Mel Gibson: $5 Mil to Fringe Church (FOX attacks "antiquated Catholic ideology")

FOX ^ | Friday, February 20, 2004 | By Roger Friedman

[Behind Liberal Lines]

Mel Gibson's put his money where his mouth is. By now everyone in the world knows he's spent $25 million to make "The Passion of the Christ" and promised nearly $25M more to market it.

But what you may not know is that Gibson has also put up $5.1 million so far to run his own personal church near Malibu.

Last year Christopher Noxon wrote in The New York Times that Gibson had donated $2.3 million to make Holy Family Catholic Church in Agoura Hills, California a reality. Holy Family rejects the universally accepted teachings of the Second Vatican Conference and chooses to stick with antiquated Catholic ideology.

Bu it turns out that Gibson has donated a little more than twice that amount to Holy Family since 1999, according to federal tax filings. And that's not counting 2003, since the most recent report has not yet been filed.

Gibson and his wife Robyn are listed in federal tax records as directors of the Holy Family Catholic Church. The church is run out of Gibson's Icon Production company offices, with an Icon employee responsible for keeping the church's books.

The Gibsons' tax-free donations to Holy Family are made possible by a charity they established called the AP Reilly Foundation, which is named for Mel's late mother. The foundation was created on October 29, 1999 for the sole purpose of creating the church.

The church, by the way, has an unlisted phone number, keeps its address a secret and has asked those who have the information not to release it.

Gibson is no stranger to controversy when it comes to voicing his opinion about his religious beliefs. In a 1992 interview with the Spanish magazine El Pais, his comments about homosexuals — which cannot be printed here — caused an international stir.

In the same interview Gibson talked about the fact that his brand of Traditionalist Catholics did not subscribe to the Second Vatican Council's 1965 rulings on various subjects including who was responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.

[ultima ratio]

"Those who worship at SSPX Masses reject the authority of the Pope over them and follow a successor the the excommunicated Marcel Lefebvre, who led his SSPX out of the Catholic Church in 1988."

More slander. I am of that number and do not reject the Pope. I only abhor his policies and the fact that he does not use his authority to eliminate corruption and heterodoxy in the Chuch but instead seems to encourage these. But I acknowledge he is the Pope. So do all SSPX priests. No matter how many times you circulate this lie, it doesn't make it true.

[SJackson]

I also don't see why it detracts from the significance of the Holocaust to point out that maybe 4,000,000 Catholic Poles were killed in the same camps, purely because they were Catholic and Polish,

It doesn't. Frankly I don't know anyone who views it that way, although I read a lot about it here.

or that between them Hitler and Stalin managed to kill more than 50,000,000 people in war or prison camps by the time the war was over.

I'd agree with you there too, however you have to recognize that a substantial portion of the world's population, including the nations he victimized, would disagree about the horrific nature of communism, viewing Stalin the same way Marge Schott viewed Hitler, ...Everybody knows he was good at the beginning but he just went too far

[CobaltBlue]

What changes offend your relatives?

I know an Irish Catholic man who rants about "machine gun toting mini-skirted Maryknoll nuns" but he never goes to church anyway.

[CobaltBlue]

Hutton seems to be more ignorant than hateful. For example, one of the things he recently said, that the Nazis didn't have enough fuel to cremate 6 million dead Jews at Auschwitz, is probably right, but beside the point.

Auschwitz and other crematoria came online very late in the Holocaust.

In the beginning, most Jews were killed with a single "Stalin shot" to the base of the skull, and their bodies were buried by Jews who were waiting their own turn to be shot.

Later, they were gassed in trucks using the exhaust while the truck ran, and again, they were buried by fellow Jews.

There were death camps all over Europe, many of them most people in the West have never heard of, and are not very well studied because they were behind the Iron Curtain and the Soviets didn't care to study the Holocaust, they were interested in the way the Nazis treated the other Eastern Europeans, especially the Communists.

Hutton is a wacky old man who doesn't have much education. Nobody would even care what he says except that it's a way of making his son look bad.

[AgThorn]

What a jerk this Friedman is .....

I am curious as to the church though. Although it is clear that it is a 'pre-vaticanII' practicing Roman Catholic church, is it totally independent of the Vatican? ie no support from the archdiocese at all? Is there support from other pre-V2 churchs, hence forming their own sort of diocese?

I am aware of these churches, and God bless them for sticking to what they feel is important in their faith practice.

[rogator]

"How could the teachings of Vatican 2 be 'universally accepted' if in the same sentence he says that this church in particular rejects some of those teachings? It can't be 'universally accepted' if one group doesn't accept them.
They ARE universally accepted within the Catholic Church."

The teachings of Vatican II regarding Gregorian Chant are in fact rejected by almost every parish in the "mainstream" church.
Your statement "They ARE universally accepted within the Catholic Church." is thus inaccurate in this and in other ways.

[Protagoras]

To the liberals, any church that insists on using the bible is "antiquated" and "fringe".

Actually, the Vatican probably regards it as such.

[CobaltBlue]

But ripping out altar rails, removing religious statues, turning around the altar, introducing "profane" music to services, and ending the Latin and the Tridentine Mass, destroyed a lot of the majesty of that faith.

Count me as one who disagrees with this position. I think you're talking about personal preferences in aesthetic matters, which have little, if anything, to do with actual doctrinal issues.

[AgThorn]

No one in the Catholic Church is empowered to build his own chapels or separate himself from the Pope, which Gibson has done.

Correction ... "No one in the ROMAN Catholic Church ....", i.e. the "Catholic" Church, by definition, can also mean the universal Christian Church. The latter, more important meaning, includes both the RCC as well as Mel's pre-V2 Catholic church.

[SJackson]

Hutton seems to be more ignorant than hateful. For example, one of the things he recently said, that the Nazis didn't have enough fuel to cremate 6 million dead Jews at Auschwitz, is probably right, but beside the point…. Nobody would even care what he says except that it's a way of making his son look bad.

Along with that Hutton contends they weren’t killed, rather emigrated, and that Holocaust is a hoax designed to increase emigration to Israel (the Polish Jews that weren’t killed went to LA and Brooklyn by the way) and make money. He’s been a minor public figure for years, expounding his views in books (vanity) and newsletters, more recently as a prominent speaker at Holocaust denial conference.

Yes, his son’s prominence is what gives him, now, a national platform, but that’s no reason to minimize the hate he spews. Smearing Jews as money-grubbing power-mongers controlling the world is indefensible, promoting hanging Alan Greenspan as the solution is worse.

[Happy2BMe]

"In the same interview Gibson talked about the fact that his brand of Traditionalist Catholics did not subscribe to the Second Vatican Council's 1965 rulings on various subjects including who was responsible for the death of Jesus Christ."

I like Mel ping!

[CobaltBlue]

Breaking off from the Catholic Church and going your own way is certainly not a new phenomenon. To a Protestant, breaking off from your church and going your own way means something very different than it does to a Catholic.

It is one of the moral duties of mankind to be true to your own conscience regardless of the consequences, so nobody is saying Gibson should not do what he has done.

But it's also true that one cannot at one and the same time reject the fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church and claim to be a good Catholic.

[af_vet_1981]

Hutton is a wacky old man who doesn't have much education.

I thought he had studied religion all his life and taught his faith to Mel.

[AgThorn]

The actor does not hide his disdain for the Catholic Church. In a January 2003 interview with Time, he condemns Vatican II, saying it “corrupted the institution of the church. Look at the main fruits: dwindling numbers and pedophilia." The 40-year gap between the colloquium and the current scandal is conveniently not addressed
American Daily

Sad that he made this statement. The dwindling numbers and pedophilia are hardly a creation of V2. The fact that V2 did not go far enough, i.e. letting the priests marry, is part of the reason for the dwindling number of priests as well as the pedophilia problem. The dwindling number of parishioners was much more severe pre-V2 than the church is facing now (of course the more the pedophilia problem stays with us, the church cannot do what it potentially could without.)

[Campion]

It's one thing to attack Gibson's behavior. It's another to cast aspersions on a religion ... But don't single out a religion for attack.

The religion of Catholics -- real Catholics, not the Mel Gibson DIY kind, but the kind in union with the Pope of Rome, is singled out for some of the most venomous attacks imaginable on practically every FR thread dealing with religion almost every day.

I, personally, have been informed that to be an obedient Catholic is to be a child-molester; that is, I have been told that I am a pedophile on account of my religion. (This would come as a shock to my wife and children, as well as to my confessor ... as well as to God.) The particular poster who said that is banned at the moment, but not for that offense.

Maybe you should start by opposing that little FR tradition.

[CobaltBlue]

I admit to not following Hutton Gibson's opinions closely - and I really don't want to, either. He's a wacky old man without much education who doesn't deserve the attention he's getting - that's my position and I am sticking to it.

[Happy2BMe]

"And when will Islam or wahhabism be spoken of with such disdain?"

What a wonderful question . .

Omar Ahmad

Co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

President & CEO of Silicon Expert Technologies, he is a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp in Jordan.  

" Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant...The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth,"
-Omar Ahmad

 Ibrahim Hooper
CAIR spokesperson

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future...But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that.

"CAIR does not support these groups publicly."
(when asked about CAIR's record of supporting Hamas, Hizbullah and other official terrorist groups)

-Ibrahim Hooper

[SJackson]

Hutton is a wacky old man who doesn't have much education.

BTW, ole Hutton's earliest claim to prominence was a victory on Jeopardy in the late 60's, won $25,000, not the prize for the uneducated in those days. He's smart and he's an excellent communicator.

[livius]

My understanding also was that it was a private chapel, not SSPX, but not affiliated with the archdiocese as a parish. It is permitted by the ordinary and staffed at Mel Gibson's expense by regular Roman Catholic clergy. Frequently retired priests do jobs like this.

I could be wrong, of course, but I'm pretty sure that this bit of information was in the New York Times article about him awhile ago.

[CobaltBlue]

Altar or lectern? If your church has laymen reading from the Bible, what difference does it make to you whether the layman is male or female?