Posted on 03/31/2003 5:28:35 AM PST by dead
Movie makers know that a dose of pre-release controversy can work wonders for their films at the box office. But even such modern marketing techniques don't quite explain the flak Mel Gibson is drawing over the film he is making based on the final hours in the life of Jesus.
Called The Passion, the movie has been directed, co-written, and largely privately financed by Gibson who says it will be an authentic - and graphic - presentation of the gospel story even to the point of having the actors speak exclusively in Latin and Aramaic.
The Passion has been panned in advance by some critics who say the story has been done to death. Some reports have linked it to Gibson's religious beliefs with one scathing attack recently suggesting he is peddling an outmoded theology favoured by "conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives".
The film has also raised concerns among Jewish groups who fear it will revive the charge that Jews are collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.
Gibson went so far as to claim, in a March 14 interview with an American Catholic cable network, that "the other world" was "warring" with him to prevent his retelling how Jesus died a horrible death for the sake of humanity.
The real war Gibson has joined, however, is a culture war within the Catholic Church which is spilling across the frontiers of inter-religious dialogue.
Gibson has never made a secret of his Catholicism or of the particular variety of the faith with which he feels comfortable. This is a traditionalist Catholicism that is deeply suspicious of the changes brought about in the church by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s and determined to retrieve a sense of its own separateness from the world.
He was quoted in Time magazine in January as arguing that Vatican II had "corrupted" the church.
"Look at the fruits," Gibson had said, "dwindling numbers and pedophilia."
This ignores the fact that attendance levels at Mass now are about what they were a century ago (high attendance levels in the decades before 1960 were the anomaly), that many cases of clerical sexual abuse go back well beyond the past 40 years, and that it was Vatican II which encouraged Catholics of Gibson's generation to take the study of the Bible seriously.
Gibson is also a devotee of the Latin Mass - he is said to attend daily in his private chapel - which Vatican II replaced by Mass celebrated in the vernacular.
Vatican II reasoned that the adoption of Latin as the universal language of the church in the fourth century was merely a concession to the times and that by conducting Mass in the language of the participants they could take a more active part in the ceremony.
But active involvement brings with it differences of opinion and outlook. It was such differences, taken to their extreme by Protestant reformers and also by those Catholics who sought to counter the Reformation, that led to the Council of Trent in the 16th century. The council sought to impose order amid the chaos by, among other things, standardising the Mass. This became known as the Tridentine Rite, commonly referred to as the Old Latin Mass.
Among traditionalists the popularity of this Mass is essentially an expression of support for the type of church that produced it - one that placed a premium on order, stability and certainty rather than innovation, participation and inclusiveness. Its appeal has very little to do with any inherent beauty associated with the Latin language.
This explains why clerics such as Bishop Daniel Dolan, who ministers to traditionalist Catholics in Cincinnati, told The New York Times recently that for Gibson "to put the weight of his Hollywood celebrity behind the truth that the whole modern church structure is rotten to the core is excellent". (Dolan was ordained by a French archbishop who broke with Rome over Vatican II and was later excommunicated.)
The symbolic importance of the Latin Mass also explains why Gibson, and by extension the publicity for his views The Passion will attract, draws criticism from mainstream Catholics and from non-Catholics who are thankful that the church finally embraced the modern world and all its complexity in the 1960s.
The moral for Gibson is obvious: if you are going to be a combatant, expect to be shot at from time to time.
The message for everyone else is simple: celebrities are entitled to their opinions but, for all the influence they wield, their views are no more valid than anybody else's.
That's not what he said. He said the "other world" was warring, a biblical reference to the war going on between heaven & hell. He did say he thought there might be forces trying to prevent him from making the movie, but we heard this same thing during the making of the Exorcist (as well as several teenage slasher movies) and I don't recall reading anyone making light of those claims.
There is a pun in there somewhere.
Battle lines are drawn; put on the whole Armour that you are able to withstand in the evil day.
Ah, yes, the cry of the "modern" moral relativist, "Opinions are like a$$holes, everybody has one and they all stink." "There is no right or wrong, mearly opinion, which we call 'personal values'". The ancients called a person rejecting the possibility that virtue was possible a "cynic". The refusal to distinguish between right and wrong they called "licentiousness". The Hebrews and Christians knew this to be Sin. As the old saying says, "the more things change the more things stay the same."
The second clause does not follow from the first; you'd have to study attendance levels over a few centuries to determine what is the norm. And even if high attendance levels in the decades before 1960 were the anomaly, it in no way follows that those high attendance levels were a causeless fluke whose end was also causeless.
Also, there is the possibility that Catholicism was heading toward a significant upswing prior to the 1960's. With "attendance" levels being much higher than they had been 60 years before, things were looking good for the Church of St Peter. But something came along to reverse that trend, and send the attendance levels back down to their previous levels. Wonder what?
What is your source for these claims?
Umm, this also conveniently ignores the fact that the Roman Catholic Church burned as "heretics" all those who tried to put the Bible into English for the layman.
Keeping the Bible in Latin meant one had to rely solely on the Church for guidance about your soul. In effect guaranteeing captivity for those wanting to know God.
Just one small example of the Catholic Church's intolerance - in 1516, two couples were burned at the stake in England for daring to teach their children the 10 commandments in English.
See Fox's Book of Martyrs: http://www.ccel.org/f/foxe/martyrs/
Exactly right. This film will do well and has the potential to greatly impact people who are searching for a spitirual path.
I suspect the film will sell very well when available on DVD. It will be a classic Christians will want to own and view repeatedly.
Me too.
Would that this were true. Those who produced the present English-language texts for the Mass did a horribly unfaithful job of translating the Latin.
SD
Yeah...how dare Mel Gibson dredge up historical fact! It's just not fair! Hasn't he ever heard of historical revision for the sake of political correctness?
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