Constantine's Sword Page #4

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from the Saint Constantine...

the image a lot of people have.

There is even a source

which says that...

Constantine had committed

so many sins...

there was no religion

that could forgive his sins.

Only Christianity.

And then he told me

the most surprising thing.

That the cross never been an important

Christian symbol until Constantine...

in the year 326.

For two and a half centuries...

Christians had used symbols of life.

The fish, the lamb, the shepherd.

Now this image of execution is brought in

to unify the empire...

under a single orthodox doctrine.

And why wouldn't Constantine,

a man who had murdered a son,

be drawn to a God who required

the death on the cross of his son.

The finding of the Cross at Golgotha...

proves, of course,

that the Jew actually had killed Christ,

it was used in that way

You could see the Christians could now say

Here is the cross, here is the cross

The Roman emperors

become influenced by that.

You see that gradually

the Jews became a marginal group...

in the Roman empire.

The church fathers

against Jews and Judaism.

In an empire united under the cross...

Jews were now in danger.

They might well have been

wiped out right then...

but church fathers decided...

the Jews should wander

in misery forever...

without a home.

The Roman empire fell,

despite its embrace of Christianity.

The western world descended into

chaos which for lasted six centuries.

Then the Pope cried God wills it.

Calling for a crusade,

a war of the Cross against Islam.

Europe's princess and their armies

stopped fighting each other.

They set out to fight Muslims

in the Holy Land.

But turned first on the infidels

they knew along the Rhines.

When I was a kid the crusader castles

were the point of this river I loved it.

Now I know that these communities

up and down the Rhine here...

all date back to the 11th century.

These towns included some one of the most

thriving Jewish centres in the world...

and in the spring of 1096,

in a a short 6 week period,

beginning in Cologne upriver and going

all the way down the Mainz downriver,

those Jewish communities were

wiped out by crusader mobs

People wearing the sign of the cross

on their shields and on their breast.

I had heard that Jews had been

invited here before the year 1000...

to help the Bishop conduct

his financial affairs...

and had made the mistake of thriving.

I wondered if the state archive in Trier

had records of what happened here...

during the crusades.

There is an old chronicle.

See, it says here

Gesta Treverorum on the top.

- Treverorum the word for Trier.

- It's the Latin for Trier.

It is all hand written.

I can show you a few examples.

- Are there references to Jews?

- Yes, there are references to Jews.

And the eldest references

are from the year 1066.

- That is about thirty years

before the crusades. - Yeah.

Because the Jews for centuries

have been made...

responsible for anything

which happened to a town...

whether it was sicknesses

or whether it was war...

or whether there was a problem

with the water...

or whatever it was,

it was always Jews' fault,

and also these crowds

they attack the Jews.

And so some of the Jews

committed suicide...

and some of them threw their

children in the river.

It is written here

in very clear words.

Because their parents

didn't want them to get baptized.

The account of the Rhine Crusades

in the Trier archive...

aren't widely known.

But Cardinal Karl Layman...

one of the most powerful man

in the church today...

is facing the facts.

The same scene that took place in

each of the towns along the Rhines.

Was played out long ago here in

the courtyards of his Cathedral.

Jews had begged the bishop to protect them

from the crusader mobs.

Layman's medieval predecessors told

them only the converted can be saved.

The rest would have to die.

This mob of people...

feels that here was an opportunity

to avenge...

the crucifixion right

here because the Jews...

had been considered Christ killers...

from the start of Christianity

as a state religion.

Do we know any one story?

There is a stone dedicated

to a young woman...

in the middle of the 12th century...

who took her own life because of the

persecutions that was threatening her.

He drowned herself.

Mr Sarofski what is this?

What is your role here?

- It is a good deed.

- And why does it matter to you?

I'm sorry.

God bless you.

A little later I learned that Mr Sarofski

had survived Auschwitz.

But lost his whole family there.

I was a young Catholic

brought into this perfect church.

It was the place that...

human beings were entirely pure.

We had saints,

we know who they were...

and our priests and our bishop and our popes

were holy, holy men.

I hadn't a clue about the failure.

Priests, now I know, leading

crusaders into this very territory...

to kill Jews.

I didn't know any of it when I made

the most important decision of my life.

We had come back from Germany

to Washington DC...

in the middle of another crusade...

America's struggle against

godless communism.

I was twenty.

I came of age

in a time of nuclear dread.

My father was...

well, he was part of what you could call

the nuclear priesthood.

He was an air force general responsible

for getting ready for World War 3.

When the Cuban missile crisis began...

it began when my father

saw the marks on the ground...

that suggested that the Soviet were

were putting missiles in Cuba.

And he took those photographs to...

the Secretary McNamara

and President Kennedy.

I have directed the armed forces

to prepare...

for any eventuality.

It shall be the policy of this nation...

to regard any nuclear missile...

launched from Cuba against any nation

in the western hemisphere...

as an attack by the Soviet Union

on the United States.

My father let me see how afraid he was

of nuclear war.

In fact he asked me to do

something about it...

once he told me he might not be there...

and it would be up to me to take care

of my brothers and my mother

He said to me once drive south

to Richmond, go past it

He was telling me to get away

from ground zero.

It was out of that

that I let go of this...

first dream I had of myself

being an air force man

And I embraced something else

I said to my Dad in that period...

"I think I want to give myself

to the things that last...

the things that are eternal."

For an Irish Catholic kid,

that only meant one thing.

The priesthood I thought at the time...

was a step away from war.

I was drawn not to the Jesus

of miracles walking on water.

but to the prince of peace,

who firmly rejected violence.

I began to think about religion

more critically.

Instead of making me

more obedient and accepting...

The seminary gave me the ability

to challenge...

some of the things

that I had never questioned...

about my church and about America.

It was 1969

and I am to be be ordained...

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