Carroll probes Christianity’s violent past in new film

c. 2008 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ It’s not a question that many like to ask, and to some it may seem impolitic it in the midst of an American papal visit _ namely, what are the ties between religion and violence, specifically Christianity and violence? But that’s the question film director Oren Jacoby […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ It’s not a question that many like to ask, and to some it may seem impolitic it in the midst of an American papal visit _ namely, what are the ties between religion and violence, specifically Christianity and violence?

But that’s the question film director Oren Jacoby and writer James Carroll ask in “Constantine’s Sword,” a new documentary based on Carroll’s best-selling book by the same title.


The film opened Friday (April 18) in New York, the same day Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the city. It’s a fact that is likely to raise a few eyebrows, particularly since Carroll, a former Catholic priest, “comes with a history” of critiquing the Catholic Church’s ties to military and political power, Jacoby said.

“He (Carroll) cares deeply about the church and has taken on some of its deepest problems,” Jacoby said.

At least one Carroll critic, Bill Donohue of the New York-based Catholic League, has already criticized the film as “based on an anti-Catholic book written by an angry ex-priest who has no credentials in the subject area.”

In his official response, Carroll, a columnist for The Boston Globe, said: “In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II apologized to the world for the sins of the church. Our film simply lays out what those sins were. Pope John Paul was not a Catholic basher and neither am I.”

In separate interviews, Jacoby and Carroll said the overlap of the papal visit and the film’s New York opening is purely coincidental and due to the vagaries of film distribution schedules.

In fact, Carroll said he would have preferred the film open during the Christian Holy Week, as the questions asked in “Constantine’s Sword” focus on the often-violent relationship between Christianity and Judaism.

Carroll argues that that animus is based on troubling portrayals of Judaism in the New Testament. Those depictions, he believes, have led to supersessionism or replacement theology _ the idea that God’s relationship with Christians somehow “superseded” God’s relationship with Jews.


“We have to continuously revise the ways we read the Gospels and let go of `supersessionist’ theology,” Carroll said.

“Constantine’s Sword” chronicles both a personal journey and broader issues. The personal journey surveys Carroll’s reckoning with the military tradition in his own family _ his father was a three-star U.S. Air Force general during the height of the Cold War _ and a spiritual evolution that began with Carroll’s stolid, traditionalist Catholic upbringing.

Like others of his generation, Carroll, 65, welcomed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, becoming an anti-Vietnam War cleric and activist. He eventually left the priesthood, though that post-Vatican II idealism still animates Carroll’s religious outlook.

“All of Christianity,” Carroll said, “needs to recover the rationalist, reformed traditions of the Second Vatican Council. It’s a matter of world peace now.”

The broader issues of the film are historic _ the legacy of militarism that have overshadowed Christianity since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.

The film contends it was Constantine’s vision of equating cross and sword, and of religious power with political and military power, that led to such ignoble abuses as the Crusades and was a key factor in the development of Christian anti-Semitism.


The relationship linking religion and military power continues today in what Carroll sees as troubling acts of Christian evangelization at the U.S. Air Force Academy and harassment of Jewish cadets.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

At one point, the documentary shows footage of Benedict early in his papacy speaking to a group of Jewish leaders and declaring that German Nazism was born of “neo-paganism.”

While Carroll said Benedict “has the respect and affection of all Catholics, including me,” Carroll finds the pope’s declaration of the roots of Nazism inadequate “and woefully incomplete.”

“We can’t leave it at that. Nazi anti-Semitism had two roots: paganism and Christianity.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Carroll said he would not be surprised if the film is criticized for not exploring religious intolerance more widely, including the relationship between religion and violence within Islam.

But Carroll said the film ultimately needed to have a focus, and given his own faith tradition, that had to be examining religion and violence through a Christian lens. Carroll calls the film an exercise in “Christian self-criticism.”

“Every religious person,” he said, “has to take responsibility for the way in which their tradition encourages intolerance, suspicion and hatred of the other.”


KRE DS END HERLINGER800 words, with optional trim to 725

Photos of Carroll are available via https://religionnews.com.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!