A Too-Weighty ‘Sword?’

A structurally elegant ‘Constantine’s Sword’ suffers from being overstuffed.

Director Oren Jacoby and author James Carroll on the set of “Constantine’s Sword.”

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

There are some stories — the Catholic Church and its history of anti-Semitism, for instance — that do not lend themselves to neat and orderly retelling. The historical threads are too widely separated, the personal impact too complicated, the forces at work too multivalent and ambiguous for a straight chronological rendering to catch all the implications, the lines of power, the truths. When filmmaker Oren Jacoby sat down with author James Carroll to discuss making their new film, “Constantine’s Sword,” which opens on April 18, both men had to know that they were undertaking such a task.
For much of its 96 minutes, “Constantine’s Sword” juggles multiple timelines and shifts between the personal and the political with a fair degree of aplomb. Yet at

the film’s end, one senses a breathless rush to completion and a nagging feeling that this film ought to be twice as long, at the very least.
Carroll will be familiar to Jewish Week readers for his controversial but acclaimed history of the Catholic Church’s history of anti-Semitism, whose title and main themes he has bestowed on the film. He is an ex-priest whose faith was shaken by the Vietnam War, despite his being the son of a three-star Air Force general. An even more salient element in his decision to leave the priesthood was his gradual discovery of the lamentable history that he outlined in his book.
For the film, Jacoby and Carroll (who co-wrote and co-produced the movie) chose to interweave Carroll’s personal odyssey alongside a reinvestigation of the Church history he covered in much, much greater detail before, and the battle over Evangelical proselytizing (to the point of physical threats) at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Jacoby and Carroll try to juggle these highly dissimilar storylines and timeframes while leaving room for visits with everyone from Leon Wieseltier and Elaine Pagels to the Rev. Ted Haggard (in some especially creepy interviews made not long before he was forced to surrender his pulpit in a sex scandal involving a male prostitute). There are lengthy, albeit useful, side journeys into the life of Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher-turned-nun who was murdered in Auschwitz and made a saint in 1998, and the dilemma of a Polish priest who was barred from teaching by the Jesuit order after he repeatedly preached on Catholic responsibility and the Shoah.
In short, the cinematic version of “Constantine’s Sword” is a bit overstuffed — the filmic equivalent of what happens when you try to put two pounds of flour in a one-pound bag: you end up with a lot of flour on the floor, but you still have a pound of flour to bake with. For all its meandering, it’s teasing us with stories that it can’t possibly take the time to tell in full; the film conveys some powerful truths and an over-arching message, the importance of which only grows greater every day of the “war on terror.”
It is hardly the place of a Jewish writer to tell Christians what constitute appropriate symbols for their worship. But Carroll, as a good Catholic, makes an eloquent case for the unfortunate nature of the shift that occurred when Constantine converted from polytheism and brought the Roman Empire to Christianity; he changed the central symbols of the Church from the fish and the shepherd to the cross, from symbols of life to a symbol of death that has carried a considerable and fraudulent anti-Semitic weight for nearly 1,700 years.
Although it gets a bit lost in the history hurtling by in the film, it is clear that this change is at the heart of much of what Carroll finds dismaying about contemporary Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity. It is hard to imagine Jesus approving of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” to cite an old chestnut and, as Carroll solemnly says while staring in horror at the cross erected at Auschwitz, “If Jesus had been here, he would have died as an unknown Jew.”
Of course, it is impossible to know for sure what that “unknown Jew” would make of the strange pathways his posthumous legacy has taken. Jacoby and Carroll make a pretty good case for the notion that Jesus, whose followers called him “rabbi,” would have been appalled by the Ted Haggards of this world. At any rate, as a film, “Constantine’s Sword” has a certain structural elegance; the material covered is so compelling and Carroll himself is such a warm presence that it is worth a look, despite its problems. n
“Constantine’s Sword” opens Friday, April 18 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas (62nd Street and Broadway).

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization