"The Passion"

E-mail This Article to a Friend

Subject: "The Passion"

E-mail This Article to a Friend

Thank You

A link to

""The Passion""

has been emailed to your friends.

Most E-mailed articles:

To the Editor:

David Berger’s article on Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, is both analytically brilliant and dialogically sensitive [“Jews, Christians, and The Passion,” May]. Still, I have a comment or two from the Catholic side of the sanctuary.

Mr. Berger rejects Rabbi Michael Cook’s unnuanced view that the handling of The Passion by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) amounted to a “betrayal of decades of Catholic-Jewish dialogue.” I would underscore the significance of this. As Mr. Berger rightly notes, many of those praising the movie have also strongly condemned the notion that the Jews can be considered collectively guilty for the death of Jesus. In this country, Catholic bishops and scholars commenting on the film in the Catholic media cited both the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate and the Conference’s own “Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion.” Readers of Catholic journals and newspapers would have had these issues freshly in their minds because of the internal Catholic publicity blitz given to The Bible, the Jews, and the Death of Jesus, a 110-page volume of official statements over the years from the Holy See and the USCCB designed to implement the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council and to guide Catholics in the correct theological and historical understanding of the Gospel passion narratives.

As Mr. Berger also points out, before the Second Vatican Council, Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus would have been presumed. Passion plays in the past—and the movie is certainly a traditional passion play, in both its artistic strengths and its historical/biblical weaknesses—did indeed trigger anti-Semitic violence. But the historical context has changed. The ancient “trigger,” if you will, was pulled, but the “gun” of the collective-guilt canard has been so thoroughly dismantled in so much of the Christian community that the weapon could not discharge.

I would argue that the review of The Passion by the USCCB, like the Gospel narratives themselves, must be understood in historical context. Despite the film’s flaws in its portrayal of Jews and Judaism, I did not believe that, by itself, it would foster anti-Semitism in anyone who was not already anti-Semitic, and I believe that the record has shown me to be right. It is hardly a “betrayal,” as Rabbi Cook would have it, to have judged that the movie would not lead to anti-Semitic violence in the U.S., which in fact it did not.

This does not mean that we in the Church can relax our vigilance. The USCCB’s “Criteria” are set even more firmly now (and are much better known, thanks to all the publicity) as guidelines for Catholic productions of the passion. But anti-Semitism is a pernicious disease, and has the ability to change with the times. As the Holy See’s 1988 document, The Church and Racism, noted, “anti-Zionism—which is not of the same order [as anti-Semitism], since it questions the State of Israel and its policies—serves at times as a screen for anti-Semitism, feeding on it and leading to it.”

Finally, while Mr. Berger considers Mel Gibson to be an “unreconstructed” or “traditional” Catholic, he might be interested to learn that Cardinal Roger Mahoney, who as bishop of the diocese in which Gibson resides has an authoritative opinion on the matter, does not consider Gibson to be any kind of Catholic at all, since he has publicly rejected the papal and conciliar teaching authority of the Church.

Eugene J. Fisher

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

There are some things in David Berger’s analysis of the controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ that I would quarrel with, but what matters most to me about discussion of this issue is tone: Mr. Berger’s is sober, reflective, and genuinely moving. His article stands in stark relief to those activists, pundits, and movie critics who have made many reckless and insulting remarks about the movie, Mel Gibson, and Christianity.

The day the movie opened (I had already seen it twice, both times with Gibson), I went to a Manhattan theater with a group that included Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis; Father Philip Eichner, chairman of the board of directors of the Catholic League; and several other rabbis and priests. At the press conference that followed, everyone had a chance to speak. There was much disagreement. But there was also amity.

Mr. Berger ends his piece by calling on all sides to maintain the “reservoirs of good will that have been painstakingly accumulated in the last generation.” If I had to make a wager, I would bet that the good relationship that has been built between Catholics and Jews will not dissipate. And that is because there are too many good guys like Rabbi Potasnik to let that happen, and too many Catholics like myself who will not have it any other way.

William A. Donohue

Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights

New York City

To the Editor:

Since I helped to convene the scholars’ committee that evaluated The Passion for the USCCB, and often found myself in the news coverage of the controversy surrounding it, I eagerly read David Berger’s article. After the media frenzy, it was refreshing to have his trenchant analysis of the film and the cultural storm surrounding it.

Mr. Berger is correct to insist on the danger of Jews telling Christians what to believe or how to interpret Christian Scripture. Aside from its theological insensitivity, the practice has a boomerang effect: it provides license for Christians to tread on Jewish sacred soil and to tell Jews what they should believe. But the scholars on the committee—at least we four Jewish scholars—never told Christians what to believe. Mel Gibson promoted himself as a Catholic believer, and we asked him to recognize that the images, theology, and biblical interpretations in his film violated declarations of the Second Vatican Council, Catholic magisterial teachings, and the USCCB’s guidelines for dramatizations of the passion narrative.

If we had a fault, it was our naiveté. Gibson soon made it apparent that he cared little for Church teachings or authority. As for the USCCB, we urged it and other Church leaders to publicize effectively their own tenets rejecting Jewish culpability for deicide and any passion dramatizations that defame Jews. Here, too, our faith proved naive.

I find Mr. Berger too charitable—perhaps a compliment to him. He guardedly concludes that Gibson’s assault on Jews is not the result of intentional anti-Jewish malice because Gibson included touches like identifying as a Jew the sympathetic figure of Simon the Cyrene and a flashback to the Sermon on the Mount in which some of Jesus’ followers are wearing prayer shawls. (One keen reviewer observed that after almost two hours of relentless violence, these “touches” had an impact roughly equivalent to a beer commercial during the Super Bowl.) I have a different explanation for these elements.

The scholars of the review committee learned early on that Gibson’s film was not about historical accuracy, theological discipline, or scriptural integrity. It was about profit, and controversy was the most effective way to feed the box office. Hence Gibson’s statement, “I want to kill [the New York Times columnist] Frank Rich”; the manipulation of the pope to hawk the R-rated film; the threat to sue the USCCB; and the in-again-out-again games regarding inclusion in the film of the blood curse of Matthew 27:25 (“His blood be on us and on our children”)—all morally vulgar, but excellent grist for the publicity mill.

Gibson’s savvy marketing team knew that the film’s supporters needed some evidence, however flimsy, to make their case. Without the seemingly pro-Jewish snippets cited by Mr. Berger, there would have been no post-release controversy. They provided some degree of deniability. But there is simply too much classic anti-Semitic content in The Passion—sinister conspiracies, devil imagery, blood lust, inhumane caricatures, not-so-subtle worship of money—to discount systematically anti-Semitic motives.