Constantine's Sword

It sounds as dutiful as can be: a documentary tracing the legacy of anti-Semitism within the church. Yet the fascination of this inquiring movie, based on the book by former leftist priest James Carroll, is that, like The Da Vinci Code, Constantine’s Sword grasps at the enigmatic flux of Christian history. Carroll, the film’s roving interviewer, leaps back to the days of Constantine, who first converted a sword into the symbol of the cross, and he traces the thorny evolution of the papacy on the issue of Jewish culpability in Jesus’ death. Whatever your persuasion, you’ll walk out enriched. B+