Constantine's Sword

NEW YORK (CNS) -- In "Constantine's Sword" (First Run), an earnest but unbalanced documentary based on his book, "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History," Boston Globe columnist James Carroll surveys the fraught history of Christian anti-Semitism, particularly as it plays out among American evangelicals today, and its roots dating back to the early days of the Roman Catholic Church.

Director Oren Jacoby -- whose Oscar-nominated 2004 film, "Sister Rose's Passion," told the story of Sister Rose Thering, a Dominican nun who took a pioneering role in bettering Catholic-Jewish relations -- broadly outlines the tragic conflict. But the script (co-written by Jacoby and Carroll) ignores significant nuances, occasionally even challenging the veracity of the Gospels.

As history and theology, the film is considerably flawed and has a pervasive anti-institutional church bias.

A Paulist priest from 1969 to 1974, Carroll begins with a visit to the U.S. Air Force Academy where recent efforts at proselytizing by evangelical cadets have stirred controversy. Casey Weinstein, a Jewish cadet, describes the hostility he has experienced because of his faith, and we later learn that his father, Mikey Weinstein, an academy graduate, has received death threats after bringing a lawsuit against the Air Force.

While the Rev. Ted Haggard, former pastor of the nearby New Life Church, who subsequently resigned after a sex and drug-abuse scandal, asserts that spreading the Gospel is a mandate for all Christians, he fails to acknowledge that prudence must be exercised in fulfilling this command.

In his search for the roots of Christian anti-Semitism, Carroll turns to the New Testament's accounts of Jesus' trial. Backed up by scholar Elaine Pagels, author of "The Gnostic Gospels," he asserts that the Evangelists whitewashed the Romans' role in Jesus' execution and shifted the blame to the Jews, thus initiating the charge of deicide that would be used by later Christians as a pretext for persecution.

Such an analysis cannot be reconciled with the inspired nature of the Scriptures. While the Evangelists may differ on minor points and each has his own theological preoccupations, they offer a coherent testimony to Christ's salvific passion and death. To deny that and to assign defamatory motives to their writings undermine the foundations of Christian faith.

Undoubtedly, the Gospels were used at times as a justification for condemning all Jews and even persecuting many. The Second Vatican Council's declaration on relations with non-Christians, "Nostra Aetate," explicitly rejects that use of the Gospels when it says that "what happened in (Christ's) passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today."

At another point, when discussing the authenticity of the seamless robe of Jesus, a relic of which he saw as a child in Trier, Germany, Carroll describes the actual garment mentioned in the Gospel of John as "pure invention," apparently because it fulfills too neatly the prophecy contained in Psalm 22 about soldiers dividing his garments.

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Carroll further argues that it was the Emperor Constantine (voice of Liev Schreiber) who elevated the cross, with its purported anti-Jewish associations, to the status of Christianity's primary symbol. Though early Christian art generally avoided depicting Jesus' crucifixion, and scholars have identified a number of possible reasons for this inhibition, the tradition of making the sign of the cross is documented as early as the second century. Constantine ruled Rome A.D. 306-337.

During the widespread pogroms set off by the Crusades, Carroll tells of a bishop who would only offer protection to those Jews who converted. But there is existing documentation of others who offered their Jewish neighbors unconditional protection, even if they were not always successful at single-handedly holding off the Christian mobs.

Carroll also recounts the story of St. Edith Stein (voice of Natasha Richardson), a philosopher, a convert from Judaism and a Carmelite nun gassed in 1942 at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland, but he fails to mention that such converts were rounded up in retaliation for the Dutch Catholic bishops' public denunciation of Nazi racism. That sequence of events may have influenced Pope Pius XII's decision to avoid a similarly explicit public declaration, a policy Carroll excoriates repeatedly.

Inextricably interwoven with Carroll's view of church history are seminal episodes from his life story. His father, an ex-FBI special agent turned Air Force general, was the officer who first identified the imported Russian weaponry in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. His later role as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War became a source of conflict with his newly ordained son, who publicly opposed the war.

It doesn't take a doctorate in psychology to see that Carroll's disenchantment with the church, which he once regarded with wide-eyed idealism, is deeply intertwined with his personal issues with his father. Indeed, his apparent wonderment at discovering the atrocities of the Crusades and the Inquisition seems either naive or disingenuous.

Carroll's current alienation from the church extends to Pope Benedict XVI, and he decries some of the pontiff's public statements and the recent revision of a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews.

As a record of one disaffected Catholic's spiritual journey, "Constantine's Sword" -- which also includes voice work from Eli Wallach and Philip Bosco -- may elicit some passing interest. But the film, as history and theology, is considerably flawed with a pervasive anti-institutional-church bias and a pattern of reducing complex realities to caricature.

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The film contains mature religious themes, one use of the f-word and occasional crude and crass language. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is L -- limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. Not rated by the Motion Picture Association of America.

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops