Repentance: Constantine's Sword

I was raised Catholic, and although I don't consider myself a Catholic anymore, I found Andrew O'Heir's interview with Catholic author James Carroll in Salon (the subject of the documentary Constantine's Sword) about the history of the Catholic church fascinating. I may have to search out one of his books, and I would be interested in seeing the documentary as well. Here's the lead in:

Partway through my conversation with James Carroll about the Roman Catholic Church and its long history of religious intolerance and anti-Semitism, the former priest turned bestselling author and journalist actually pauses to give Mother Church a break. "You know, you have to be as old as I am to appreciate how much the church has changed," he says. (Carroll is 65.)

"The church I was born into, the church of Pope Pius XII, was totally on the side of war," Carroll says. "In the Cold War, the Vatican was a staunch ally of the better-red-than-dead impulse, and for the first half of the 20th century the church was consistently on the wrong side of history." (As I told Carroll, my own father, who was raised in Ireland in the 1930s, remembered the church collecting pennies for Francisco Franco, so he could carry on the fight against godless communism.)

But in the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII issued an encyclical challenging the idea that there could ever be a just or righteous nuclear war, and for the last 40 years the Vatican has been a vocal critic of all the overseas military adventures launched by the United States. That draws Carroll's attention back to the day's news, and to his mounting sense of irritation -- and something deeper than that -- with the current pope. "I don't know why Pope Benedict doesn't make that an issue on this visit," he says, his ire audibly rising. "I don't know why he insists on celebrating George W. Bush, a man who is presiding over an outrageous, unjust war. That strikes me as totally inconsistent with the positions the Vatican takes."

Carroll is forever appointing himself the task of demanding that the church live up to its own ethical and rational standards, and forever finding it impossible. As with all true Christian martyrs, his passion is born of love. He is frequently attacked by the Catholic League and other defenders of the faith, but Carroll is no outsider. Although he left the priesthood in 1974 (he is married to novelist Alexandra Marshall and has two grown children), he is still a Catholic, still a communicant and still a weekly Mass attendee.

In his role as the peripatetic narrator of director Oren Jacoby's new documentary "Constantine's Sword," a travelogue-style film adaptation of Carroll's magisterial book of the same name, Carroll cuts a deceptively mild and scholarly figure. But the word he keeps using, in his prose, in the movie and in conversation, is a weighty one: "reckoning." Carroll believes that Christians, and especially his fellow Catholics, must come to grips with the past. They can't claim to be a force of morality and integrity until they face the church's painful history of anti-Jewish libel and persecution -- and face it in what he terms a spirit of "repentant change."

The culmination of Christian anti-Semitism, of course, arrived under the Nazis, but "Constantine's Sword," as its title may suggest, is at least as much about the Roman and medieval eras as about the Holocaust. At 96 minutes, Jacoby's film cannot accommodate all the extended digressions into history, mythology, geographical rumination and personal reminiscence that make Carroll's book (at 700-odd pages) such a rich and absorbing experience; it's more like a highlights tour of his worldview. He travels from Rome to the Rhineland, from Auschwitz to Colorado, interviewing biblical scholar Elaine Pagels, former U.S. Sen. Gary Hart and megachurch pastor Ted Haggard (just before his male escort-related fall from grace), among many others.

Carroll's objects of contemplation are various and his approach is always sober and reflective. He finds the roots of anti-Semitic violence in the Emperor Constantine's sudden conversion to Christianity, which came in a vision as he was crossing a bridge over the Tiber. He visits the tomb of St. Helena, Constantine's mother, who purportedly went to the Holy Land and brought back the True Cross. He visits the medieval German towns that Crusaders purged of Jews on their way to kill Muslims in Palestine, finds a letter of warning that Jewish philosopher-turned-Catholic saint Edith Stein wrote to Pope Pius XII in the 1930s, and considers his own trajectory. The son of a leading conservative Cold Warrior, Carroll became an antiwar activist as a Boston University chaplain in the early 1970s. (As readers of Carroll's memoir "An American Requiem" already know, his father was an important Air Force general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.)

Along with the 2000 bestseller "Constantine's Sword" and the National Book Award-winning "An American Requiem," Carroll is the author of many other books, including "House of War," his 2006 "biography" of the Pentagon (the building where he spent much of his childhood), the 2004 "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War" and several novels. He is also a columnist for the Boston Globe, and spoke to me from his home in that city.

Comments

[phatrick]

I always meant to read C's Sword. I even picked it up in the bookstore one day, but it was too thick, so I put it back down. Glad to hear there is a movie now.

[MC]

I agree, I think the movie sounds much more palatable, but some of his other books also sound intriguing don't you think?