Gibson's 'Passion' Given Unfair Label

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 8/14/03)

Christianity without the cross? We are reaching the point where a recognizable body of anti-anti-Semites apparently won't settle for anything less. Ask Mel Gibson.

Gibson, as everybody knows, is producing a movie called "The Passion" about the last hours of Christ. Already it's under relentless attack for alleged hostility to Jews.

I haven't seen it. I was invited to an early screening, but was out of town. That may be just as well, since my purpose now isn't to defend an unfinished movie months away from release but to situate the attack on it in the context of Christianity without the cross.

I got a whiff of that recently at a grassroots Jewish-Catholic dialogue. A participant urged the group to read a book by an ex-priest who takes that line.

"You have the crucifixion," this gentleman explained, "and then somebody's got to be blamed, and pretty soon you've got the Holocaust." Anyway, he added, it was the Emperor Constantine who made the cross the symbol of Christianity in the fourth century — nobody had thought of that up till then.

Excuse me, but wasn't it Paul of Tarsus, 250 years before Constantine, who wrote, "We preach a crucified Christ" (1 Cor 1.23)? And didn't Jesus himself say, "He who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me." (Mt 10.38) But what the heck —who said polemics need to make sense?

The campaign against "The Passion" starts from the incontrovertible fact that Mel Gibson is a traditionalist — that's to say, ultra-conservative — Catholic. So? Gibson insists neither he nor his film is anti-Semitic, and on the record so far there's no reason to dispute that.

The ugliest episode in this brouhaha was the purloining of an early version of the movie's script, which then was solemnly reviewed by some Jewish and Catholic scholars assembled by people at the national conference of bishops.

The scholars claimed to find signs of anti-Semitism in what they read. This fueled the wrath of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. When the bishops' general counsel learned what had happened, however, he apologized to Gibson and returned the script.

What evidence did the scholars find? You can read a long account, filled with trivial nastiness, in the July 28-Aug. 4 New Republic without getting an answer. Recall that this is the journal which gave over most of its January 2002 issue to a notorious attack on Pope Pius XII by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in which Goldhagen openly argued the Christianity-without-the-cross line.

The new piece, by Paula Fredriksen of Boston University, rambles on about anti-Semitism in the writings of the 19th century mystic and stigmatist Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, said to be among sources consulted by Gibson. The Vatican recently accepted the authenticity of a miracle attributed to her intercession, and she is expected to be beatified soon. Whether there are or aren't anti-Semitic elements in Emmerich's work tells nothing about "The Passion."

It's easy to see why Jews, traumatized by the Holocaust and historic anti-Semitism, might be super-sensitive about a movie on Christ's death. Catholics need to be sensitive, too.

But for what it's worth, over a period of many years I've never encountered anyone making anti-Semitic hay out of the Passion accounts. In Catholic schools in the 1940s I learned that through our sins all of us shared in responsibility for Jesus' death. And if we've got to have Christianity without the cross anyway, maybe we also should try Islam without the crescent — or even Judaism without the Star of David. Fair's fair.

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