The protagonist of this convoluted and intellectually stimulating documentary is John Carroll, once a Catholic priest, now a successful writer and the father of two grown children. The film dramatizes Carroll's best-selling 770-page 2001 book of the same name exploring reasons why he left the priesthood. Chief among these is the Church's historical role in the persecution of the Jews. According to Carroll, the New Testament falsifies what is known of history in depicting Jews as Christ-killers, and the Church's culpability all grows from there. Moreover Constantine, the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity, transformed the cross into a sword and Christianity got blood on its hands in the Crusades and the Inquisition; but it got a lot worse when Hitler came along and the Vatican stood by and watched. As the Kirkus review put it, the book 'Constantine's Sword' is essentially the "first 2,000 years of Catholic-Jewish relations retold as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and endat Auschwitz." Perhaps Carroll's most eye-opening point is to remind us that the Nazis were Christians.
To appreciate the film, you have to flow along with Carroll's personal journey and also humor director Jacoby's sometimes tired methodology. Scene after scene is a trite setup where Carroll poses some question, goes somewhere, and gets canned answers from some local expert. It's a device that's been used thousands and thousands of times. Luckily the material is controversial enough to keep things lively anyway.
Carroll's father went from a Chicago slaughterhouse to became so successful as an FBI agent that he was promoted to Edgar Hoover's inner circle and became an Air Force general involved in high-level intelligence planning. Hence John once considered attending the Air Force Academy. So he tells us as he drives there--then dives into descriptions of how Mel Gibson's arguably anti-Semitic 'Passion of the Christ' movie was so heavily promoted at the Academy through evangelicals, cadets felt obligated to attend--and how Jewish cadet Casey Weinstein met with constant anti-Semitism, and how his father Mikey, also an Academy graduate, felt compelled to sue the Air Force for discrimination. Delving into the shocking penetration of evangelical proselytizing at the Academy, Carroll interviews the square-jawed rictus-smiling Colorado evangelical mega-church leader Ted Haggard, evidently a key figure in these machinations.
It's hard to recount in a few paragraphs how it all fits together; maybe it doesn't. No; it does. But many--particularly orthodox Catholics--would hotly dispute the accuracy of some parts. For them, the fabric comes undone.
Anyway, Carroll traces the history of the Emperor Constantine (voiced here by actor Liev Schreiber) as a seminal moment, when the state and Christianity were interwoven, when the Pope became a secular as well as religious leader. The cross became the main symbol of Christianity, with its bloody associations and its sword-like shape and anti-Semitic overtones (if you see the Crucifixion as the fault of the Jews), and the Crusaders went out and massacred Jews in a string of communities in the East.
Another story Carroll tells is that of St. Edith Stein (voiced by Natasha Richardson), a 20th-century Jewish convert to Catholicism who begged for protection from the Nazis in a letter to Cardinal Pacelli, but got no answer and died in the camps. Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, who was called "Hitler's Pope" or "Hitler's Cardinal" for his early friendliness to the Nazis and failure to speak out against the Holocaust. This is part of Carroll's personal story because St. Edith lived in Germany and Carroll's family also lived there while his father was chief of staff of the United States Air Forces in Europe. There were nine children in the family, by the way, which impressed the Pope when the family had an audience. Carroll's time in Germany alerted him not only to St. Edith Stein but to the holy relic of The Robe kept at the Cathedral of Trier, said to have been worn by Jesus at the time of the Crucifixion, which Carroll declares a total fiction. Did he think it authentic when he first saw it in his youth? How much did he really believe, and how much does he just choose to bring up now to strengthen his main indictment? That's not so clear. But What a tangled web we weave (to coin a phrase) when first we practice to believe.
The subject of the papacy leads Carroll to Rome and its ghetto--for which the Vatican was directly responsible, and whose history he presents along with some interesting personal interviews with members of old Roman Jewish families.
Carroll's own fraught time as a Catholic priest was from 1969 to 1974; the (disapproving) Kirkus review asserts that he "remains an angry 1960s-era Catholic." He was galvanized politically by the anti-war movement and stood in protests with Father Daniel Berrigan. His father, on the other hand, ever more deeply involved in the military establishment, headed the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam era, which led to conflicts.
Follow-ups at the film's conclusion include the information about Mikey Weinstein's death threats since he brought suit against the Air Force; complicity of high officials in the US military in religious proselytizing; the resignation of Ted Haggard from his mega-church under a cloud of scandal for drug abuse and a three-year affair with a male prostitute; and information about how the present Pope Benedict XVI has waffled on the issue of Jewish guilt in the scapegoating of the Jews issue.
Carroll ends with a speech about how the world of religion is a "lake of gasoline." If you pitch one match in it, it can fire up. In this context it seems a pity Carroll spends so much time about his personal concern with the troubled relations between Judaism and Christianity, when it is the old conflict with Islam that looms largest nowadays. This limitation is due to the fact that Jacoby and Carroll, even though they did some updating, are basically working with a pre-9/11 source.
To appreciate the film, you have to flow along with Carroll's personal journey and also humor director Jacoby's sometimes tired methodology. Scene after scene is a trite setup where Carroll poses some question, goes somewhere, and gets canned answers from some local expert. It's a device that's been used thousands and thousands of times. Luckily the material is controversial enough to keep things lively anyway.
Carroll's father went from a Chicago slaughterhouse to became so successful as an FBI agent that he was promoted to Edgar Hoover's inner circle and became an Air Force general involved in high-level intelligence planning. Hence John once considered attending the Air Force Academy. So he tells us as he drives there--then dives into descriptions of how Mel Gibson's arguably anti-Semitic 'Passion of the Christ' movie was so heavily promoted at the Academy through evangelicals, cadets felt obligated to attend--and how Jewish cadet Casey Weinstein met with constant anti-Semitism, and how his father Mikey, also an Academy graduate, felt compelled to sue the Air Force for discrimination. Delving into the shocking penetration of evangelical proselytizing at the Academy, Carroll interviews the square-jawed rictus-smiling Colorado evangelical mega-church leader Ted Haggard, evidently a key figure in these machinations.
It's hard to recount in a few paragraphs how it all fits together; maybe it doesn't. No; it does. But many--particularly orthodox Catholics--would hotly dispute the accuracy of some parts. For them, the fabric comes undone.
Anyway, Carroll traces the history of the Emperor Constantine (voiced here by actor Liev Schreiber) as a seminal moment, when the state and Christianity were interwoven, when the Pope became a secular as well as religious leader. The cross became the main symbol of Christianity, with its bloody associations and its sword-like shape and anti-Semitic overtones (if you see the Crucifixion as the fault of the Jews), and the Crusaders went out and massacred Jews in a string of communities in the East.
Another story Carroll tells is that of St. Edith Stein (voiced by Natasha Richardson), a 20th-century Jewish convert to Catholicism who begged for protection from the Nazis in a letter to Cardinal Pacelli, but got no answer and died in the camps. Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, who was called "Hitler's Pope" or "Hitler's Cardinal" for his early friendliness to the Nazis and failure to speak out against the Holocaust. This is part of Carroll's personal story because St. Edith lived in Germany and Carroll's family also lived there while his father was chief of staff of the United States Air Forces in Europe. There were nine children in the family, by the way, which impressed the Pope when the family had an audience. Carroll's time in Germany alerted him not only to St. Edith Stein but to the holy relic of The Robe kept at the Cathedral of Trier, said to have been worn by Jesus at the time of the Crucifixion, which Carroll declares a total fiction. Did he think it authentic when he first saw it in his youth? How much did he really believe, and how much does he just choose to bring up now to strengthen his main indictment? That's not so clear. But What a tangled web we weave (to coin a phrase) when first we practice to believe.
The subject of the papacy leads Carroll to Rome and its ghetto--for which the Vatican was directly responsible, and whose history he presents along with some interesting personal interviews with members of old Roman Jewish families.
Carroll's own fraught time as a Catholic priest was from 1969 to 1974; the (disapproving) Kirkus review asserts that he "remains an angry 1960s-era Catholic." He was galvanized politically by the anti-war movement and stood in protests with Father Daniel Berrigan. His father, on the other hand, ever more deeply involved in the military establishment, headed the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam era, which led to conflicts.
Follow-ups at the film's conclusion include the information about Mikey Weinstein's death threats since he brought suit against the Air Force; complicity of high officials in the US military in religious proselytizing; the resignation of Ted Haggard from his mega-church under a cloud of scandal for drug abuse and a three-year affair with a male prostitute; and information about how the present Pope Benedict XVI has waffled on the issue of Jewish guilt in the scapegoating of the Jews issue.
Carroll ends with a speech about how the world of religion is a "lake of gasoline." If you pitch one match in it, it can fire up. In this context it seems a pity Carroll spends so much time about his personal concern with the troubled relations between Judaism and Christianity, when it is the old conflict with Islam that looms largest nowadays. This limitation is due to the fact that Jacoby and Carroll, even though they did some updating, are basically working with a pre-9/11 source.