Review: Constantine’s Sword

Chicago-born Boston Globe columnist James Carroll deconstructs the cross as a Christian icon linked to anti-Semitism. Documentary director Oren Jacoby tracks Carroll to Rome, Auschwitz, the Rhineland and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where evangelical cadets taunt their Jewish classmates as “Christ-killers.” This autobiographical and investigative essay draws upon Carroll’s books “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History” and “An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War that Came Between Us.” Carroll was a Catholic priest from 1969 to 1974. As an anti-war activist in the Vietnam era, he was estranged from his father, who served as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “I saw crosses everywhere when I was a kid,” narrates Carroll. “I saw telephone poles as crosses. I looked up from the sky and I saw airplanes as crosses. The cross was central to the way I saw the world. It was like a sighting device, even, through which I looked. And then it changed. I began to see that this cross throws a shadow.” From Constantine’s heavenly vision of a cross with the injunction “In This Sign, Conquer” in 312 A.D., to our Commander-in-Chief’s use of “crusade” to describe the “war on terrorism” on September 16, 2001, Jacoby and Carroll cover knotty terrain indeed. “Constantine’s Sword” redeems the sub-genre of the first-person inquiry film that was trivialized by the recent “America the Beautiful” and “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?” 95m. (Bill Stamets)