In the past week, there's been a fuss over claims that the US Bishops and the ADL had criticized Mel Gibson's upcoming movie The Passion as anti-Semitic. People huffed and puffed in e-mails and on various fora about how foolish the bishops were -- that they were criticizing a well-intended and pious movie, when there are all sorts of social trends and pronouncements more deserving of rebuke.
As is usual in such cases, the story was pretty garbled: the criticism didn't come from any statement by the bishops, or by a committee of the bishops, but from some group of "scholars" picked jointly by a priest on the USCCB staff and a rabbi with the ADL. And they based their criticism on a draft version of the script that doesn't reflect the actual movie all that well.
The Register reports that USCCB counsel Mark Chopko has apologized for the whole affair. That's a pretty good outcome: maybe the folks at the USCCB are starting to understand that their functionaries create a lot of confusion when their statements and actions go out to the public and are treated as statements by "the bishops".
Please help clarify this for me. It was my understanding that Mel Gibson, a very devout Catholic, was filming this movie in order to give people around the world the most realistic depiction possible of the brutality of Jesus' passion and death. Is this a bad thing?
In a society where we are so desensitized to violence and blasphemy, maybe a film such as this will be a wake up to people who have started taking Christ's ultimate sacrifice for granted after having heard the story about so often over the years.
I see this film as possibly being in the same realm of "Schindler's List", where history is not idealized or whitewashed, but shown in its stark, harsh reality.
Same thing goes for their lame movie reviews--there are a lot of Catholics who think it's a mortal sin to see a movie that has been rated "morally offensive" by the USCCB's staff of movie critics.
I'm still waiting to see why an official body working for the US bishops hired a girl heretic radical-feminist "theologian."
Atheists, apostates, and political radicals have taken over this whole realm of scholarship, especially in the non-Catholic divinity schools and seminaries.
The mainline Protestants have allowed this to completely hollow out their churches, and they now do not shrink from sending their young people to learn to be clergy at the feet of a community of scholars who reject everything essential to Christianity and approach the Bible in an angry, atheist, de-bunking spirit.
And now the Catholic Bishops consult that same kind of witch-devil to evaluate the doctrinal and moral acceptability of a film about the Passion?
Isn't that, and what that tells us about the hierarchy and the Church establishment today, the biggest part of the scandal?
The outlook and aims of the revolutionary Left have been essentially the same for nearly two hundred years. They have always included destruction of relgious belief, destruction of the family, "free love" (destruction of sexual morality), destruction of private property in the means of production, destruction of sharply distinguished gender roles, destruction of male authority, destruction of significant inequality of wealth, etc.
How odd that these have to such an extent become the aknowledged outlook and aims of highly treained and respected "theologians" and "religious scholars."
Why isn't that the scandal?
[Ever get the feeling that increasing swaths of our cultural life are being played out as dramatizations of "The Possessed"? Right down to the hopeless wimp liberals who allow themselves to be bullied and abused by murderous revolutionaries?]