Free Republic

'There's a huge war raging," Mel Gibson says, "and it's over us!" The movie star and director has gone apoplectic about the criticism he's received for his forthcoming film The Passion, a provocative retelling of the crucifixion of Jesus.More incendiary than the film is Gibson with his mouth open.He decried his critics before anyone actually saw the multilingual cinematic portrayal of Jesus' final hours. He has threatened the life of a well-known critic, complained about "vehement anti-Christian sentiment out there," and claimed that certain Jews would kill him if he didn't cut out some incendiary footage.Gibson is rich enough to...

As a guy who's done a bit of chatting about the Catholic Faith with folks, one of the things that has struck me over the years is the sheer fecundity of the human mind in giving reasons not to be Catholic. When Life Serves Lemons, Make Lemonade! To a young Catholic or a new convert, such overwhelming fertility in repudiating the Faith can be rather daunting. A trip to an Internet list group, for example, can be a bit like drinking from a fire hose of anti-Catholic rhetoric. One can simply be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it all....

People sometimes have vague fears about the Catholic Church, that we have a sinister plan to restrict their freedom. Since this is Fourth of July weekend (and it fits with our Scripture readings) I would like to address those fears. Once I had a conversation with a young woman concerned that the Catholic Church was trying to take away her “right to choose.” She described herself as “very pro-choice.” Fair enough, I told her, but I was curious how far she would take it. “Suppose,” I asked, “someone were mistreating their pet (not feeding it properly, allowing it to live...

Among the many troubling offshoots of the clergy sex abuse scandal, the erosion of confidence in the leaders of the Church is easily one of the worst.Tell a mixed audience of Catholics that not all bishops are responsible for the mess and that anti-Catholicism had something to do with the way the scandal was presented and perceived — you’re likely to get your head handed to you for your trouble.But, as Philip Jenkins shows in his important book "The New Anti-Catholicism" (Oxford University Press, $27), these things happen to be facts. People who think the abuse scandal was exclusively about...

Anti-Catholicism in the U.S.: A hate much loved and lied about By Michael Pakenham Sun Staff Originally published May 11, 2003 Is a need to hate essential to the human condition? No. But history and contemporary life insist that hating has beguiling charms. Denying them is a main job of civilization. That job's not being done very well these days. For the moment, put aside African-Americans, Jews, Latinos and other traditional hate targets and consider the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The most elegant description of anti-Catholicism I have read is John Highham's: "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition...

It's an exhilarating and strange thing for a chubby suburbanite like me to find I am a dangerous man. But somebody named Robert M. Zins, Th.M. has deduced that I am and has written an exciting expose of me called published in a journal called Theo~Logical, (a quarterly publication of A Christian Witness To Roman Catholicism). Wow! Talk About Yer Sinister Papist! As should be obvious from the name of his ministry, Mr. Zins is pretty certain Catholics are not Christian. He is also, judging from his article, certain that I am a Bad Person. I show "to what depth...