Constantine's Sword
Directed by Oren Jacoby
at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and The Quad Cinema
Shortly after Hitler came to power, a young German nun wrote a letter to Pope Pius the 11th. Sr. Benedicta, asks, “Holy Father… Isn’t the extermination campaign pursued against those of Jewish blood an insult to the most holy humanity of our Redeemer?” signing the letter as Dr. Edith Stein, her pre-conversion, Jewish name. In 1942, she was arrested and died in a gas chamber.
In one of the most powerful moments in Constantine’s Sword, narrator James Carroll, a former Catholic priest and author of the controversial best-selling book on which the documentary is based, visits the Carmelite convent in Cologne, Germany, to read the letter, which never received a response.
A childhood papal meeting left Carroll feeling “chosen” for priesthood, but he entered the orders during the anti-Vietnam movement. Constantine’s Sword takes him to Colorado Springs to investigate the growing evangelist presence in the U.S. Air Force Academy; to Rome, the Vatican and Germany to probe church-sanctioned anti-Jewish paranoia through the ages. And to the hardest place of all—his childhood.
With piercing honesty, Carroll holds up pieces of his own life—the Good Friday Bible readings, his relationship with his father who was a General in the Air Force, his privileged childhood as an American in post-war Germany, his hero worship of Constantine the Roman emperor—to identify symptoms of fanaticism in a larger cultural history.
Carroll represents a particular kind of activism—he is simultaneously fierce (“If the B52 bombers flying over Vietnam had been dropping contraceptives, the American Catholic hierarchy would have condemned that war in a minute”) and gracious (“The president may not have known what he was saying” in response to President Bush’s infamous crusades reference). Admirable as this critical stance is, it does begin with a hardcore refusenik’s confirmation bias: Constantine’s Sword is not an open-ended quest. The way director Oren Jacoby sets up Carroll's agendas for his conversation can remind one very faintly of Michael Moore’s far less gracious tactics.
Far more valuable than simply as an indictment of Christian fundamentalism, Constantine’s Sword records an intensely tortured moment in contemporary spiritual debate. Carroll’s quest to confront the violent history of Christianity is ultimately the challenge of resisting manipulation by what we love—by our faiths, by our countries, by our fathers.
Directed by Oren Jacoby
at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and The Quad Cinema
Shortly after Hitler came to power, a young German nun wrote a letter to Pope Pius the 11th. Sr. Benedicta, asks, “Holy Father… Isn’t the extermination campaign pursued against those of Jewish blood an insult to the most holy humanity of our Redeemer?” signing the letter as Dr. Edith Stein, her pre-conversion, Jewish name. In 1942, she was arrested and died in a gas chamber.
In one of the most powerful moments in Constantine’s Sword, narrator James Carroll, a former Catholic priest and author of the controversial best-selling book on which the documentary is based, visits the Carmelite convent in Cologne, Germany, to read the letter, which never received a response.
A childhood papal meeting left Carroll feeling “chosen” for priesthood, but he entered the orders during the anti-Vietnam movement. Constantine’s Sword takes him to Colorado Springs to investigate the growing evangelist presence in the U.S. Air Force Academy; to Rome, the Vatican and Germany to probe church-sanctioned anti-Jewish paranoia through the ages. And to the hardest place of all—his childhood.
With piercing honesty, Carroll holds up pieces of his own life—the Good Friday Bible readings, his relationship with his father who was a General in the Air Force, his privileged childhood as an American in post-war Germany, his hero worship of Constantine the Roman emperor—to identify symptoms of fanaticism in a larger cultural history.
Carroll represents a particular kind of activism—he is simultaneously fierce (“If the B52 bombers flying over Vietnam had been dropping contraceptives, the American Catholic hierarchy would have condemned that war in a minute”) and gracious (“The president may not have known what he was saying” in response to President Bush’s infamous crusades reference). Admirable as this critical stance is, it does begin with a hardcore refusenik’s confirmation bias: Constantine’s Sword is not an open-ended quest. The way director Oren Jacoby sets up Carroll's agendas for his conversation can remind one very faintly of Michael Moore’s far less gracious tactics.
Far more valuable than simply as an indictment of Christian fundamentalism, Constantine’s Sword records an intensely tortured moment in contemporary spiritual debate. Carroll’s quest to confront the violent history of Christianity is ultimately the challenge of resisting manipulation by what we love—by our faiths, by our countries, by our fathers.
