your dad was right…The Army is not the place for a Jew.”

A Fort Benning public affairs representative would not comment on the incidents saying the attack and the anti-Semitism are under investigation. Michael Handman’s father said in an interview he fears for his son’s safety and is worried that his son may continue to endure additional beat downs and taunts about his faith by drill sergeants.

“I’m scared he will become a victim of friendly fire.” Jonathan Handman said. “The Army is not doing enough to protect him. They have mentally broken him to the point that he is willing to ruin his life by getting a dishonorable discharge.”

After he was released from the hospital, Pvt. Handman was sent back to the same platoon to face the soldiers who attacked him. He was then moved to a different company within the same platoon. But Jonathan Handman said his son told him the anti-Semitism has continued, according to a conversation he had with his son.

A week ago Jonathan Handman took action and began a fierce letter writing campaign in an effort to get his son some help. He reached out to his state’s U.S. senator, Saxby Chambliss, the Republican of Georgia. Chambliss immediately contacted the Pentagon to investigate and, surprisingly, the Department of Defense sent Chambliss a detailed letter last week confirming that Pvt. Handman was the victim of anti-Semitism.

“Based on [Private] Handman’s statement and the seriousness of the allegations, the command immediately initiated a commander’s inquiry,” stated a Sept. 26 letter sent to Chambliss by Samuel Selby Rollinson, the Department of the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff. “Based on the inquiry, the Army found that two [non-commissioned officers] inadvertently violated the Army Regulation concerning the free exercise of religion by requiring the Soldier to remove his yarmulke and by using inappropriate terms when referencing the Jewish faith.

“While the actions of the NCO’s were not meant to be malicious, and were done out of ignorance for regulations and cultural awareness, this does not excuse their conduct. The command intends to reprimand both NCO’s for their conduct; require them to present formal blocks of instruction on what religious are authorized for wear; and finally, the battalion chaplain will instruct all cadre members on the Army policy concerning religious accommodation.”

The investigation by the Pentagon was limited to the anti-Semitism and did not include an inquiry into the beating.

Prior to receiving a copy of the letter from Chambliss, the elder Handman contacted Mikey Weinstein, the president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a nonprofit government watchdog group that aims to keep a close eye on the military to ensure its adherence to the law mandating the separation between church and state. Weinstein spent a decade working as a U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG), was formerly legal counsel in the Reagan White House and was General Counsel to Texas billionaire and two-time Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot.

Handman’s allegations that his son was the victim of anti-Semitism and that his son was allegedly beaten because of his Jewish faith resonated immediately with Weinstein.

While attending the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in the 1970s, Weinstein was subjected to a virulent series of anti-Semitic attacks which he describes in gripping detail in his book, With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against An Evangelical Coup in America’s Military (St. Martins Press, 2006).

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Recently, In fact, Weinstein launched MRFF more than three years ago after his sons, Casey and Curtis, also U.S. Air Force Academy graduates, told him they were harassed about their Jewish faith and urged by other cadets and Air Force officials to convert to Christianity. Weinstein’s daughter-in-law, Amanda, likewise an Air Force Academy graduate and a Christian, also experienced wrongful religious pressure from Christian fundamentalist officers at the Academy. Weinstein said his son Curtis, like Michael Handman, was also called “A fucking Jew.”

Recently, Weinstein’s family was the subject of a much-publicized hate crime attack where, among other things, his house was marked with a swastika and a crucifix.

The Army’s cavalier attitude toward the anti-Semitic attacks on Pvt. Handman, as described in the letter to Chambliss, rubs Weinstein the wrong way.

“The Army’s wretched response to this hate crime is, sadly and typically, to trivialize the entire sordid matter,” Weinstein said in an interview. “Those found to be responsible need to face a criminal trial by general courts martial. The United States Army needs to learn, and learn fast, that persecuting anyone and marginalizing them by asserting that they lack character, integrity, veracity and courage because of their chosen religious faith, or lack thereof, is exactly the same thing as attacking someone and telling them that they’re stupid for the color of their skin. Shame, shame on the United States Army.”

After speaking with Jonathan Handman, Mikey Weinstein contacted Lt. Dan Kim, the company commander at Fort Benning, and demanded to be fully briefed “about a hate crime” involving Pvt. Handman.

Weinstein said Kim told him he had “100 sworn affidavits” denying that Pvt. Handman was the victim of anti-Semitism and even went so far as to insinuate that it was possible that Pvt. Handman may have instigated the attack.

Kim would not return messages left on his cell phone or at his office.

“The moment we were contacted by the father, Jonathan Handman, MRFF did what it always does in these ever more frequent, tragic matters of unbridled, military-sponsored Christian religious oppression; we moved at light speed to ensure the victim’s immediate safety. Next, we demanded that the victim’s chain of command comprehensively and fairly investigate and punish those responsible. As that will only happen “when hell freezes over”, I want the Army to understand that MRFF will now use this entire incident in our just-filed Federal litigation against the Department of Defense.

“Indeed, it will serve as yet another heinous example of the pernicious and pervasive pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of the religious liberties of our honorable and noble U.S. service members by their military superiors unlawfully using the armed forces chain of command to force one and only one biblical worldview on their otherwise helpless subordinates.”

Weinstein’s MRFF is a co-plaintiff in a Federal civil suit filed last week in the United States District Court of Kansas against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates alleging the U.S. Army has been subjecting soldiers to fundamentalist Christian prayer ceremonies against their will during mandatory military events. He reiterated that he intends to defend Handman’s case vigorously.

This is not the first incident of anti-Semitism that Weinstein’s organization has exposed that has resulted in the Army running for cover.

Weinstein and MRFF exposed a pattern of anti-Semitic Biblical teachings by chaplains at Fort Leavenworth. He also signed on to help defend former Army Chaplain, Rabbi Jeffrey Goldman, a Toronto native, who was taunted by senior military officers at a prayer breakfast one morning in May 2001 as his chaplain colleagues had placed Nazi uniforms and swastikas on the wall of the officers’ club at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Handman and his wife, Randi, continue to worry about their son’s well being.

“I feel like this was written from the movie “A Few Good Men” and we all know the outcome there,” Handman said, referring to the 1992 Tom Cruise blockbuster about Marines accused of murdering a colleague. “That is what terrifies me. I do not want to bury my only son.”

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