Mel's maligners

Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is provoking religious slights -- on Christians.

Diane Sawyer's Primetime interview with Gibson dripped with an insulting condescension toward Christianity, a condescension liberals would regard as bigoted were it aimed at Judaism or Islam.

Sawyer, brows furrowed, looking almost in a state of physical pain, felt free to question Gibson's faith with a surely-you-can't-believe-that? air. As Gibson spoke about such things as his belief in the Devil and the Holy Spirit, Sawyer's face registered a wincing incredulity. She looked like a horrified anthropologist who had just stumbled upon some grotesque religious sect.

After Gibson said of Jesus Christ's crucifixion -- "He was beaten for our iniquities. He was wounded for our transgressions. And by his wounds we are healed. That's the point of the film. It's not about pointing the fingers, it's not about playing the blame game. It's about faith, hope, love and forgiveness. It's the reality for me. I believe that. I have to " -- Sawyer asked, "Have to?" In other words: Come on, Mr. Gibson, you don't have to take your faith quite so seriously.

Talk show hosts usually coo over the convictions of artists and believers. Not so with Gibson. His convictions are so in need of correction that Sawyer, suddenly an art monitor, demanded to know why he didn't make a different movie. "You could have made a life of Jesus," a nice and fuzzy movie without the crucifixion, Sawyer told Gibson.(The fatuousness of Sawyer reached its bottom when she referred to the movie as an "anti-date movie.") And why didn't he add a postscript denouncing anti-Semitism to his movie? Sawyer wanted to know.

It would be hard to imagine Sawyer behaving like such a busybody with any other director. She suggested to Gibson that he was "playing with fire." Do other directors get reminders from her on their responsibility to make movies that produce only comity and unanimity?

The left loves "art that challenges," and treats turmoil in the wake of art as a mark of its value and truth, but not if it is based on the Bible. Then it is viewed as a dangerous obscenity, a matter of "playing with fire."

Gibson correctly pointed out to Sawyer that those who object to his movie are really objecting to the New Testament. "Read the Gospels," he told her. But Sawyer doesn't want to read the Gospels unless they are rewritten according to liberal sensitivities. The Bible, she reminded Gibson, has been deconstructed. (Though it is never explained why the deconstructionists deconstruct the Sanhedrin's role in Christ's crucifixion while not extending that same deconstructionist generosity to Pontius Pilate.) Why take it all so literally? she in effect asked him. She really caught him out when she established that the blood-be-on-our-children line from the Gospels was still in the film in "Aramaic." Apparently unless the Bible is bowdlerized, it is not safe material for movies.

When not asking belittling questions -- "What does the evil side want?" "Do you believe God wrote this film?" "You have the nonstop ticket [to heaven]?" -- Sawyer was hiding behind phrases like "some critics say," "historians say."

Sawyer found a "former priest" to criticize the movie. He was disappointed that the movie didn't anticipate the moviegoing needs of Martians. "Let's say I'm a Martian, I'm just watching this film. All the time I keep saying to myself, what's anyone got against this guy?" the former priest said. Gibson's response to this criticism was to say basically that he didn't make the movie for Martians. The "former priest" didn't care for the focus on "brutality." (Christianity without the crucifixion appeals to liberal Catholic priests, current and ex. Hence they have been trying to take crucifixes out of Catholic classrooms and churches for years.)

Sawyer also asked Gibson about a 19th century nun whose work on the crucifixion -- a "some say lurid" account of the crucifixion -- supposedly informed his film. "Lurid," "playing with fire" -- this is Hollywood's stock in trade. For such a seasoned Hollywoodized journalist, Sawyer is easily shocked.

"I think it is one of the things that worries and concerns some of the critics" -- meaning her -- "that this is presented as truth," she said to Gibson, casually implying that the Gospels are made up. Sawyer was so determined to make sure that Gibson didn't disparage anyone else's faith she felt entitled to disparage his.

Another point of view:

A Passion of Violence and Love
Zenit ^ | Feb 18 2004 | Vittorio Messori

Posted on 02/19/2004 7:07:11 PM PST by Tantumergo

After two hours and six minutes, the lights flick on again in the little soundproof room. There are only about a dozen of us (I the sole journalist), and we are aware of a privilege. By invitation of Mel Gibson and producer Steve McEveety of Icon Films, we are the first in Europe to see the final copy of this film which just arrived from Los Angeles. The same version that next Wednesday will be in 2,000 American cinemas, 500 English ones, and as many Australian, the version whose expectation has caused a short circuit on Internet sites and which in the first week will recover (the bookmakers say it is certain) the $30 million of production costs.

The Pope himself has only seen a provisional version, lacking among other things the final soundtrack. But, if this evening we are the first, the Italians will have to wait until the 7th of April, the French and the Spanish until June.

When the long list of credits ends, where American names alternate with Italian, where recognition of the municipality of Matera is side by side with that of theologians and experts in ancient languages, where Rosalinda, the daughter of Celentano (the devil) is next to a Romanian Jew, Maia Morgenstern (the Virgin Mary), and the technician presses the light switch, silence continues in the little room.

Two women weep quietly, without sobbing; the monsignor in clergyman's dress who is next to me is very pale, his eyes closed; the young ecclesiastical secretary nervously fingers a rosary; a tentative, solitary start of applause quickly dies out in embarrassment.

For many, very long minutes, no one stands up, no one moves, no one speaks. So, what we were being told was true: "The Passion of The Christ" has struck us, it has worked in us, the first guinea pigs, the effect that Gibson wanted.

For what it's worth, I myself was disconcerted and speechless: For years I have examined one by one the Greek words with which the Evangelists recount those events; not one historical minutia of those 12 hours in Jerusalem is unknown to me. I have addressed it in a 400-page book that Gibson himself has taken into account. I know everything, or rather, I now discover that I thought I knew: everything changes if those words are translated into images of such power to transform in flesh and blood, striking signs of love and hatred.

The Gamble

Mel has said it with pride tempered by humility, with pragmatism kneaded with mysticism which becomes in him a singular mixture: "If this work was to fail, for 50 years there will be no future for religious films. We threw the best in here: as much money as we wished, prestige, time, rigor, the charism of great actors, the science of the learned, inspirations of the mystics, experience, advanced technology. Above all, we threw in our conviction that it was worthwhile, that what takes place in those hours concerns every man. Our eternity is bound up forever with this Jew. If we don't point this out, who will be able to do so? But we will point it out, I am sure of it: Our work was accompanied by too many signs that confirm it."

In fact, on the set much more happened than what is known; much will remain in the secret of consciences: conversions, release from drugs, reconciliation between enemies, giving up of adulterous ties, apparitions of mysterious personages, extraordinary explosions of energy, enigmatic figures who knelt down as the extraordinary Caviezel-Jesus passed by, even two flashes of lightning, one of which struck the cross, but did not hurt anyone. And, then, coincidences read like signs: the Madonna with the face of the Jewish actress with the name Morgenstern which, it was only noticed later, is, in German, the "Morning Star" of the litanies of the rosary.

Gibson remembered Blessed Angelico's warning: "To depict Christ, it is necessary to live with Christ." The atmosphere, between the Sassi di Matera and the Cinecittà Studios seems to have been that of the sacred medieval representations, of processions of scourged pilgrims before the relics of martyrs. A 14th-century Thespis' cart, with which every evening, a priest in black cassock, of the type with the long line of buttons, celebrated an open-air Mass, in Latin, according to the rite of St. Pius V. Precisely here, in fact, is the real reason for the decision to make the Jews speak in their popular language, Aramaic, and the Romans in a low Latin, of the military, which wounds our schoolboy ears, used to Ciceronian refinements.

Gibson, a Catholic who loves the Tradition, is a strong champion of the doctrine confirmed by the Council of Trent: the Mass is "also" a fraternal meal but it is "above all" Jesus' sacrifice, the bloodless renewal of the passion. This is what matters, not the "understanding of the words," as the new liturgists wish, whose superficiality Mel mocks as it seems like blasphemy to him. The redemptive value of the actions and gestures that have their culmination on Calvary has no need of expressions that anyone can understand.

This film, for its author, is a Mass: Let it be, then, in an obscure language, as it was for so many centuries. If the mind does not understand, so much the better. What matters is that the heart understands that all that happened redeems us from sin and opens to us the doors of salvation. Precisely as the prophecy of Isaiah reminds us on the "Servant of Yahweh" which, taking up the whole screen, is the prologue of the entire film. The wonder, however, seems to me to be verified: After a while, one stops reading the subtitles to enter, without distractions, in the terrible and marvelous scenes -- that are sufficient in themselves.

The Quality

On the technical plane, the work is of a very high quality, so much so that previous films on Jesus might seem reduced to poor and archaic relatives: in Gibson, strategic lighting, skillful photography, extraordinary costumes, rugged and sometimes sumptuous set designs, incredibly convincing makeup, recitations of great professionals supervised by a director who is also one of their illustrious colleagues. Above all, such amazing special effects which, as Enzo Sisti, the executive producer, said to us, will remain secret, to confirm the enigma of the work, where the technique is intended to be at the service of faith. A faith in the most Catholic version -- no accident that it was pleasing to the Pope and to so many cardinals, not excluding Ratzinger, for whom "The Passion" is a manifesto that abounds in symbols that only a competent eye can fully discern. There will be a book (two, in fact, are in preparation) to help the spectator understand.

Very briefly, the radical "Catholicity" of the film lies first of all in the refusal of every demythicization, in taking the Gospels as precise chronicles: The things, we are told, happened like this, precisely as the Scriptures describe it. Catholicism is present, then, in the recognition of the divinity of Jesus which exists together with his full humanity. A divinity that bursts forth, dramatically, in the superhuman capacity of that body to suffer a level of pain as no one before or after ever has, in expiation of all the sin of the world.

But the radical "Catholicity" is also in the Eucharistic aspect, reaffirmed in its materiality: The blood of the Passion is continuously intermingled with the wine of the Mass, the tortured flesh of the "corpus Christi" with the consecrated bread. It is, also, in the strongly Marian tone: the Mother and the devil (who is feminine or, perhaps, androgynous) are omnipresent, the one with her silent pain, the other with his/her malicious satisfaction.

From Anne Catherine Emmerich, the stigmatized visionary, Gibson has taken extraordinary intuitions: Claudia Procula, Pilate's wife, who offers, weeping, to Mary the cloths to soak up the blood of the Son is among the scenes of greatest delicacy in a film that, more than violent, is brutal. Brutal as, in fact, the Passion was. The desperate Peter after the denial, falls at the feet of the Blessed Virgin to obtain pardon. I believe, however, that the theological importance attributed to the Madonna, as well as to the Eucharist -- an importance not spiritualized, not reduced to a "memorial" but seen in the most material, and therefore Catholic, way (the Transubstantiation) -- will create some uneasiness in American Protestant churches which, without having seen the film, have already organized themselves to support its distribution.

If two hours are dedicated to the martyrdom, two minutes suffice to recall that that was not the last word. From Good Friday to Easter Sunday, to the Resurrection, which Gibson has resolved by making a particular reading of John's words: an "emptying" of the funeral shroud, leaving a sufficient sign to "see and believe" that the tortured one has triumphed over death.

Anti-Semitism or, at least, anti-Judaism? Let's not play around with words that are much too serious. From my viewing, I agree with the many and authoritative American Jews who admonish their co-religionists not to condemn before seeing. It comes across very clearly in the film that what weighs Christ down and reduces him to that state is not this one's or that one's fault, but rather the sin of all men, no one excluded.

To Caiaphas' obstinacy in calling for the crucifixion (that collaborator Sadducee who did not in fact represent the Jewish people, but, rather was detested by them; the Talmud reserves terrible words for him and for his father-in-law Annas), more than abundant counterbalance is made by the unheard-of sadism of the Roman executioners. The political cowardice of Pilate that leads him to violate his conscience stands counter to the courage of the member of the Sanhedrin -- an episode added by the director -- who confronts the High Priest crying out that that trial is illegal. And is it not John, a Jew, who supports the Mother? Is not the pious Veronica a Jew? Is not the impetuous Simon of Cyrene a Jew? Are not the women of Jerusalem, crying out in despair, all Jews? And is it not Peter -- a Jew -- who, when forgiven, will die for the Master?

At the beginning of the film, before the drama is unleashed, an anguished Magdalene asks the Virgin: "Why is this night so different from any other?" "Because," Mary answers, "we were all slaves and now we will no longer be so." All, but absolutely all: whether they are "Jews or Gentiles." This work, Mel Gibson says, saddened by aggressions to prevent it, intends to propose again the message of a God who is Love. And what Love would it be if he excluded any one?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.