Mel Gibson: $8M More to Private Church

FOX ^ | 12.09.06 | Roger Friedman

[Coleus]

Mel Gibson: $8M More to Private Church

You may recall Gibson telling the officer who arrested him that he “owned half of Malibu.”  Well, not quite. But as I reported in this space last February, following up on a New York Times report by Christopher Noxon, Gibson has been building a religious retreat in Malibu for some time.  Holy Family is a Catholic church that isn’t recognized by any archdiocese.   Instead, it follows beliefs counter to the 1965 Vatican II Conference, which among other things, absolved Jews of Christ’s death. Instead, Holy Family Catholic Church adheres to 16th century Catholic values.

Click Here to Visit the Mel Gibson Celebrity Center.

According to a September tax filing obtained by this column, Gibson put $8 million more into his A.P. Reilly Foundation in 2005. That’s the tax-exempt entity named for his late mother and designed to run his privately built and owned Holy Family Catholic Church in Malibu.  The most recent filing is just a registration and doesn’t contain line items. Gibson, according to a source at the California Department of Justice, is late filing his annual tax forms for A.P. Reilly. But the registration indicates revenues in 2005 of a little over $8 million, bringing Holy Family’s assets to $22 million. That’s not bad for a church with just 70 members.

This is a sizeable jump from 2004, when the foundation’s assets were listed at just over $14 million. Gibson’s 2005 contribution was substantially larger, too, since in 2004 he donated $5 million. The big upswing seems due to profits from “The Passion of the Christ,” the hit movie that Gibson financed.  The A.P. Reilly Foundation, according to public records, started buying property in Malibu in 1977, when it purchased a 9-acre plot for $51,000.

[vladimir998]

Simple. Ecumenical councils are held by the Catholic Church -- not by the Eastern Orthodox churches. The Eastern Orthodox know they cannot hold such a council. Only the Catholic Church can.