Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Catholic “Leaders” vs. Mel Gibson

(Reprinted from the issue of January 23, 2004)

Sometimes the news these days just makes you rub your eyes. I no longer expect the American bishops to pipe up against the moral grossness of Hollywood, but nothing prepared me for this.

The Washington Times reports that “an interfaith group of Catholics and Jews” — including a committee attached to the U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops — has condemned Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ as a “modern version of the notorious medieval Passion Plays which so often over the centuries have triggered riots against the Jews of Europe.”

I had to read that twice before I believed it. Here is perhaps the most pious, and incomparably the most popular, movie ever made about our Lord, the first cinematic offering made to Christians in a generation, and made from a distinctively Catholic perspective — and an official-sounding Catholic group joins a consulting Jewish group in smearing it, and in words that might have been written by Abe Foxman at that. Unbelievable.

Did this same interfaith coalition pipe up against Martin Scorsese’s obscene, absurd, and blasphemous Last Temptation of Christ? Not that I recall. If you wonder why some Jewish organizations, claiming to speak for barely 2% of the U.S. population, wield more influence than the bishops who supposedly speak for a full quarter of that population, wonder no more.

This statement, it should be noted, doesn’t speak for all the bishops. It looks like the work of bureaucrats trying to palm it off, under the bishops’ noses, as “the Church’s position” on Gibson’s film. One hopes the bishops will firmly correct that impression.

As to the charge itself, Gibson’s movie, as the statement admits, has inspired not a single violent act against any Jew in the whole world, while raking in over $600 million. It clearly wasn’t meant to inspire violence, and the countless Christians who saw it took it as Gibson intended.

The only hatred it seems to have provoked was in enemies of Christianity, some of whom, in Hollywood, threatened reprisals against Gibson himself!

Of course nobody really thought the film would cause violence; not even those who predicted that it would took measures to protect themselves. This isn’t that mythical medieval Europe, in which every Jew lived in constant fear for his life (though Jews migrated to Europe anyway, for some reason). Abe Foxman didn’t hire a bodyguard, either when the film was shown in theaters or when it was released on video. After all those prophecies of horror, the pacific Christian reaction must have come as a severe disappointment.

The film is based directly on the Gospels’ accounts of the hours before the crucifixion. I recently watched it again, and was impressed by its general conformity to Scripture. The scene of Christ’s scourging has been criticized for going on too long, but by my watch it lasts less than ten minutes — much, much shorter than the actual scourging must have lasted.

But this points up an interesting fact. That scene is so hard to watch that it seems far longer than it actually is; I thought, before I checked, that it ran about a half-hour. This refutes the charge that Gibson’s portrayal of the Passion is “sadistic”; even the movie’s bitterest critics agree that its violence is nearly unbearable to watch, offering none of the furtive pleasure most violent movies afford. The hostile critics all had the same impression I did: that the scourging took up a large part of the film. Never has prolonged agony been shown on the screen with such terrible realism.

What about those “notorious” Passion Plays? My college courses on Elizabethan drama mentioned them only briefly as part of the background of Shakespeare’s plays, saying nothing about their having caused violent reactions, or specifically “riots against the Jews,” in their audiences. I presume this happened occasionally, but if it had been a chronic problem the civil authorities would have had to take action.

The Church would also have condemned them; the Popes and bishops forbade violence against Jews and protected them against mobs on many occasions. The Jews often sought the Church’s protection. But as so often happens, the Church is now blamed for the very evils it actually tried to prevent.

Gibson’s film does show both the Sanhedrin and a Jewish mob demanding Christ’s death. In this it merely follows the Gospels. Pontius Pilate is up against tremendous pressure, and he finally caves. Ordering the crucifixion is the politically safe way out of his dilemma. Killing “this just man” isn’t his idea; Jesus’ Jewish enemies plot against Him all the way through the Gospels. He and His followers often have to watch their steps, in a recurrent phrase of the Gospels and in the Acts, “for fear of the Jews”; never “for fear of the Romans.” The Talmud condemns Christ as a “sorcerer” who got what He deserved from the Jewish authorities; the Romans aren’t even mentioned.

One also has to wonder what the Passion Plays actually said. How faithful to the Gospels were they? Did they add inflammatory material about the role of the Jews? These questions are hard to answer, since few scripts of those plays survive, and they must have varied greatly from place to place and from time to time. We never seem to hear what those plays did say. But it seems unlikely that a single performance of any play could have incited a riot, unless there was already bad blood between local Christians and Jews for other reasons.

I suspect that the Passion Plays, like Gibson, are taking a bad rap. The charge against them isn’t that they distorted the Gospel accounts; indeed, many Jews charge that the Gospels themselves are the original source of anti-Semitism. Christians “caused” anti- Semitism merely by recording their memories of the Jewish hostility leading to Calvary.

Sadly, that hostility still exists. We can say all we want about Christ and the Apostles being Jews; about the Judeo-Christian tradition; about the many good and decent Jews among us. We can absolve today’s Jews of collective guilt for the crucifixion. We can engage in “interfaith dialogue.” But a very large problem still exists, and it isn’t going away.
 
What Good Can Come of This?

At any rate, Gibson’s film is one of the most remarkable works of Catholic art in our time, undertaken at great personal risk and expense for the purpose of glorifying Christ and spreading the faith. Its vilification could have been safely left to the liberal Jewish organizations, Hollywood moguls, atheist reviewers, modernist Catholics, and countless others who were only too ready to try to kill it even before its release.

The huge concerted effort to quash the film has already failed spectacularly. So why on earth is an official Catholic body complicit in such an effort now?

When every movie theater is offering PG-rated fare that would have been condemned by the Legion of Decency, what possible good can come of censuring the first movie in a generation to inspire passionate Christian devotion?


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Joseph Sobran