Please read this narrative, then send the email and make the phone call suggested at the end.
The other week, a reader emailed me an item from CWN about the Diocese of Cleveland's respective reactions to Passion and The V Monologues. The reader added some further information about the latter, and suggested emailing various folks at JCU and the Cleveland Diocese to complain. I blogged his note. The first two sentences of the CWN item were as follows:
The Diocese of Cleveland issues a warning to Catholic parishes that seeing a movie, The Passion of the Christ, which illustrates the events of the Gospels, may lead to the rise of anti-Semitism in churchgoing Catholics. Meanwhile, a local Catholic university allows the production of the "Monologues" on campus with proceeds going to a pro-abortion group.
The other day, I linked back to that earlier post from another one about another apparent abomination at JCU.
Enter another reader, a priest from the state of Washington. Yesterday, he emailed the various Cleveland chancery officials noted in the original post, citing the above-quoted sentences, and asking, "is this true?"
He received a reply from Father Lawrence Jurcak, who appears from the diocese's web site to be the recently-named Secretary and Vicar for Clergy and Religious. He forwarded the correspondence to me. Fr. Jurcak's reply read:
You details are not true at all. There is no "warning issued by the Diocese" about not seeing The Passion of the Christ."
My first thought was that this seemed to be somewhat of an evasion. The claim, quoted above, had been that there was a warning not that one shouldn't see the movie but rather that doing so might lead to anti-Semitism - i.e., that one should be cautious about what conclusions one draws from the movie if one does see it.
I then followed the links from my original post, as provided by the reader who'd sent it. The CWN item links to a Cleveland newspaper article, "'Passion' movie raises religious fervor, fears," which describes the diocese's warning/"memo." Paragraph 4 of that article reads: "The Diocese of Cleveland sent a February memo to all its parishes asking Catholics to be aware of the potential for anti-Semitism." The CWN item struck me as containing a reasonable paraphrase of that description - a call for awareness for the potential for anti-Semitism surely reflects concern that anti-Semitism might be one of the movie's effects and could therefore reasonably be described as a "warning" that the movie might lead to anti-Semitism. The article goes into somewhat more detail about the memo further down.
Of course, a newspaper account may well be inaccurate. So I poked around the diocesean web site a bit more until I found what appears to be the "memo" in question. It's headed, "Movies About the Passion of Jesus Christ." It begins, "In the next few months there are at least two movies to be released about the passion and death of Jesus Christ." Now, those two would be Gibson's Passion and, I gather, The Gospel of John. Since no one that I know of has expressed concerns that the latter might stir up anti-Semitism - presumably at least partly because of the translation it uses - it's obvious, I think, that the warnings about anti-Semitic accounts of responsiblity for Christ's suffering and death that make up the bulk of the memo reflect concern about Passion. In short, I think that the newspaper account of the memo is accurate, and that the CWN description of it is, too. (When I bounced these thoughts off my Washington priest reader, he replied, "Your interpretation seems correct to me.")
So, when we've dealt with the diocese's evasion and quibbling, we're left with the question: Why were they more concerned about the effects that Passion might have than about the effects that JCU's presentation of Monologues might have? Why haven't we seen at least a "memo" about the possibly bad effects of the latter? (Never mind whether the warning about Passion is the best way to deal with that movie to begin with.)
My Washington reader forwarded my comments to Fr. Jurcak and told me he'd keep me posted if he gets a reply. I suggest you contact Fr. Jurcak also. As well as Bishop Pilla - (216) 696-6525 ext. 2030. Ask them why Fr. Jurcak is being evasive about what the diocese said about Passion - and why they're expressing concerns about it, but not, apparently, about Monologues.
