On June 24, “Constantine’s Sword,” a documentary based on the book by John Carroll, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It is sure to warm the hearts of all anti-Catholic bigots.
Carroll is an embittered ex-priest who has spent his adult life railing against the Catholic Church. The film, like the book, treats the public to some of the most polished propaganda ever to hit the big screen.
In 2001, here’s what Robert Lockwood (then the Catholic League’s director of research) had to say about Carroll’s book:
“Carroll’s thesis is that the anti-Semitism which resulted in the Holocaust is central to Catholic theology and derived from the earliest Christians’ expressions of belief.
“Carroll believes that the New Testament is clearly anti-Semitic and, therefore, caused anti-Jewish sentiment that, in turn, eventually evolved into the philosophies that created the Holocaust. Rather than arguing that bad Scriptural interpretation in the past was used by some to declare that all Jews shared the blame in the death of Jesus, Carroll would rather agree that this is the proper meaning of Scripture.
“It is not the belief of the Church, the New Testament, the Church centered in Jesus, the understanding that Christ died for the sins of mankind, that created the horror of the Holocaust. It was the rejection of those, and the attempt to substitute for Judeo-Christian civilization a secularist pseudo-scientism of race, class and nationalism that generated Nazism and the Holocaust.”
On June 22 the Los Angeles Times said that the movie “tries to link the errors of the past with the religious movements of today, moving fluidly from stories of the Crusades and clips of Hitler Youth rallies to scenes of Catholic youth cheering Pope Benedict XVI and ecstatic kids at evangelical Christian revivals.”
Carroll’s hatred of all things Catholic shines through from beginning to end. Which is exactly what we would have expected.
