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.

[Victoria Delsoul]

Thanks for the ping, lonevoice.

Bump.

[rogator]

"True ... I are one ..."

As I said earlier: "I think we must live in two different universes."

You have my best wishes and my prayers.

[AgThorn]

Sad that you consider Christians a "different universe" from you as a Catholic.

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

Actually i would say that the Second Vatican Council's 1965 rulings dont exactly folow gods law but bends to appropriate those of a lesser value to true catholicism

Mel is free to worship any way he wants to contrary to popular belief this is still a free country with freedom of and or from religion whichever you choose !

And its his money and no one elses Buisness but those he chosses to worship with and God Himself but there will be those who will oppose mel just because hes mel and he IS a free thinker!

God Bless God and Mel Gibson more power to both of them !

[rogator]

Just out of curiosity, have you read the Vatican II documents?

[rogator]

"Sad that you consider Christians a "different universe" from you as a Catholic."

You are puting words in my mouth. I do not consider other Christians a "different universe" from myself as a Catholic.
Based on the context of our brief discussion I was referring to the perception of whether or not Vatican II has helped or hurt the mission of the Church. We are obviously looking at this from two seperate directions and a very different background. I am sorry that my words left room for misunderstanding.
There are several thousand religious denominations claiming to be Christian. The vast majority to some degree or other contain essential elements of Christianity but unfortunately differ among themselves as to the full meaning of the term.

[CobaltBlue]

Are you trying to draw me into a debate about Vatican II? Because I won't do it. You can argue about it with others.

[rogator]

No I am not. Some of your comments have led me to believe that you have read or heard what various liberals have had to say about it rather than having read the documents, themselves.
Adios and good luck.

[Robert Drobot]

BTT

[kcvl]

What is the difference in making a MOVIE called "The Passion" and making the MOVIE "Schindler's List"? They are both MOVIES (interpretation of, as in, freedom to interpret)


Schindler's List (review of)

No-one, of course, would have gone to see an honest movie about the Holocaust. It would have been in German (or Czech, Polish, French, Dutch, etc.) with subtitles. It might begin with a middle-class Jewish family living comfortably in Germany in 1933. It would have tracked the changes in their life after Hitler's election; the events of Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938, as they are beaten up and their windows broken; their arrest and shipment to a concentration camp; at movie's end, they are gassed at Dachau; the final shot, smoke and ash billowing from incinerator smokestacks at night.

Schindler's List is dishonest because the number of Schindlers in Germany, or for that matter anywhere in Europe, was so small as to be statistically insignificant. But Hollywood cannot tell the story of the everyday or mainstream, not the humdrum ordinary or, apparently, even the horrible ordinary. Hollywood must always be about exceptions. Its films cannot portray everyday work; the employee must defy his boss, quit his job or rob his company at gunpoint. To relate the story of the extermination of six million Jews (and four million others, lets not forget; not only Jews died in the camps), Hollywood must pick the happy story of a man who rescued Jews, even though there were so few who did. (Why not tell the story of the teenage Roman Polanski instead? The family to which his father entrusted him as the Warsaw ghetto was being encircled sent him back--but kept the money they had been paid and all his belongings.)

Steven Spielberg is Jewish, but was incapable of making a story about the Jews; he must adopt a heroic Gentile as the center of his story. Why? He must have felt--lets grant the grace that these were all unconscious choices--that we Jews are still the outsider, the other, even in sympathetic America; that no-one would relate to a Jewish story. Schindler's List is of a piece with those movies about other ethnic groups that set a kindly white person in the foreground. Barbara Hershey in A World Apart; Donald Sutherland in A Dry White Season; Sissy Spacek in A Long Walk Home; Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields; all these examples come to mind, but there are hundreds of others.

There is a very revealing bit of business in Schindler that resembles a similar bit in The Killing Fields. When Schindler, atop the hill with his mistress, watches the clearing of the ghetto, amidst the black and white panorama, we see the sole touch of color in the whole movie: a little girl wearing a red dress. Why has Spielberg engaged in this fantasist touch? So that when the prisoners forced to burn bodies later come upon the little girl's corpse, we can recognize her, amidst the hundreds of other bodies, by the tatters of the red dress. In The Killing Fields, we see a more realistic or veristic scene, a man with a plastic bag on his head being dragged away; later, when Dith Pran passes the man's floating corpse, we recognize it by the bag. What's really going on here: in each case, the director needed a gimmick, a red dress or a plastic bag, to allow us to identify an otherwise anonymous, fungible corpse among the mass of corpses. In each case, its not hard (while acknowledging some real-world problems for the storyteller, to make a corpse noticeable, among so many) to detect a racist subtext: just as the other director may have needed the plastic bag because he feared that, to his audience, all Cambodians look alike, Spielberg may have feared that all his Jews (little girl included) would blend together, while only Schindler, the Gentile, stood out. And for the most part, the Jews in Schindler's List do blend together.

It is very hard also to watch the Jews in the movie becoming pets. Schindler appears to be attached to them as if they were so many turtles; again, I am reminded of the children dressing up ET in their mother's clothes, or carrying him around on their bicycles. God bless Oskar Schindler for protecting the Schindlerjuden, whatever his motives; but there are times in the movie when he appears to think of them as if they were so much property.

There are no tough moral choices in the movie. Schindler does not agonize, or even lose a night of sleep like Jean Valjean, before risking himself; there are no Sophie's Choices in the movie; when he sets his Jews to work making munitions, we are told he is sabotaging the munitions, so that they cannot blow anyone up; and when the Jews walk over the hill at the end, they are walking not into the strife-torn Israel of today, but into a golden fantasy Jewish state.

[185JHP]

The 7th church mentioned in Revelations - the church at Laodicea - is the apostate church.

[dennisw]

THanks.

[narses]

Technically, Gibson's church is "fringe," since it is not in union with the Los Angeles archdiocese and is outside the Catholic mainstream.

No good Catholic could stay in union with Abp. Mahoney and his peculiar New Age Black Mass.

Archdiocese of Los Angeles

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[narses]

" During family get togethers, my Catholic relations frequently express anger over the Vatican II changes. I have to think this must be a common opinion among mainline Catholics."

It is. V2 was a turning point. The liberal commies became ascendant. Their heterodox destruction of the liturgy and the culture was done with deliberation both inside and outside the Church. The Council itself isn't the issue, rather what the sodomite scum who tried to take over the Church did with it. They are dying off, going to jail and being exposed on a daily basis as the Holy Ghost returns order to His Church. Come home to Rome, the cleansing is ongoing.

[narses]

"The number of people who attend the Tridentine Mass in the United States is less than a million; the number of Catholics is over 62 million."

Whoa "deacon". If the Bishops OBEYED ROME and made the Indult easily available, then what? For 20 years after V2 people were DENIED the Latin Mass. Abp. L's courage forced an Indult and most American Bishops ignored Rome's clear answer - the Indult remains a small, often ignored part of the question. Too many of the "bishops" in "union" with Rome ran seminaries for queers while booting true, heterosexual and orthodox vocations. Read Michael Rose in Good Bye Good Men. "Union" with sodomites and satanist may satisfy your self proclaimed legalism, but for my family WE REJECT that perversion of God's Church.

[american colleen]

I'm not Catholic, but my roots are Irish Cathloic, as are my husband's. During family get togethers, my Catholic relations frequently express anger over the Vatican II changes. I have to think this must be a common opinion among mainline Catholics.

Vatican II didn't change any teachings of the Church but it did change the language and some traditions of the Mass. Many "innovators" encouraged and implemented changes that were not mandated by Vatican II and a lot of Catholics are unhappy with the way *some* maybe even most priests now say the Mass. But the essense of the Mass never changed (the host is still consecrated and therefore becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ) it's just the more modern elements of it that some people become angry over.

[american colleen]

I don't know if this is where Mel stands or if he has thrown his hat in with the Lefebvre gang.

Last night EWTN rebroadcast an interview with Mel Gibson and he specifically said "Christ died for ALL" and that it wasn't the Jews that were responsible for the death of Christ it is ALL of us who are responsible. That didn't strike me very SSPX-like. Also he said he "was over-run with Jesuits" on the set - hired for language and historical purposes.

[american colleen]

I suggest that Jews stay home and not see the movie. Period. This is a Christian movie by a man of faith designed to be understood by Christians. I suggest that Jews take the advice given to Christians when an anti-Christian movie is made--don't buy a ticket.

Whoa, ultima. Are you in effect saying that "The Passion of Christ" is anti-semitic? Mr. Gibson has gone to great lengths to say that he hopes everyone sees it and is changed by it. He has also said that Jesus Christ died for ALL of us - regardless of our creed.

[ultima ratio]

Of course I'm not saying this. But anti-Semitism is a vague charge that can mean almost anything somebody wants it to mean. Is it anti-Semitic to depict Jewish leadership as rejecting Christ in 33 A.D.? His rejection, after all, didn't take place in Norway. So what was Gibson supposed to do to depict the Passion? Jewish critics have said they want him to blame the Romans exclusively. But that is not in the historical texts, nor in traditional teachings, whatever a minority of historical-critics say.

It is true the Church has always denounced blaming the Jews collectively for Jesus' death. Even before Vatican II it had done so--though journalists gloss over this fact and pretend Vatican II alone declared this (thus tying Gibson's principled opposition to Vatican II to his supposed opposition to all Jews). Trent, for instance, was explicit about not assigning collective guilt to the Jewish people. However Jewish critics read these decrees as absolving the Jewish leadership of two thousand years ago as well from any historical participation. They do not do this. History, after all, is history.

[ultima ratio]

What you say is only partially true. The Novus Ordo is not just a Mass that's a variation of the ancient Mass of Catholicism. It is actually subversive of the faith--dangerous for Catholics. The Catholic elements are admittedly present--the valid Consecration--and the actual sacrifice--but they have been hidden and subverted. In some dioceses, particularly in the midwest, they have been totally obscured. In more traditional dioceses--such as those in the Northeast--this is less apparent. Yet statistics tell the real story: since the advent of the Novus Ordo, there has been a precipitous decline in the faith.