But Is Mel Gibson Catholic?

Everybody likes Mel Gibson. He’s an award-winning actor, he’s box-office gold and he seems like a nice guy. But because of his fame and The Passion, his forthcoming movie about Christ, a lot of his fans would like to be clear on where he stands with respect to the Catholic Church, a Dallas-based author says.

Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D., is an associate of the Canon Law Society of America and a best-selling writer whose book Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads includes one of the most graphic accounts of the Crucifixion ever published. He’ll definitely see Gibson’s film about the sufferings of Christ on the Cross. But Gibson’s campaign to build a church in Malibu, California, raises some serious issues about the actor’s relationship with the Catholic Church.

“You can’t just build your own church,” Johnson says. Parishes are geographical entities, set up by bishops in conformance with the Church’s laws and subject to their authority. “There are no free-lance churches in the Catholic Church. You live in a parish, and you go to its church.” Every place in California is already part of a parish, which has its own church.

Gibson’s parish, then, would be the aptly named Our Lady of Malibu on Winter Canyon Road, Johnson says, looking through a Los Angeles Catholic directory. But, according to The New York Times Magazine, the actor’s privately funded Church of the Holy Family in Malibu is not affiliated with any diocese. So, according to Church law, it’s schismatic, not a Catholic church at all.

The Church’s Code of Canon Law defines schism--separation from the Church--as “the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” Gibson’s father, Houston, Texas resident Hutton Gibson, is an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church and a vocal adherent of the “sedevacantist” movement, so called from the Latin phrase meaning “empty seat”--their claim being that every pope since 1960 has been spurious.

While Gibson himself is said to disagree with his father on many counts, the actor has been quoted often as waxing nostalgic for the Mass said in Latin and the doctrines as they were for almost 2000 years. But, as Johnson explains in his booklet What About the Latin Mass?, the Latin Mass that traditionalists long for is nothing like 2000 years old--the early Mass was often in Greek, and Gibson probably remembers only the Latin Mass that wasn’t finalized until 1962. “So if he was born in 1956,” Johnson says, “his Latin Mass is really younger than he is himself.” That Latin version is still used in the Church by special permission, and it’s actively encouraged by authentic Catholic organizations like the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, headquartered in Elmhurst, Pennsylvania.

The difference is that these groups nurture the Latin Mass in full unity with the Catholic Church. “Fringe groups who reject Vatican II stand away from the Church and go off on their own,” he says. “They’re largely reacting to the sloppy or even destructive way in which Vatican II’s decrees were put into effect here in the United States.”

Vatican II--officially the Second Vatican Council--was convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962 and strove to clarify the Church’s activities to better serve the modern world, mandating simplification of the liturgy and the use of the local vernacular languages instead of Latin everywhere.

“Of course, you have to use the liturgy as a way to look to the substance of the Faith,” Johnson says. “You can’t just stop at appearances.” Vatican II mandated no changes in Church doctrine whatever--“the Church’s teachings are the teachings of Christ,” he says, “and therefore no human agency can add to them or take any away, and the Church never has,” although many Catholics still seem to be confused about that point.

Johnson believes that the confusion started when American bishops took Vatican II as an excuse to sweep away any part of the Church that they didn’t like personally--“not just the Latin of the liturgy but, as we’ve seen, even the most basic doctrines of human decency.” Since 1993, more than 80 percent of the Catholic bishops in the United States have been directly implicated in court cases of priestly pedophilia or in using their positions to shield such activity over the past 40 years or more, according to a study compiled by reporters Brooks Egerton and Reese Dunklin of the Dallas Morning News last year.

That corruption of the clergy makes it hard to find authentic teaching or authentic liturgy in the United States today, Johnson says, but it doesn’t mean that people can just run out and start up their own church instead. The new English Mass is perfectly legitimate and a lot closer to the simplicity of early-Christian practice--when Latin itself was the vernacular, the everyday language of the people. And with a little effort, he says, “you can get a Latin Mass celebrated regularly at your proper parish, and know that you’re doing so in full communion with the Church that really is almost 2000 years old.”

So where does that leave Gibson? “Well, I hope he’s Catholic," Johnson says. "We’d love to have him.” END

Mel Gibson is an ardent member of the "Latin rite" Catholics, an ultra-conservative Catholic group who border on schismatics that reject the reforms wrought by Roman Catholic Church's Vatican II Council of the late 1960's.

It is sublimely ironic that the Passion's defenders and main media market are those fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant christians, most of whom are anti-ecumenical, utterly anti-Catholic (e.g. Bob Jones university et al) and as doctrine regard Gibson's Roman Catholic Church (Latin Rite or not) as the "Whore of Babylon" and the Pope himself as the "Antichrist."

You speak entirely too broad.

Yes, there exists a particular strain of evangelicals who consider Catholicism as you say, particularly the version which Gibson's father adheres.

But 99% of evangelicals do not. And it is those who are defending this film, because those who have seen it have said it is a good film that depicts the crucifiction faithfully as described within the Bible.

I think you might have some issues you should get resolved, rather than trying to turn Christians against each other.

According to the Passion of Christ website http://www.passion-movie.com/english/faq6.html

" Director, actor, and producer Mel Gibson is a Christian who attends Sunday services".

Note not that Mel Gibson is a Roman Catholic who attends weekly Mass (little less that he is Tridentine rite Catholic if not an outright sedevacantist)

Talk about hiding his "light" under a "bushel!"

It seems he wishes to downplay his version of Catholicism in order to reach the Evangelical market since he has 20 million dollars of his own money invested in this movie.

Obviously he does not take into consideration the biblical admonistment “Do not make My Father's house a house of merchandise”.

As for evangelicals they seem to consider Catholics fair game for apostasy.

"Salvation comes by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ and Christ alone -- not through any institutional church body, be it Baptist, Catholic or otherwise, That's why we have always sent missionaries even to 'Catholic' countries, because people come to salvation only though personal faith in Jesus Christ."

Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board

The site you mentioned is not the official movie site. It seems to be a site directed toward evangelical christians interested in the movie. The question reades "Is Mel Gibson Christian" so I don't find the answer misleading at all. Mel has been very straitforward about his Catholicism in all his interviews. By the way, the official movie site is www.thepassionofthechrist.com/main.html if you are interested.

Mel Gibson is hardly straightforward on his Catholicism.

He remains evasive as to wither he is a sedevacantist, that is to say that Pope John XXIII and his successors, are heretics and therefore forfeited the papacy.

He certainly seems a fan of conspiracy theories and in interviews particularly the Sawyer interview questionably as borderline as the characters he has portrayed in his often violent and sadistic movies.

Gibson told the New yorker reporter that only those in the Catholic church had salvation.

Sept 15 2003
I told Gibson that I am a Protestant, and asked whether his pre-Vatican II world view disqualified me from eternal salvation. He paused. “There is no salvation for those outside the Church,” he said. “I believe it.” He explained, “Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it, she's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.”

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