"The cross located me. It told me who I was. My connection with Jesus, the cross as a sign of mercy. I saw crosses everywhere when I was a kid. I saw telephone poles as crosses. I looked up in the sky and saw airplanes as crosses. The cross was central to the way I saw the world. It was a sighting device, even, through which I looked.

"And then it all changed. I began to see that this cross throws a shadow."

James Carroll opens the film Constantine's Sword with this observation on the cross. Carroll, a former Roman Catholic priest who is now a writer, takes us on a bit of his personal journey to look into antisemitism and its place in church history going back to the Emperor Constantine in the Fourth Century. His book by the same title was published in 2001. This film by documentarian Oren Jacoby (who also directed a similarly themed Sister Rose's Passion) brings that book to life by following Carroll as he traces various aspects of antisemitism through various key points in history. It also updates the topic by bringing in the more recent events at the Air Force Academy that led to a 2004 scandal involving cadets, officers, and chaplains and spilling over into the Evangelical culture that pervades Colorado Springs where the Academy is located.

Most of the film centers on how the Catholic Church has been an agent of antisemitism. (While the focus is on the Catholic Church, the problem applies to the broader church as well.) Coming from a Catholic background, Carroll stands as a critic within his tradition. He is not some outsider pointing out all the flaws. Rather this is the account of someone who has found the flaws in his tradition and wants to make sure these flaws are defeated when they rear their heads.

After a section telling of the killing of Jews by mobs along the Rhine, he says, "I was a young Catholic brought into this perfect church. It was the place where human beings were entirely pure. We had saints; we knew who they were. And our priests and our bishops and our popes were holy, holy men. I hadn't a clue about the failure: priests, now I know, leading crusaders into this territory to kill Jews."

The trouble, as Carroll sees it, is the merger of religion and power. It begins when Constantine brought Christianity not merely into acceptance, but into prominence in the Empire. He used the church to try to establish unity within the empire and had the army enforce that unity. Those outside the church, especially Jews, became targets. This union between church and power was the main force behind antisemitism through the next sixteen centuries, whether it involved kings or popes or (as more recently) Air Force chaplains. Carroll at times shows the ways the Church has aided Jews and celebrates the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, which outlined the way Catholics should engage and accept people of different faiths. But he also tells us of times when Paul IV put Jews in ghettoes, or Pius XII was silent during the Holocaust.

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