"Constantine's Sword": The Movie

Dang.  It looks like "Constantine's Sword" -- James Carroll's entry in the "the Catholic Church brought us the Holocaust and loads of other bad things" genre -- is going to be a "documentary."  William Doino's thoughts, at First Things, are worth reading.  He ends with this:

[T]the film stoops to its lowest level by ending with a disingenuous attack on Benedict XVI: “Months after associating Islam with ‘things only evil and inhuman,’ Benedict XVI reversed reforms of Vatican II to authorize a Good Friday Mass that includes a previous disavowed prayer—for the conversion of Jews.”

What Benedict actually did, at his now famous Regensburg address, was quote (not endorse) a fourteenth-century emperor in order to highlight the relation between faith and reason. Moreover, there is no such thing as a “Good Friday Mass.” On Good Friday, the day Christ died, Catholics have a service, but they do not celebrate Mass—something everyone trained as a priest should know. The old rite’s Good Friday liturgy does indeed carry a prayer for Jews, but its language has been revised by Benedict precisely to avoid unnecessary offense; and were the Church to formally disavow evangelization, it would betray its very mission. As recently demonstrated by his visit to an America synagogue, Pope Benedict’s outreach to Jews is a central feature of his pontificate. He has written extensively on the subject and once published an essay, “The Heritage of Abraham,” that is among the most beautiful Catholic tributes ever penned to Judaism.

By producing this egregious film, Carroll and Jacoby missed a real opportunity to appreciate the events taking place in Catholic-Jewish relations today. Among them was Benedict’s visit to a Cologne synagogue shortly after he became pope. Carroll mentions the visit but severely distorts the moving speech Benedict delivered and fails to mention Jewish reaction. Paul Spiegel, the leader of Germany’s Jews, was so overwhelmed by the pope’s presence that he told reporters: “If someone told me 45 years ago, ‘You are going to be in Cologne, and the pope will visit you in a synagogue,’ I wouldn’t have believed it. We have come a long way in mutual support and understanding and, as the pope said, in mutual love.”