Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un articolo del New York Times che forse è sfuggito al Logi

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/movies/18swor.html?scp=11&sq=jewish&st=nyt
April 18, 2008
When Love of Religion Leads to Hatred of Others
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
At the heart of Oren Jacoby’s screen adaptation of James Carroll’s
book “Constantine’s Sword” lies a question to which each person of
faith must his find own answer. When your core beliefs conflict with
church doctrine, how far should your loyalty to the church extend? The
same could be asked of loyalty to a government or a political party.
Mr. Carroll, a former Roman Catholic priest and an acclaimed author
whose memoir, “An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That
Came Between Us” won a 1996 National Book Award, vehemently disagrees
with the church on many issues but still embraces Catholicism. A
former anti-Vietnam War activist, now in his mid-60s, he is an
eloquent screen presence who conveys the same searching moral gravity
that characterized other Catholic war resisters during the Vietnam
era.
At once enthralling and troubling, the film, whose title has been
simplified from the book’s “Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the
Jews: A History,” does about as good a job as you could hope of
distilling a 750-page historical examination of religious zealotry and
power into 95 swift minutes. Because the book was published several
months before 9/11, the film adaptation, which was written by Mr.
Jacoby and Mr. Carroll and uses the voices of Liev Schreiber, Philip
Bosco, Natasha Richardson and Eli Wallach, updates the book’s
pessimistic vision of how religions demonize one another to include
Christian and Islamic fundamentalism as well as anti-Semitism.
What must Middle Eastern Muslims feel, Mr. Carroll wonders, when
George W. Bush throws around concepts like good and evil and uses the
word crusade to describe the Iraq war? Mr. Carroll worries that we may
be heading toward an all-out holy war between state-supported
religious extremists.
The movie begins in Colorado Springs where Mikey Weinstein, an alumnus
of the United States Air Force Academy, describes the harassment of
his son, Casey, a Jewish cadet, by evangelical Christians who over
several days blanketed the student cafeteria with fliers promoting the
Mel Gibson film “The Passion of the Christ.” There is no doubt in his
mind that the film promoted an inflammatory view of Jews as Christ
killers. He sued the Air Force, but the case never made it to trial.
Aggressively arguing the evangelicals’ right to proselytize is Ted
Haggard, the former pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs,
who was filmed for this movie before his fall from grace in a scandal
involving a former male prostitute. Fiery-eyed and grinning
maniacally, Mr. Haggard suggests a Paul Lynde caricature of a fire-and-
brimstone preacher. The evangelical fervor in Colorado Springs is the
somewhat tenuous topical hook on which the movie’s exploration of
religion and power is hung.
Woven into the film is Mr. Carroll’s family history. Born Irish
Catholic, he is the son of a former F.B.I. agent who became a three-
star general and an enthusiastic prosecutor of the Vietnam War. When
Mr. Carroll was a boy, his family had a private audience with the
pope, and he recalls his feelings of awe. Years later he became an
ardent opponent of the Vietnam War. His estrangement from his father
began when, shortly after becoming a priest, he referred to napalm in
a sermon.
The movie then dives into the distant past for Mr. Carroll’s
alternative, shadow history of the Catholic Church. He dates the
notion of Christian militancy to the early fourth century, when the
future emperor Constantine I, on the eve of a battle for control of
the Roman Empire, had a vision of the cross in the sky inscribed with
words promising that under its sign he would conquer. After the
battle, in which he led a victorious army wielding a sword in the
shape of a cross, he legalized Christianity and the cross, previously
a minor symbol, became synonymous with Christian might.
He traces the origins of Christian anti-Semitism to Constantine’s
birthplace in Trier, Germany, where Crusaders sailing down the Rhine
systematically destroyed Jewish communities, which the pope refused to
protect unless the people converted. Centuries later Trier was the
site of an agreement between the Catholic Church and Hitler,
negotiated with the future Pope Pius XII, whose later refusal to speak
out during the Holocaust Mr. Carroll considers to be a great shame of
the church.
In the most moving segment Ms. Richardson is heard reading a letter
written in 1933 to Pope Pius XI by Edith Stein urging him to speak out
against Nazi persecution of the Jews. A Jewish convert to Catholicism
and a Carmelite nun, Stein died in Auschwitz in 1942. The letter,
which went unanswered, was made public in 2003, five years after she
was canonized.
Above and beyond criticizing the church’s refusal to stand up to
Hitler, “Constantine’s Sword” is a cri de coeur about the abuse of
religion when aligned with the state. Jesus, “the prince of peace,”
Mr. Carroll insists, was not an intolerant warmonger.
“If you think of religion as a great lake,” he warns, “it’s a lake of
gasoline, and all it’s going to take is someone to drop a match into
it for a terrible conflagration.”

 When Love of Religion Leads to Hatred of Others
vallo a dire a quelli che sputano sugli armeni
-- 
"il Logi è goi e quindi, poverino, abituato a credere che
quel che c'è scritto non necessiti di interpretazione"
(il cosiddetto agnosco/nahum/jabo/shampista/delafia/borat/andrea su
it.politica.internazionale, 26/10/06)

 vallo a dire a quelli che sputano sugli armeni
chissà se lo ha fatto arrabbiare proprio questo passaggio:
