A personal exploration and an institutional indictment

The protagonist of this convoluted and intellectually stimulating documentary is John Carroll, a former Catholic priest, now a writer and father of two grown children. The film dramatizes Carroll's best-selling 770-page 2001 book exploring reasons why he left the priesthood. Chief among these is the Church's historical demonizing of the Jews and failure to intervene to prevent the Shoah. According to Carroll, the New Testament falsifies what is known of history in depicting Jews as Christ-killers. The Church's culpability in persecution 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 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 end—at Auschwitz." Perhaps Carroll's most eye-opening point is to remind us that the Nazis were Christians.

As a publisher's blurb mentions, the book is "a sprawling work of history, theology, and personal confession," and the movie, while undoubtedly losing nuance and detail from the book, adds one controversial new element: the invasion of evangelical Christianity into the US military--a recent event not at all unrelated to the Bush II administration and one which also has its anti-Semitic aspect.

To appreciate the film, you need to go with the flow of Carroll's personal journey as his concerns lead him as much into his own past as into twentieth-century history and on a world tour that ranges from Colorado Springs to the Roman ghetto. You must also humor director Jacoby's sometimes tired methodology. Scene after scene is a setup where the narrator (Carroll) poses some question, goes somewhere, and somebody pops up to give planned answers. It's a device that's been used thousands and thousands of times, but Carroll's moral conviction and personal intensity help to make it work.

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. Rome's ghetto was a virtual prison for centuries, then liberated, according to Carroll, for only sixty years, from the disbanding of the papal state in 1870 till 1930, when fascist persecution of the Jews led to their being enclosed there again, with many sent from there to extermination. Carroll visits the concentration camp site where St. Edith Stein probably was incinerated, and also a cemetery presided over by a man who lost his family in the Holocaust. He also meets with an Eastern European Jesuit priest whose determination to speak the truth about the connections between Catholicism and anti-Semitism have led to pressures so strong he has left the order.

Carroll's own fraught time as a Catholic priest was from 1969 to 1974; the book's (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 father-son 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.

All this is intricate enough, though only a partial summary--yet the film omits much that is in the book. Needless to say, this is controversial material. Such a story risks seeming self-serving, or simply too self-dramatizing. This kind of story only works if you buy considerably into the importance of the author/narrator's central concerns. Orthodox Catholics question Carroll's scholarship and reject many of his assertions.

That doesn't keep this from being fascinating, even if it's all over the map (a 770-page book would present the tangled web with closer weaving) and if the documentary conventions are, well, awfully conventional at times. Carroll ends with a speech about how the world of religion is a "lake of gasoline" and if you pitch one match in it, it can fire up. In this context it seems a pity Carroll spends so much time on 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 do some topical updating with the evangelical story, are working with a basically pre-9/11 source.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.