"The cross located me, it told me who I was" "My connection to Jesus, the cross a sign of mercy" "I saw crosses everywhere when I was a kid" "I saw telephone poles as crosses" "I looked up in the sky and I saw airplanes as crosses" "The cross was ..." "Central .." "To the way I saw the world" "It was like a sighting device even through which I looked" "And then it changed." "I began to see that this cross" "Throws a shadow" "I used to be a Roman Catholic priest." "That was a long time ago" "Now I am married and father of two grown kids." "And I make my living as a writer and journalist" "I cover a lot of stories but there is one that haunts me" "Probably because it hits so close to home" "It's the things people are doing in the name of God" "I went to Colorado Springs, now a scene of controversy over one of the biggest religious revivals in our country" "It is also the home of the United States air force academy" "A destination I'd once envision for myself as a young man" "Being here makes me remember of how very much I wanted to be in this world" "This world of the air force" "There were always two parts of me as a kid" "I mean I was a religious boy and I was tapped for the priesthood as a kid there was a way in which that was powerful but the other thing the whole other half of me was the love of the air force" "I once wanted to be in that dormitory as a kid" "My first ambition for myself" "I would have become an air force officer" "And my story with my dad would have been very different" "Dad started out in the slaughterhouses in the Chicago stockyards" "He met my mother a telephone operator who had quit school after 8th grade to support her family" "He made his way down to night school in the loop" "And after 7 years he went into the FBI" "As a young FBI agent in Chicago, he captured a notorious gangland criminal ... named Roger "The Terrible" Touhy" "It was such a triumph for the bureau that my dad was brought into J. Edgar Hoover's inner circle" "In 1947, when the air force was established" "Dad was picked to set up its first counter intelligence agency" "A guy who had done his traveling by train I'm not sure if he had ever been on an airplane at that point" "Now he is an air force general" "I am here now because I heard that members of the faculty and administration along with some of the" "Evangelicals Churches in the area are on a mission to convert cadets" "In my dad's air force, that would have been a non-starter" "Things are different now" "It's a quick ride down the road from the academy" "To pastor Ted Haggard's New Life Mega church" "I went to see him there a year ago" "We started a little over 20 years ago in the basement of our home" "We started with 20 people in a concrete basement with buckets stacked up I'd put my bible on them" "Everybody had to bring their own folding chairs so it was a kind of a cute scene" "Now we have 14,000 people that call New Life their home church" "And on an average Sunday we have right around 10,000 people that come and worship with us" "Wonderful?" "Beautiful?" "Glorious?" "Evangelicalism is growing and developing" "There is a new mega church, a mega church being 2000 people in attendance or more" "There is a new mega-church in America every two days" "And they are all Evangelical" "We bow before you in all of your wonders?" "We believe that the bible is the word of God, Jesus is the son of God" "That you must be born again" "The National Association of Evangelicals is a group that was formed to be the counterbalance to liberalism." "So it's 30 million people the largest evangelical group in America" "We are politically active" "And the predominant way the Bush administration communicates with us" "Is a Monday conference call with evangelical leaders and I'm one of those" "Haggard says that it is his mission to convert non-believers at the academy or anywhere else" "Now I think the US air force has done a great job handling religious issues over its history" "That seem absurd to me that they can talk about any issue other than God" "These are not idiots" "These are not the kind of naive students who can't think and need someone from the outside to come in and say listen" "You can discuss military strategy You can discuss political ideology" "You can discuss history but you can't handle a discussion of religion because that may make you a feel intimidated" "Are you kidding me?" "These are students we are getting ready to give multi-million dollar bombers to" "Do you know that as a boy I harboured an ambition to come here as a cadet?" " Really?" " I did" "I entered in 73' and I graduated in 77'" "My father is a 53' naval academy graduate" "My eldest son and his wife actually graduated last year" "And my youngest son is now a second class junior" " What has happened there ?" " On 29th July of 2004 I was invited back to the first annual GLC Graduates Leadership Conference" "My son Curtis came over to me and said" "Dad I know that we are at this party" "But I need to talk with you about something Can we go off base?" "And he never does that In my mind I thought that maybe he'd" "God forbid has there been something with alcohol or drugs or an honour code violation?" "Has he gotten somebody pregnant?" "I mean what's going on?" "He said look, 'Dad, I'm probably going to be getting into some serious trouble"" "I said, 'What have you done, Curtis?" "'" "He said, 'No, it's not what I've done, it's what I'm going to do"" "And I said "enough of this, what is going on? "" "He said, "The next person who calls me a fucking Jew or accuses me or our people of executing Jesus Christ," "I'm going to beat the shit out of"" "I was surprised because I do have three kids there at the time" "I called Casey and said, 'What the hell is going on?" "'" "He said, 'Dad, this is just the way it is here'" "Mickey's three kids are his sons Casey and Curtis and Casey's wife Amanda" "They met at the academy" "She was raised as a Christian" "I've never heard it in high school" "If people knew I was Jewish, it never was a point, it never made any kind of mention" "But once I got to the academy" "It became so, I was so aware of it" "That I was kind of different" "I went to lunch that day, I had a flyer for a movie on my plate" "It was for the "The Passion of the Christ" It had all kinds of quotes" "Every single place in Mitchel Hall had" "Every place sitting That's four thousand place sittings" "Each single one had an advertisement for "The Passion of the Christ"" "So over a three day period Every time that I would go to sit down there" "There is a flyer staring back at me" "Why is this OK to do with this movie?" "Why is it that nobody is making a fuss about this?" "So we started talking to Chaplin Morton" "But I have this feeling the whole time that this was all fruitless" "I had eventually more and more cadets coming to me and telling me these stories about how the academy was now full fledge putting their stamp on conservative Christian ideology" "If you are a cadet and you walk in to Mitchel Hall." "And on every table are flyers for a movie" "Then as a cadet you're going to assume that your academy is encouraging you to go see it" "If you want to see whether or not it is anti-Semitic, you need to see it for yourself" " For yourself" " Right" " So we both went to go see it" " We did" "And I felt terrible watching that movie" "Just absolutely terrible I look at how they portray Jews" "These are my people" "We are being portrayed as the people who killed Christ" "How can believers see that and not get pissed and angry at the Jews?" "It's scary" "I kept telling myself this is July of 2004" "It's not 1096 in the Crusades, It's not 1492, it's not 1939 and 1940" "It's not all the spaces in between It's the United States air force academy" "The spaces in between." "That is the journey I have to take" "Why is it a Jewish cadet who is singled out?" "I understood somehow that I had to take on this question of Jewish Christian history" "Which is so complicated and so dark" "Somebody said you live your life forward but you understand it backward" "My first memory of hearing the word Jew had to be at church when I was 7 years old." "I knew who the Jews were, they had killed our lord" "Then they had refuse to believe in him" "When I was a kid the death of Jesus was what first grabbed me" "It was a figure like this that I would kneel before next to my mother" "The power of the passion story even for someone like myself who cannot accept the divinity of Jesus" "The story of his mortality is supremely moving" "But this is a man I loved Yeah" "Also a man to whom I pray" "My problem has been that when I stand before a figure like this" "I can appreciate them and be moved by them only on condition that I shut down a piece of my heart" "That I obliterate something of what I know about the actual consequences in the real world" "Of these images and of these figures" "For you?" "Well not for me" "I am an American Jew born in the 1950's" "That makes me one of the spoiled brats of Jewish history" "I am one of the luckiest Jews who had ever lived" "But certainly for my parents and the people who preceded them yeah" "The supremacy of the cross in European culture was responsible for the death of many of my people for centuries before I was born and eventually for the death of my own family in south-eastern Poland" "I am the descendant of the victims You have a much more difficult problem than I do" "In other words if you want to understand Anti-Semitism" "Don't study Jews, study non-Jews" "Why do we blame the Jews?" "Generation after generation, where do this contempt come from?" "I'm trying to figure out where it all went wrong between Christians and Jews" "And we go back to Jesus, we have to go back to Jesus" "Before there were Christians when there were only Jews" "Because Jesus certainly saw himself as a devout Jew, a prophet and was called Rabbi" "How did the story then get told with the Jews being cast as the villains here?" "Well it's an extraordinary twist" "The way the stories are told in the New Testament Gospels" "It says basically that it was the Jewish leaders who arrested Jesus" "Who tried him, who sentenced him to death" "And basically duped the Romans into crucifying him" "Is that true to history?" "It looks completely at odds with what we know about history" "We know that this was a Roman charge, a Roman punishment and a Roman execution" "But it's startling that if you read the gospels," "You'd think that it was the Jews that engineered it" "At every Good Friday service with the reading of that passion narrative" "The Jews, the Jews, the Jews" "It really hits the ear and Jesus is against the Jews" "And I don't know how else Christians can hear this story" "And the Jews answer " Crucify him, crucify him"" "I am Jewish" "Now, a Jew, dictionary-style, is one who has descended from one of the ancient tribes of Judea or one who is regarded to have descended from them." "But you and I know what a Jew really is:" "One who killed our Lord!" "I don't know if it got much press coverage out here on the West Coast cause that all happened a couple thousand years ago" "Although there should be a statute of limitations to the crime" "We are still paying the dues" "Why do you keep busting our balls for this crime?" ""Why?" "Jew!" "Because you skirt the issue." "You blame it on Roman soldiers."" "I'm gonna clear the air once and for all, and confess." "We did it." "My family, I did it." "We found a note in the basement:" ""We killed him", signed Morty." "When I was 17, I came to Rome" "Soon after the new pope John the 23rd was elected" "This was the great moment of my family life" "My mom and dad, my four brothers, me, my grandmother" "Coming here for a private audience with Pope John the 23rd" "You got to understand my Dad was at the peak of his power" "My mother is a general's wife" "I'm a senior in high school" "But we are 1 or 2 generations removed from the poorest of Irish poor" "This was the most important affirmation you could imagine for people like us" "We make our way up the long Michelangelo staircase into the" "Pope's palace" "For us it is like the Wizard of Oz Here we are" "Being brought as dignitaries into the Pope's presence" "When he took a look at us he threw his arms up" "And saluted my mother and father for having this large catholic family" "But to my amazement when he came in front of me he reached up and grabbed my shoulders" "I was close enough to feel the whiskers of his face against my cheek" "He was whispering something to me" "He made me feel chosen he made me feel conscripted" "I didn't know what he said, it could be Latin it could be Italian" "It didn't matter I just felt addressed" "I felt addressed by God in some odd way" "When I was a kid one of my favourite story was about about a hero who had been addressed by God" "My Dad told the story about a miracle that had happened to the Roman general Constantine" "Right on this bridge in Rome" "I'm a little kid in St. Mary's Church in Alexandria [Virginia USA]" "Over the altar the letters IHS" "I say to my Dad, what's that" "He says 'In hoc signo vinces' Jimmy" "'In this sign, you will conquer'" "And then he tells me this story" "Constantine afield right over here has a vision in the sky" "I guess that sky we are supposed to believe" "At a time when the roman empire was still pagan" "Constantine was the general in charge of the Northern legions based in Germany." "In the year 310, he set out with thousands of men to beat his rivals for control of the empire" "Now Rome itself was in his grasp right across this river" "I saw with my own eyes the cross of light in the heavens" "It bore the inscription, 'By this sign, you will conquer'." "I described the marvel and its meaning to my men" "I told them to reproduce it" "A long spear crossed by a transverse bar forming the figure of a cross" "To be carried at the head of all my armies" "They are carrying their spears in the sign of a cross and he comes on to this bridge" "Meets the enemy and against all the odds wins" "Constantine goes into Rome declares himself emperor.." "And on the strength of that vision, he becomes a Christian." "In the midst of the imperial city" "As a trophy of victory and the safeguard of the Roman empire" "I ordered a statute of myself with a lofty spear in the figure of a cross" "To be placed by my hand with this inscription" ""By this sign, I have conquered" "And liberated your city from the yoke of tyranny"" "What's the story?" ", When does this date to?" "What year would they date this for?" "Was made around 320 after Jesus Christ" "This was part of his glorification as the new emperor" "Was it usually big?" " The largest statue in Rome." " This is the biggest?" "Really?" "So we are all below." "we are all subservient" "But can you say what it meant that the emperor was a Christian?" "Constantine had a political strategy to preserve the empire of Rome" "After Constantine. it was no longer possible to go back to Pagan life" "Historian wonder whether Constantine's conversion was real" "Or was it just a way to strengthen his hold on power" "These frescos in an old Roman covenant tell the story" "The great emperor falls to his knees as he shares his crown with the Pope." "This is the moment when the sword and the cross become one" "Christianity turns violent" "The things people do in the name of God" "When Constantine converted there were almost the same number of Christians and Jews" "Today there are around two billion Christians" "And only 15 million Jews" "Before I left Rome I went to look for the abandoned tome of Constantine's mother Helena" "I remembered that she was my mother's favourite saint" "Helene collected sacred relics from the Holy" "Land, the way my mother collected antiques" "Excuse me Mausoleum Helena?" "Yes" "Excuse me signor Mausoleum Helena?" "Thank you" "Historians know practically nothing about the real Helena" "But she started to obsess me" "I remember the stories back in Sunday school about her visit to Golgotha where Jesus had been crucified" "She found the Jew who knew where the true cross was hidden" "And then he converted" "The story of Saint Helena and the Jew could be a useful clue in my search" "Historians do know that she came from Germany" "I remember my mother first told me about Helena in Germany" "Back when I was 16" "We lived in Wiesbaden, headquarters of the US air force in Europe." "My father was chief of staff" "When my family was here in the fifties" "It was as privileged Americans." "I was just a kid but I saw my father as a figure of tremendous power" "The airbase was the point of the spear" "Fighters and bombers targeting the iron curtain just a hundred miles away" "I was at home in this world of power and virtue" "We had everything even Elvis stationed at a nearby army base" "In fact my brother had his eye on a fellow 8th grader when the rumours spread to junior high that she was dating Elvis" "Her name was Priscilla;" "We were known in this neighbourhood as the American General with many children" "My mother told me she was the blessed mother's representative here on earth" "That is to say was her name was Mary and she made me understand that she was associated with Mary" "Of course I was aware that my father's name was Joseph" "My initials were J.C" "I just came of age and my relationship with mom and dad very much included God in the family circle" "This road makes me think of my mother" "We used to drive on this road" "Where we were going were these really important Catholic centres of devotion" "Mainz, Cologne Trier, each one had a relic ..." "Supposedly brought from the Holy Land By Saint Helena" "And Mom needed to see them all" "Here in Trier in 1959 ..." "Mom and I saw the most precious relics more precious even than a piece of the true cross" "Helena is said to have brought it to Trier because this was her hometown" "And she wanted it here in the Cathedral built by her own son Constantine." "In the ancient city of Trier Germany" "One of the most venerated relics in Christendom... is shown publicly this year" "United States Air force personnel and their families are among those privileged to see a robe said to have been worn by Christ" "The vestments has been shown publicly only at very rarely intervals" "I stood on the balcony at the back of this church looking at that robe" "And to me it looked like an over-sized T-shirt" "Surrounded by people who were profoundly moved by their conviction" "That this had been worn by Jesus." "I couldn't imagine then that the whole idea of the robe could be fiction ... or that it would keep coming back in the history of the Christians and the Jews" "Hollywood's version of "The Robe" was the first movie in Cinemascope ..." "And the screenplay came right out of the gospels" "Scholars now tell us that the robe of Jesus in the new testament is pure invention." "It is based on the Psalm in the Hebrew Bible ..." "Written hundreds of years earlier." "That detail they will cast dice from my robe comes from Psalm 22 [KJV Psalm 22:18, Bible;" "Psalm 21:19] It described an experience that seem to apply to Jesus" "The Story of the Robe was used by the time of Constantine as one more excuse to blame the Jews for not believing in Jesus" "But if there was no robe" "And the other stories about Helena and her relics are fiction" "What is the true story about Constantine and his family" "I thought I might find the answer here in Trier" "Guten Tag" "Constantine?" "Danke schön" "And who is that?" "Fausta, Constantine's second wife" "So that's Constantine." "Yes" "And this is Crispus The son of the first wife of Constantine." "Crispus looks like his father Indeed" " What happened to him?" " He was killed by his father" "In the Roman baths that Constantine build in Trier" "I met his biographer Jon Drivers" "He ordered his eldest son Crispus to be killed" " Why?" " One of reasons may have been a relationships between Crispus and Constantine's second wife Fausta." " What happened to Fausta?" " She was killed also." "In an overheated bathroom, On the order of Constantine." "So this one year he orders the execution of both of his son and his wife" "It makes you actually wonder what kind of a person Constantine was." "Ruthless and perhaps violent person" "Quite another person 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" "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 princes 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 is 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" "The earliest references are from the year 1066." "That is about 30 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" "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 20 years old." "I came of age in a time of nuclear dread" "My father 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 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 at the time I thought 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 as a Catholic priest." "I am saying my first mass in a chapel at Bolling Air force Base" "Because that's where my parents live It is the tradition" "And in the chapel, my mom and dad's neighbours, friends and colleagues ..." "The general officers of the United States Air force" "But we are in the middle of a war" "And I knew that the intelligence assessments in Vietnam were coming from the Defence Intelligence Agency" "From my father" "Vietnam tore this country apart" "Set one generation against another" "My father and I have long since stopped discussing it" "But I had to give a sermon" "And I preached on a text from Ezekiel ... where he describes a valley full of dead bones" "I said that the bones he was looking at had been burned, scorched by the sun and then I said and by napalm" "It was as close as I could get to referring to the war in Vietnam" "But it was plenty close Believe me" "The word "napalm" ... in that chapel on that day was a deep offense" "And my father never forgave me for it" "I was under my father's window in the Pentagon" "He was there and I was here" "I was surrounded by 50,000 other people ..." "But still it was a defining moment" "I spent the years of the anti-war movement" "As a Boston University Chaplin" "Counseling those who faced the draft" "I think we have opened up these grievous questions a little further as to whether or not Americans are allowed to kill the innocent" "A powerful wing of the peace movement was Christian" "We hope we could change the church's future even if we couldn't erase its past" "Once I focused on the good the church could do" "Now my faith hangs on facing directly the worst" "I looked back to the 14th century .." "when the Church in Spain thought it was extending a helping hand to the Jews ... with a campaign to convert them to Christianity." "But it was followed by an Inquisition" "A violent paranoia that those conversions could not be trusted" "Once a Jew always a Jew" "The sin was no longer in their belief but in their blood." "In Spain and then across Europe ..." "Jew were tried and burned" "As mobs accused them of poisoning well causing the black plague ... and killing Christian children for their blood" "Finally the Jews were driven out of Spain" "Surprisingly they were invited by the Pope to take refuge in Rome" "They settled along the banks of the Tiber ... not far from the Vatican." "My family came to Italy from Spain in 1492." " Why?" "The Catholic queen of Spain in 1942 ..." "Expelled the Jews." "We are what they call Sephardic Jews Jews of Spanish origin" "Sepharad in Hebrew means Spain" "There was a market place here, across was the Jewish quarter in ancient Roman times" "For 60 years, inquisitors threatened Jews and Popes protected them" "Then in 1555 the Inquisitor himself Gian Pietro Carafa" "Was crowned Pope Paul the 4th" "It is absurd and improper that these Jews have erupted into insolence" "They presume to dwell side by side with Christians" "With no distinction in their dress to separate them" "Therefore we do issue the following decrees" "Jews are to own no real estate" "Jews are to hire no Christian servants" "Jews are no longer to ignore the ancient requirement" "To wear distinctive clothing and badges" "The taxes of Jews are to be increased" "Jews are to live in a distinct quarter" "Cut off from other sections of the city" "This quarter is to have only one entrance" "To be locked at sundown" "After Carafe's edict," "The Jews of Rome were walled up in a tiny ghetto" "Four square blocks into which thousands of families were squeezed in cramped and squalid conditions." " So this is your neighbourhood" " Yes" "My family they are Jewish start to live here in the ghetto in 1555." "Which begins with Carafe." "Yes" "The Jewish people cannot go out from this area" "So my family and all the Jewish family" "They are from all over Italy" "They come here in Jewish Ghetto and they lose all of their possessions" "The only thing that they remember is that they came from Mentana" "So our name that is Limentani means the people from Mentana" "To come to the ghetto was to lose your name as well as your possessions" " Yes" "And what did they do?" "The Jewish people can only sell or buy used things" "They cannot work with new stuff" " No manufacturer" " No manufacturer" " Only used things" "So my family start to work with glass" " And that was in the middle of the 16th century?" " Yes" " And your family has been here ever since" " Yes" "For hundreds of years, the uneasy threat of conversion was hanging over the Jewish enclave" "There is a church in this neighbourhood ... with a Hebrew inscription on the front saying "Come you unbelieving Jews"" "And that's where the Jews were forced to attend Catholic sermons" "It's documented that in order not to listen to what the priest was saying" "They put wax in their ears" "So the priest was talking and talking and I don't know how much they listened" "Or how much they believed what they were being told" "One of the cruelest stories was played out on this Roman bridge" "Underneath statues commemorating Helena's discovery" "Of the true cross and the holy robe" "Right on this location on what is most probably a very cold winter morning in 1572" "A group of four women who were Christian" "They have been convicted by the Inquisition of practicing Jewish rites were brought here and first hung and then burned" "Many of these people underwent forced baptisms or their parents or grandparents underwent forced baptisms" "And the children continue to practice Jewish rites" "And a group of comforters who told them to be penitent and have a good Christian death brought them here" "and with some sort of crowd looking on they were killed" "These people were called the holy comforters?" "That's right" "If you admitted you're wrong and you were resigned to your fate, you can be hung first" "If not you would just be burned alive" "In spite of this on-going persecution" "I learned that the Limentani family had not only survived they had prospered" "In 1820 we opened our first store" "Where was that?" "It was in this street" "This is your family shop over here?" "Yes this is my family shop in this street" "This is my father" "Your daughter has been telling me the story of your family" "All the stories of the family Yes" "Would you explain to me what the passport was?" "We start to work with the Pope in 1870." "When the Pope moves to the Vatican city" "Our family gave him the first set of dishes and plates just to thank the Pope for giving us the passport" "How many Popes have you made dishes for?" "Starting from 1870 till now" "Are you making plates for the new Pope?" "Yes we are expecting the order from the new Pope" "The Limentanis received their special passport from Pious the 9th" "In March 1870, at the very end of the Pope's authority over the Jews" "In November of that year the citizens of Rome voted to join a unified Italy" "And the walls of the ghetto were torn down" "The Jews were liberated after more than 300 years" "The Pope had to flee from his palace in the centre of the city" "And retreat to the Vatican." "The Italian army entered Italy ended the power of the church" "And Rome became part of a unified Italy" "And that's when the ghetto was closed in 1870." "But the Jews have continued to live here because it is a place to which they feel they belong" "The Roman Jews thought they were free and they were for sixty years" "Free to go anywhere and to practice their religion without pressure to convert" "The zeal to convert others to Christianity may start with good intention" "This mission passed from the Catholic Church to the Protestants." "Today it is alive and well in Colorado" "So this is our family getting together to say we are about two things" "Knowing God and making God known in our generation" "And so we would love to engraft you as part of the family tonight and I think by the end of tonight you may just want to" "But everybody, there is a purpose behind it" "Just take a second and listen to it" "First Corinthians, chapter 4, verse 20." "For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power" "We got a scenario going on in our generation right here" "Where they are saying that only 4 per cent of us are going to be Evangelical Bible believing people" "But there are those of us that will say and are saying here tonight at New Life Church" "Not on my watch" "So we can now go out and make a difference in Colorado Springs" "In every college, at the academy and beyond" "It's kind of the moment where we will say "Here am I God, send me"" "Come on all over this room let's pray" "Our father in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ" "Look down on this gathering, this body of believers in you" "Tonight we give you everything and we pray in the name of Jesus that you would send us out God ship us out into our generation to carry this powerful Gospel story of your promises that never let go, that never relent" "that never quit, that never stop that never say die, that never surrender" "Taking that good news into our generation" "Talk is cheap, we are ready for action" "So here we are God Send us in Jesus name" "We are ready Amen." "A shuttle bus takes cadets back and forth between the academy and the New Life Church" "They will come to my room and just try to talk me into becoming saved" "To resist this kind of pressure and intense this kind of weight on me" "Can this not be an issue, can this please not be an issue" "Can this just be something we don't discuss and just go about our lives" "The academy is difficult enough, I don't need this" "They tell you you should go out and get people to come to Christ" "That that is a part of your job as a" "Christian if you are not doing that you know you are not being a good Christian." "I don't know if they think about that perspective of those people that they are talking about" "That they are going to burn in Hell That's me" "I don't think that by and large people feel like they are being violated at the air force academy" "I do think that it is part of freedom to have to hear other people's point of view when you don't actually want to hear it" "I drink Coke, I have to listen to Pepsi commercials" "I drive a Chevrolet, I have to listen to Ford commercials" "It is all part of living in a pluralistic society." "If cadets come to your church and they are convinced fine" "That is a totally different exercise than infiltrating" "And that is what was going on down there It was the infiltration" "Senator Gary Hart was one of the first to see a danger of state sponsored religion at the academy" "Many fundamentalist right-wing religious organizations ... are headquartered in Colorado Springs." "There was an attempt by those organizations to indoctrinate air force cadets and faculty members" "The drum beats were getting louder when conservative Christian evangelical ideology becomes the norm for the air force" "Then anything that appears other needs to be at least moved to the side" "If not banished and denigrated and humiliated" "And what is most visibly other to conservative Christian evangelicals is Jewishness" "I always say the same thing" "If you want an absolute guarantee of eternal life, Jesus is that guarantee" "If you want to try to work it out on your own you got that freedom" "But if you want a guarantee, This is the way to do it so" "So that's what I told Barbara Walter, Tom Brokaw and now you" "I wasn't the only one to make an nostalgic visit back to Germany this summer" "The newly elected Pope, Benedict the 16th" "Came home to say mass in a field for a million children." "World Youth Day The catholic Woodstock" "But he made another historic visit while he was here in the Rhineland" "Pope Benedict here in Cologne reminded people of the Third Reich ..." "And quite properly in speaking to a Jewish group he begins by acknowledging the tragedy of the Shoah, the Holocaust" "There was a way in which his acknowledgment of the Shoah was incomplete" "He said Nazi hatred of Jews was "born of Neopaganism"" "As if that's the only source of it" "Well it was born of Nazi Neopaganism." "But that hatred had two parents" "And the other one, the long tradition of Christian anti-Judaism he did not mention" "The story which most shockingly reveals the church's involvement" "Took place right here in the Rhineland" "Within two weeks of Adolf Hitler coming fully to power in March 1933 ..." "Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli The Vatican foreign minister sent him warm greetings" "Treaty negotiations began between Pacelli and" "Hitler's vice chancellor Franz von Papen" "In July they signed the so called the Reichskonkordat" "And the Vatican became the first foreign power to enter into a bilateral treaty with Hitler" "It included a secret provision in which the Church defend the Jews who had converted to Catholicism" "But indicated that it would have nothing to say about Nazi assaults against other Jews" "Only after a few days after signing the treaty for Hitler" "Franz von Papen represented the Fuhrer at the unveiling of the robe in Trier" "The robe that would not be shown again until 25 years later when I saw it" "The same robe that had come into the Gospels as proof that the Messiah had come" "That robe had become the centre of the celebration of the church's treaty with Hitler" "Over the next 3 weeks, more than 2 million pilgrims poured into Trier to see the robes" "Now the symbol of this alliance between church and state" "Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli went on to become Pope Pious the 12th." "While it may be unfair to call him Hitler's Pope" "It is not too much to call him Hitler's cardinal" "The New Pope is revising this history" "While he was here In Cologne" "Benedict invoked the memory of Edith Stein as a catholic hero but fell far short of telling her real story" "Edith Stein was a brilliant young German Jewish philosopher" "She studied the problems of despair and empathy" "In 1922, she converted to Catholicism" "11 years later, she entered the Carmelite Convent here in Cologne" "And took the name Sister Benedicta of the Cross" "Edith Stein was said to have written a letter of warning to Pope Pious the 11th right after Hitler took power" "There is one nun still alive who might know if this is true" "Sister Amata came to the convent here just as Sister Benedicta was leaving" "I ask her if she knew anything about the letter." "I would be very grateful to see it." "Sister Amata told me as I was leaving" "That the Vatican had released the letter only a year ago" "She said I was the first person to ask to see it" "Edith Stein fled from Cologne to another convent in the Netherlands" "But in August 1942, she was arrested there anyway and put on a train to the east" "Nine years after she wrote to the Pope." "Holy Father" "As a child of the Jewish people" "Who by the grace of God has been for the last 11 years a child of the Roman Catholic Church" "I take the liberty to spell out what oppresses millions of Germans" "For years on end Nazi leaders have preached anti-Semitism" "Now that they have put their hands on the powers of government the seeds of hate have sprouted" "For weeks now, not only Jews but thousands of faithful Roman Catholics have been waiting for the Church to raise its voice" "Isn't the extermination campaign pursued against those of Jewish blood an insult of the most holy humanity of our redeemer" "All of us who are faithful children of the Church" "And who face events in Germany with open eyes fear the worst for the standing of the church should the silence wear on" "Asking at your Holiness's feet Dr. Edith Stein" "So Edith Stein could be buried there" "As I was leaving, I saw a nun in the distance" "She was joined by more of her sisters" "They were coming to remember Edith Stein at the place where she had died" "When the church named her a saint in 1998" "Her letter to the Pope was not mentioned" "Nor was the entry about it in her diary" "December 18th 1938" "I know that my letter was delivered to the Holy Father" "I never received a reply" "I have often wondered whether this letter might have come to his mind once in a while" "For in the years that followed that which" "I had predicted for the future in Germany came true step by step." "In the course of my journey" "I realised I couldn't help but trace the story back to Rome." "That's where I found the episode that made me as a Christian feel most ashamed" "Italy's fascists leaders instituted racist laws in 1938." "The restrictions on Rome's Jews were a haunting reminder of Pope Carafe's edict in 1555." "Jews are forbidden to attend or to work in any Italian school" "Jews cannot own land." "Jews cannot employ Christian servants." "Jews cannot serve in public office" "Jews are forbidden to marry non-Jews." "In another set of restrictions a year later" "Jews were banned from skilled professions" "To attend services, they had to do so in secret" "They gathered in a small room near the old ghetto" "Jews were scared and worried" "And in 1938 my father sensed that our lives were in danger" "The Nazis pretended they were bargaining with Jews here" "They collected I don't remember exactly how many kilos of gold" "It is a day that I remembered perfectly 16th October 1943" "It was Saturday morning and raining" "I went to the smoke shop by myself" "But suddenly my father showed up" "He run over and when he reached me, he told me to come away with him" "He said the Germans are rounding up all the Jews" "The trucks came and they started rounding up people" "People started running away" "They went along the staircases and grabbed men, women, children, infants" "They carried them out on trucks" "This was the end of their lives here" "Where they had been living for 2,000 years." "On May 16th, we arrived in Auschwitz." "Right away, they started yelling and hitting anyone who moved slowly with their clubs" "Then we saw my sister and my mother" "We ran towards them." "My mother hugged us all, she was crying" "Her face was completely wet with tears" "I remembered her hug, mom's hug" "With my face against hers getting wet from mom's tears" "Then she said "I will never see you again."" "Which would be my mother's last words" "If on October 16th. when the Jews were awaiting deportation" "Not 300 yards from the Vatican" "If the Pope had only taken the trouble to step out through those Vatican gates" "Even without saying anything" "There was that great gesture of his in 19th July 1943" "When Rome was bombed" "And he went to the ruins" "And didn't say a word" "He just opened his arms in the sign of a cross" "If he had done something similar when the Jews were arrested on 16th October" "I think there would never have been a deportation" "If the Pope had spoken clearly, what difference would it have made?" "How does this history continue to live with you?" "He was very lucky man and he always thanks our God, the God of Abraham" "For the lucky chance that we have" "Nearly two decades passed after the war" "Without the church taking any responsibility for what had happened" "Then Pope John the 23rd was elected" "Just months before I met him, and he so changed my life" "He was this old guy and they chose him as the compromise" "He was just going to be there for a while and die That was the plan" "He blew them away because the first thing did was he said he was going to have a new Vatican Counsel" "A reforming counsel to as he said would open the windows of the Church" "Pope John died but the bishops went on and approved the change that mattered most" "They called it 'Nostra Aetate' ..." "Meaning "In our time"" "Nostra Aetate went right to the heart of the problem" "This document said no more saying the Jews are Christ killers" "You can't say that because now we understand where that charge led" "But Nostra Aetate is hardly known in the Christian world" "In our own time, Pope John Paul the 2nd was still fighting the battle to wipe away our hatred that had become second nature after 2000 years" "John Paul did what he could ..." "But in Poland I was shocked to see what had been erected after the Pope's visit" "Right in front of the wall of Auschwitz." "As if Christians was trying to claim the Holocaust for themselves" "If Jesus had died here, it would not have been as the saviour of the world but as an unknown Jew, with a number on his arm" "An hour's drive from Auschwitz in Krakow as elsewhere in Poland" "There is hardly a trace of the Jewish life that flourished here before the war" "I met a young priest who had grown up without knowing this Jewish past" "When he found out, he made it his calling" "They were neighbours, their houses are still there What happens to them?" "Why the people forget so easily?" "So it has become a kind of questions about myself" "About the kind of memory which I have" "The Jews were perceived as 'others'" "As not part of our group" "Probably it is easy to kill someone who is not belonging to us" "We still are unable to admit this Most of us" "We Catholics have to take responsibility for this" "And to say this openly" "That there is an institution, we played a role in this" "Just saying this, recognising this, we are changed by this truth" "Father Obirek was demanding a much fuller reckoning with the Church's failures than the Vatican was" "His Jesuits superiors ordered him to stop preaching in public" "He said a mass for me in the small chapel at the seminary where he used to teach" "I cannot teach, I cannot write as a member of the order" "You have been silenced?" "Yes Why?" "Because I was expressing what I am saying to you now" "In Poland this kind of voices are not acceptable" "I am leaving the priesthood, I'm leaving the order and I will try to to build my own way according to my conscience" "Still as a believing Christian?" "Yes" "In a way, it is painful because I have 30 years of being a Jesuit, 20 years as a priest" "So to change it, it is not easy" "I feel this as a new challenge for my life" "I think ironically you were entering the order as I was leaving my order 30 years ago" "So probably you have the same experience." "My version of it, I left the priesthood" "Precisely to speak as myself and to write as myself" "My time as a priest from 1969 to 1974 ..." "Coincided with all that had been effectively undercut in my life" "I couldn't be obedient after having the war in Vietnam destroy my faith in authority" "The turmoil of those years were my turmoil" "There was a moment in my life when I realize that" "If the B52 bombers flying over Vietnam were dropping contraceptive" "The American Catholic hierarchy would have condemned that war in a minute" "But they were dropping napalm" "In 1973, I spent a summer in a retreat in Tantur in Jerusalem" "When I walked where Jesus walked, on his way to his death" "I understood that it wasn't just the pious story that I had been raised to" "To believe and to celebrate every good Friday" "I understood in a way I never had before" "That there were people who had paid with their lives" "For the way their story was told" "So all of this was bearing down on me and I understood if the priesthood is wrong for you then leave" "Because your connection to God is unbreakable" "And the rest of my life followed from that" "Thousands of young priests like me left our orders" "I wonder if the liberal reform would have taken hold if we had stayed" "In Rome, I sought out my old friend Father John Pavlikovsky" "Who stayed when I left and fought for the very things that now matters so much to me" "How are you?" "Good." "Good to see you again" "Was it 73' I think was the first time We were young priest in Tantur" "I think you know I think you know" "What a definitive summer that was for me" "You confessed to me that perhaps you weren't going to stay around" "I was deciding to leave the priesthood right then That's right" "Confession is not a bad word for the feeling I have" "I don't feel that way so much now" "But at the time as you know it was a real struggle It was a struggle" "You stayed in the trenches, You have done tremendous work over the years" "Well thank you thank you What has it been like?" "Well, it has been very positive I would say" "Then you get the Gibson film Yeah" "Gibson film that kind of destroys Then you get people who who are supposed to be speaking for the church or something coming up and saying this is totally wonderful" "There is no contradiction here between what Nostra Aetate says" "And you are staring at the space and say" ""What planet are you on?"" "If you want to make religion a constructive force in society ..." "Religions must begin with an honest admission of those moments when they haven't been a constructive force" "When they have been a destructive force" "And the thing that frustrates me no end is when religious leaders get up and give the impression that religion has always been on the side of good and virtue" "It hasn't." "Let's be honest" "This crusade" "This war on terrorism" "Is going to take a while" "The president may not have understood what he was saying" "But his words calling for a crusade in the war we are fighting now still haunt me" "We are in a conflict between good and evil" "And America will call evil by its name" "We received our rights from God" "And we know that God is not neutral." "I am convinced this really is a crusade" "Islam is accused of violence as if Christianity is innocent." "If you think of religion as a great lake, it is lake of gasoline" "And all it is going to take is someone to drop a match into it for a terrible conflagration" "And I'm talking literally now, tragically" "Cause that is what the world of weapons of mass destruction mean" "And when you put religion into that context as a source of hatred and violence" "The worst catastrophe of all is possible" "Every religious person has to take responsibility" "For the way in which their tradition encourages intolerance suspicion, hatred of the 'other' ..." "And the Christian tradition both in relation to Muslims and Jews" "We have some very clear reckoning with history to do" "I can't ignore what is happening in Colorado Springs." "Religious and military power are coming together" "It is a warning and I hear it getting louder." "Tonight, at one military school, there are serious allegations of religious fervour out of control" "The air force academy face a full blown scandal when it was revealed that there had been a cover-up of a report by the Yale University Divinity School" "What we observed at the air force academy was wide spread evangelizing" "From cadets to officers to chaplains." "The Yale team reported that a chaplain delivered a sermon exhorting over 500 cadets on basic training to threaten non-evangelicals with dire consequences if they refuse to convert" "The head chaplain was telling them that in fact if they did not come to Jesus that they will burn in the fires of hell" "Quite frankly, some of the incidents that we looked at and heard about over the last 4 or 5 years were vicious and that is totally unacceptable" "The academy immediately started trying to spin this saying that" "Ok we have a little issue but the good news is it is not systemic" "The place is not out of control" "The evangelists have not taken over here" "This is a very normal campus other then it is a military school" "Rather than admit their mistakes ..." "The air force academy decided to attempt a smear campaign on the Yale team and ask me to also say that the things that were in the report were not true" "And then they proceeded to tell me that I too was a traitor" "And my career was over" "I tried working for months with an assistant I love the academy" "I sued the air force 15 days ago" "It was a very hard decision" "Some of you, most of you I hope are old enough to remember a Walt Disney movie called "Old Yeller"" "In the last scene is when the guy has to shoot his own dog" "That is how I felt when I had to fight my school" "My alma mater and the air force" "Now Mikey has been very clear" "But what he really wants" "Is no religious expression in the military" "And he does it under the banner of saying" "We want total equality between the various religions and non-religion" "See that's code for no religion" "See now that is anti-American We are not an atheistic country" "I think the message that it is sending around the world" "Particularly in Islamic world" "Is that the American military comes hand in hand this Christian evangelical package." "That we don't separate the two" "That the force behind the United States is this missionary zeal" "We are currently fighting a religious war at least our enemies are the remnants of the Taliban" "Al-Qaeda, the jihadist, the insurrectionist" "They already see us as invading American Christian imperialist crusaders." "You have yourself an evangelical background" "You were raised in the evangelical tradition" "What is different here is the insertion of these fundamentalist belief by key religious figures into partisan politics and I think it is very dangerous." "This is bordering on theocracy and of course theocracy is why our founders were so insistent on the First Amendment" "Within weeks of his suit" "Weinstein who had served in the Reagan White house found himself in open conflict over the separation of church and state with the US government and the evangelical religious right" "We are in the midst of an ideological conflict" "And we don't like people using the power of the state to keep Christians from giving their best arguments." "So Ted Haggard filed a counter suit on behalf of the 30 million strong National Association Evangelicals insisting that they be allowed to proselytize whenever, wherever and to whomever they want in the US military" "My father was buried here as the first Iraq war began" "The thing I remembered of my Dad most was this sense I got from him about war which is why this place is always so overwhelming to me" "Lo and behold here we are with a terrible war unfolding" "I was foolish enough to think that war would recede as a threat in my lifetime" "We had learn our lesson. hadn't we?" "I thought as an ex-priest, as a writer, I would take up other things" "But look what happen now" "The world is back on the edge of that precipice" "Only now it has been put there in part by religion by this terrible civilizational conflict that has religion at the centre of it" "I am back where I started, only now religion isn't the opposite of war" "Religion is involved in it, maybe even responsible for it" "No war is holy" "Oh the history books tell it" "They tell it so well" "The cavalries charged" "And the Indians fell" "The cavalries charged" "And the Indians died" "Oh the country was young then" "With God on its side" "For you don't count the dead when" "God's on your side" "BOB DYLAN" " WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE"