New U.S. Release
Constantine's Sword
(Docu)
By RONNIE SCHEIB
A First Run Features/Red Envelope Entertainment release of a Metropole Film Board presentation, in association with Prologue Prods., of a Storyville Films production. Produced by Oren Jacoby, James Carroll, Michael Solomon, Betsy West. Executive producers, Carroll, Jacoby. Co-producer, Donald Cutler. Directed by Oren Jacoby. Written by James Carroll, Jacoby, based on the book by Carroll.
With: James Carroll, Liev Schreiber, Phillip Bosco, Natasha Richardson, Eli Wallach.
(English, Italian, German dialogue)
Casting bestselling author/columnist James Carroll as the teller of his own tale, Oren Jacoby's magnificent, thought-provoking essay film "Constantine's Sword" examines the unholy alliance between organized religion and military power. Jacoby's focused yet peripatetic approach perfectly suits Carroll's unique blending of historical and personal pilgrimages, as he travels to the U.S. Air Force base at Colorado Springs on the one hand and to ancient Rome on the other. Taking anti-Semitism as a paradigm for religious intolerance, Carroll sets out to ascertain where Christianity went wrong. Highly controversial, deeply felt docu bows April 18 at Gotham's Quad and Lincoln Plaza.
Analyzing the church's part in the persecution of Jews proves revelatory on many levels, particularly from the vantage point of ex-priest Carroll, whose religious convictions led him to leave the church. Early in the docu, a Jewish scholar tells Carroll that if he wants to understand anti-Semitism, he shouldn't ask Jews. So Carroll travels to where all roads lead, Rome, tracing militant Catholicism back to the third century A.D. and the Emperor Constantine's vision that transformed the cross into a sword, conquered Rome and converted it to Christianity.
Carroll wanders the byways of the ancient city, following the traces of the emperor's conquest, from the huge toe fragments of Constantine's colossal statue to the bridge over the Tiber where Christian "comforters" led Jewish women to be hanged and burned. Carroll also meets with Jews in Rome whose roots date back to the Inquisition, recounting the long, sorry history of the Sephardic Jews and the papacy.
Jacoby supplements Carroll's private musings and casual interactions with artifacts that are absolutely integral to his subject's quest: vintage woodcuts, '40s newsreels, a Christian comicbook pictorializing the conversion of "the Jew that hid the Holy Cross" and a choice reproduction of the 15th-century papal edict that foreshadowed the Holocaust by walling Jews into ghettos, denying them basic rights and mandating that they wear special insignia.
What makes Carroll's history lesson vividly immediate is that his itinerary mirrors his own inner journey. As Carroll puts it, with a mother named Mary, a father named Joseph, and the initials "JC," God was practically part of the family. When Carroll's father, a high-ranking Air Force general, was stationed in Germany, his mother took him to sites commemorating St. Helena, Constantine's German-born mother. In the 1960s, as contemporaneous footage attests, Carroll was not the only priest to oppose the war in Vietnam, but he may have been the only one to demonstrate beneath his father's window.
Continuing his odyssey to discover the "things people are doing in the name of God," Carroll motors to another idealistic beacon of his childhood -- the Air Force Academy, here under the proselytizing spell of Ted Haggard in his pre-scandal, evangelical heyday. It may be a toss-up as to which is more frightening, the hooded figures of the Inquisition or the fanatical grin with which Haggard proclaims his Bush-sanctioned right to infiltrate the military and convert its members.
Tech credits are solid, including stellar voiceovers by Liev Schreiber, Phillip Bosco, Natasha Richardson and Eli Wallach.
Constantine's Sword (2007) NYT Critics' Pick
This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
When Love of Religion Leads to Hatred of Others
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: April 18, 2008
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 his find 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.
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 Leiv 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.”
CRITIC'S PICK
A piercing look at the church's crusading ways
Constantine's Sword
Directed by: Oren Jacoby
Written by: James Carroll and Jacoby, based on the book by Carroll
Starring: James Carroll
At: Coolidge Corner
Running time: 96 minutes
Unrated (big ideas, blows against church orthodoxy)
In English, Italian, and German, with subtitles
+
By Ty Burr
Globe Staff / May 30, 2008
A documentary that zooms in scope from the millennial to the profoundly personal and back again has no business working, yet "Constantine's Sword" speaks provocatively to history and our moment. Adapted by author and Boston Globe op-ed columnist James Carroll and director Oren Jacoby from Carroll's 2001 book, "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History," the film is a dense yet fiercely eloquent examination of how and when Christ's message of peace became perverted into an instrument of war.
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Carroll's larger point is that this war has been waged over the centuries against non-believing "others" - Jews, primarily, and Muslims - and continues to underlie much Catholic and evangelical Protestant groupthink, up to and including the current US administration. "Constantine's Sword" isn't an anti-Bush screed, though, but a patient condemnation of church fear and power politics from the fourth century AD on.
Through travels to the Vatican and Germany and interviews with scholars, Carroll and Jacoby recast the conversion of Constantine to Christianity in 312 as an expedient way to distinguish himself from the pack vying for control of Rome. "This is the moment when the cross and the sword become one," intones Carroll of the future emperor's vision. "Christianity becomes violent."
The film traces the rise of anti-Semitism as part of church orthodoxy through the Crusades and the Inquisition - "the sin was no longer in [the Jews'] belief but in their blood" - and tosses out fascinating nuggets such as a Jewish family in Rome that has served as dishmaker to the Pope for centuries.
The modern manifestation, and the springboard for Carroll's coolly measured outrage, is the infiltration of evangelical Christianity into the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., where officers have pressured cadets to convert and marginalized those who resisted. "Constantine's Sword" sees the merging of religious belief and military bureaucracy as a profoundly worrisome development of the post-9/11 era.
"No religion? That's anti-American. We are not an atheistic society," counters pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs. Haggard was interviewed for the film before revelations of his involvement with a male prostitute forced him to step down, and his toothy fatuousness serves as a caricature of hypocritical New Christian zeal.
The film's more valuable for aiming at less obvious targets, such as Pope Pius XII, whom the film accuses of turning a deaf ear to the Holocaust, or the current Pope Benedict XVI, who has blamed the Nazis' "insane racist ideology" on "neo-Paganism" while dodging the church's own culpability. "Every religious person has to take responsibility for the way in which their tradition promotes intolerance and hatred," says Carroll, and his clarity is admirable.
The writer isn't a lapsed Catholic but a deeply disillusioned one who has turned his faith to scouring his church of its entrenched hatreds and blind spots. Carroll's life history is surprisingly germane to the film, since his own father was an FBI agent who rose to become a three-star Air Force general while remaining a devout Catholic; Carroll himself left the priesthood during the Vietnam War era to become a writer, activist, and gadfly.
"Constantine's Sword" should be seen not just as a provocation. Rather, it pulls a viewer back to see the outlines of state-sponsored religious ideology in our history and our current affairs, and it begs us to consider how dangerously far we've come from Christ's message of love for all mankind. The tone is gentle but the message is unyielding: "No war is holy." Period.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.co