Illuminating! In Constantine’s sword, the Documentary, James Carroll is unafraid, but not reckless, in shining light into some particularly dark corners of the edifice of Christianity regarding its treatment of Jews in particular, and its Cross-and-Sword stance in general. The personal memoir aspect of the documentary functions as a laboratory for exploring how decisions that were made (or not made) centuries ago have profound impact on individuals and on religious/military systems today. This important documentary brings to light two urgent prerequisites for world peace: reconciliation among world religions and, for individual believers, a heightened historical consciousness that leads to an informed critique of religious institutions.

–Kathleen Dolphin, PBVM, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Spirituality
Saint Mary’s College
Notre Dame, Indiana

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Professor Mary Boys, Union Theological Seminary “What he narrates in that film happened,” she said. “We need to know about it, so that we make for a different church, and I think we are in a different church. And I want to be a part of a church that has the courage and the maturity to face its own history.”

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James Carroll has compounded the good he does Catholicism, (on its way we hope to being purified of the corrosives of absolutism, exclusivism, triumphalism), by bringing us an expanded, updated and deepened version of his 2001 book.

James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword A Film by Oren Jacoby places the earlier narrative of the book in 2008, in the midst of neo- colonial crusade against Muslims, in an era of appalling growth of Fundamentalisms, especially of the Christian Right in the United States, Christians with an agenda to Christianize our country, beginning with the armed forces.

What Carroll’s film does for Catholics and for Catholicism is to evoke a chastened but confident and vigorous concilior Catholicism, the Catholicism of Pope John XXIII’s hopes, the hopes of a pope who loved people more than power (Yves Congar OP) and who longed to purify the Catholic Church of the corrupting influence of its wayward authoritarianism, absolutism and exclusivism, (all, by the way, masquerading as, you know, “having standards”).

If triumphalism corrupts, and surely it does, then Carroll’s rich personal narrative of his journey from that Catholicism to renewed Catholicism, and of the Church’s own – truncated – journey from corrupt structure of power to a blessed structure of service , his riveting film narrative, is a very great service to our Catholic life indeed.

[Padraic O’Hare is Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at Merrimack College in North Andover, MA., and Director of the College’s Center for the Study of Jewish Christian Relations. He has published widely on traditional Catholic practice of contemplative prayer, on Catholic religious education, on interreligious and Jewish-Christian Relations and teaches in these areas and in Catholic theology and on the lives of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day]

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On James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword – A Film by Oren Jacoby:

“A candid revelation of the tragic morphing of the Christian movement in its first centuries–and the challenge that poses for people of faith today! What began in Galilee as a mission of healing, reconciliation, mercy, and forgiveness (“Good News”) was transformed within a few centuries by its wedding to Roman power. The One who died forgiving his executioners, who endured torture and death on the cross rather than abandon his “Good News,” who spoke of loving our enemies and welcoming the outcast–this One became portrayed as a Roman centurion. Pivotal to this radical shift was the Emperor Constantine, who sought to coopt Christianity and make it the underlying ideology of empire. Only recently recovering from its virulent anti-Semitism, today’s Church now faces the challenge of retrieving non-violence and peace-making as its mission in an age of religious fundamentalism, weapons of mass destruction, and a theology of redemptive violence. This video lays bare both the tragedies of history and the challenge of the present moment.”

Robert A. Ludwig, Ph.D.
Professor of Pastoral Theology and
Director of the Institute of Pastoral Studies
Loyola University Chicago

“Only someone who loves the Catholic Church as James
Carroll does could have made the movie Constantine’s
Sword – A Film by Oren Jacoby. Love does not mean never having to say you’re sorry, it means demanding that the loved one lived up
to its best and highest possibilities. Witness and
atonement: James Carroll has set himself the first
task and demanded the second of the Church he loves.
The film is morally essential for all people of good
will; it is also just plain riveting for anyone who
was a live for any part of the twentieth century.
-Mary Gordon,
Author most recently of “Circling My Mother: A Memoir.”