Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

That Movie

(Reprinted from the issue of March 18, 2004)

Christian America has finally found a way to send Hollywood a message: by going to a movie.

The movie I allude to, lacking a single big-name actor and filmed in foreign — indeed, dead — languages, had some trouble even finding a distributor. And in its first week of release, it garnered more revenue than all of Hollywood’s current films combined.

Hollywood is now torn between its hatred of God and its love of Mammon. It despises all things Christian, especially Catholic, but it harbors a profound reverence for those box-office receipts.

Still, putting principle above profit, some Hollywood moguls are vowing revenge on producer-director Mel Gibson. They’ll never hire him again, they swear, forgetting that he has successfully defied them and will never need them again.

I should mention at once that even some serious Catholics have found flaws in The Passion of the Christ.

One thoughtful criticism is that the motives of the rabid high priest Caiaphas are never satisfactorily explained. I must say that I was too overwhelmed by the film to notice this, and I must watch it again when my nerves are up to it. It’s hard for anyone to keep a sense of proportion about this stunning movie, and I admire those who, when watching it, can separate their emotional experience of it from their memory of the Gospels.

Even Gibson’s undoubtedly good intentions mustn’t exempt the film from rational judgment. That would be merely the reverse of his enemies’ position that his supposedly evil motives make The Passion a terrible film.
 
A Sign of Contradiction

In the end, Catholics will disagree about it; and so will Jews. Some Jews already fear that Jewish attacks, not only on the film but on the Gospels and Christianity, will alienate “evangelicals who have been staunchly supporting Israel, but who also packed movie houses during the past week,” reports the Jewish newspaper Forward.

Some conservative Christians want to blame the anti-Gibson, anti-Christian barrage on “liberals,” but this is silly. Two of the most vicious smears have come from the neoconservative columnists William Safire and Charles Krauthammer; Gertrude Himmelfarb, wife of Irving Kristol, has made a more reasonable case against the film, though she also calls it “sadistic” (without having seen it).

Safire, however, traces the Holocaust back to Christ Himself, who laid the groundwork for violent persecution with the words “I come to bring not peace, but a sword.” Safire neglects to explain that this is a metaphor; Jesus immediately goes on to explain that His teaching will set father against son, mother against daughter, and so forth. He also says (it’s in the movie) that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

So our Lord once again proves to be “a sign of contradiction” — this time for the conservative movement. The dispute goes far deeper than politics.

Krauthammer is slightly less absurd than Safire, but more adroit in his insinuations. He blames the Catholic Church for the “blood libel” the Gospels “affixed upon the Jewish people [that] had resulted in countless Christian massacres of Jews, and prepared Europe for the ultimate massacre — six million Jews systematically murdered within six years — in the heart, alas, of a Christian continent. It is no accident,” he goes on, “that Vatican II occurred just two decades after the Holocaust, indeed in its very shadow.”

Gibson, he writes, has committed “a singular act of interreligious aggression,” “openly rejects the Vatican II teaching,” and “gives us the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews.” The council had tried to “unteach the lesson that had been taught for almost two millennia: that the Jews were Christ-killers.”

Note what Krauthammer is doing here: He is turning a goodwill gesture of Vatican II into a smear of almost two millennia of Christendom. Evidently the council was summoned, “in the shadow of the Holocaust” (a word not even in currency until years after the council), for the chief purpose of “unteaching” what the Church had always taught, causing “countless” Christian slaughters of Jews.

You’d think Catholics had greeted the council’s teaching with the incredulous question, “You mean we can’t even kill Jews anymore?”

In all the raging against the film, I’ve read the word “countless” countless times. The further these alleged Christian atrocities recede into the past, the worse they seem to become.

But this propaganda insults Jews as well as Christians, and defies common sense. It means to tell us that Christians constantly behaved inhumanly, with what Krauthammer calls “a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands.” But it also suggests that the Jews, living in Christian lands where they were bitterly hated, were uncommonly passive, unlike any Jews (or normal human beings) ever known.

In response to Gibson’s film, many hoary anti-Catholic slanders have been revived, including the beloved myth of the Spanish Inquisition, which (we are told) also killed “countless” Jews, though it had no authority over Jews and was by modern standards a rather pokey affair.

One hostile historian estimated that it executed a total of about 10,000 people over the more than three centuries of its existence; modern historians believe the total was far lower.
 
Behaving like Christians

The remarkable success of Gibson’s film won’t kill off the myths that never die, but it does prove that American Christians, despised by Hollywood, are more than a niche market.

They have been attending the film by the tens of millions, and they have behaved like the Christians they are, with absolutely none of the violence against Jews that was predicted. Even one beating of a Jew would have produced nationwide headlines and several Krauthammer columns.

The “predictions” themselves were only more of the anti-Christian propaganda we have come to expect.


I’ll soon be examining the fear of Christ, which I call crying “Wolf!” at the Lamb, in my monthly newsletter, SOBRAN’S. If you have not seen it yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

Already a subscriber? Consider a gift subscription for a priest, friend, or relative.

Joseph Sobran