Let me explain why people, including me, suspect that Mel opinion's and his father's are not dissimilar, though Mel has reason (PR) to be cagey about his.
The movie is described by many as anti-Semitic, and Mel's father is an anti-Semite. He goes so far as to be a Holocaust-denier, and if you read Mel's comments on the Holocaust, you get an odd feeling. No, I should say that I do. He's being cagey.
The movie is about Mel's faith. And his father's faith and his are the same, he says. And both of them reject the reforms of the second Vatican council.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued pastoral guidelines about how believers should dramatize the Passion. Don't put Jewish high priests in black or portray them as a chanting mob. Don't portray Pontius Pilate as a passive, not particularly strong ruler. There are others, but I don't remember them. According to John Meacham, who wrote about the Passion for Newsweek (I haven't got the issue) and appeared on the Charlie Rose panel, Gibson violated every one of the guidelines, and that is Church instruction.
If I asked you about your father's racism, and you replied, "He's never lied to me," that would be a different thing than you just rudely and disrespectfully calling your father a liar. No one asked Mel if his father was a liar. It was convenient, though, to act as though that were the issue. |
