Posted on 11/03/2003 8:27:06 AM PST by Brian S
November 3, 2003
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
When a private viewing of Mel Gibson's ''The Passion of Christ'' was completed at a Washington hotel 10 days ago, my wife and I along with a dozen other invited guests were emotionally frozen into several minutes of silence. The question is whether public presentation of the film four months hence shall be welcomed by tumultuous demonstrations outside the theaters.
Hollywood actor Gibson, who spent more than $25 million of personal funds to produce ''The Passion,'' has finally found a distributor to begin its showing Feb. 25 -- Ash Wednesday. A campaign by some Jewish leaders to radically edit the film or, alternatively, prevent its exhibition appears to have failed. This opens the door to religious conflict if the critics turn their criticism into public protest.
That is not because of the content of ''The Passion.'' As a journalist who has actually seen what the producers call ''a rough cut'' of the movie and not just read about it, I can report it is free of the anti-Semitism that its detractors claim. The Anti-Defamation League and its allies began attacking the movie on the basis of reading a shooting script without having actually seen the film. The ADL carries a heavy burden in stirring religious strife about a piece of entertainment that, apart from its artistic value, is of deep religious significance for believing Christians.
The agitation peaked in early August when New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind told a rally: ''This film is dangerous for Jews all over the world. I am concerned that it would lead to violence against Jews.''
Hikind had not viewed the film. After an ADL representative viewed a rough cut, longtime ADL director Abraham Foxman on Aug. 11 declared the movie ''will fuel hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism.'' Foxman called on Gibson to change his film so that it would be ''free of any anti-Semitic message.''
This renews the dispute over the Jewish role in the crucifixion of Christ, the source of past Jewish persecution.
''The Passion'' depicts in two hours the last 12 hours of Jesus Christ's life. To watch him beaten, scourged and crucified so graphically is a shattering experience for believing Christians and surely for many non-Christians as well. It makes previous movie versions of the crucifixion look like Hollywood fluff. Gibson wants to avoid an ''R'' rating, but violence is not what bothers Foxman.
Foxman and other critics complain that the Jewish high priest Caiphas and a Jewish mob are demanding Christ's execution, but that is straight from the Gospels.
Father C. John McCloskey, director of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, told me: ''If you find the Scriptures anti-Semitic, you'll find this film anti-Semitic.''
Complaints by liberal Bible scholars that ''The Passion'' is not faithful to Scripture are rejected by the Vatican. Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who heads the Congregation for the Clergy, called the film ''a triumph of art and faith,'' adding: ''Mel Gibson not only closely follows the narrative of the Gospels, giving the viewer a new appreciation for those biblical passages, but his artistic choices also make the film faithful to the meaning of the Gospels.''
As for inciting anti-Semitism, Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos contended ''the film does nothing of the sort.'' This Vatican official is denying that Gibson violates the 1965 papal document Nostra Aetate, which states: ''What happened in [Christ's] passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.''
No such libel is committed by ''The Passion,'' where the mob's Jewish identity is not specified. As a Catholic convert, I was taught we are all sinners who share in guilt for the crucifixion.
At the heart of the dispute over ''The Passion'' is freedom of expression. Liberals who defended the right to exhibit Martin Scorsese's ''The Last Temptation of Christ,'' which deeply offended orthodox Christians, now demand censorship of ''The Passion of Christ.'' As a result, Abe Foxman and his allies have risked stirring religious tensions over a work of art.
Actually this is nothing like the Reagan movie flap. The Reagan flap is about critcs of the president putting vile words in his mouth that he never said. The Passion flap is about reporting what the Gospel record says people actually did say. See the difference?
Given that the Catholic Church's role in the Holocaust consisted mainly in saving many many thousands of Jews and pissing off Hitler, I'm curious to know what you might mean by this.
Did Hitler invent the forced ghettoization of jews? No, it was invented by canon law. Did Hitler invent the idea of jewish armbands? No, it was invented by Canon law. The catholic church provided the SS with church marriage and birth records to aid in their hunt for jews in the european population. They only balked when the SS requested information on jewish converts to christianity--pretty proud of that, are they, you think? Pope Pius the Silent is credited by his apologists with every jew ever saved by any christian, however, as to what Pius himself was ever actually observed doing to save jews through the official offices of the church, well, that's a little sparse, to be charitable. The catholic church provided the SS with priests to provide them with mass absolution for mass murder.
Shall I go on?
The catholic church provided priests to supervise the loading of jews into cattle cars in Slovokia. The catholic church's vatican state provided Hitler with his first accord with a foreign power, where other states were reluctant to lend such legitimacy to Hitler's government, and which, incidently, was a compact to shut the hell up about the jews, in return for support, including monitary support, of the catholic church in Germany.
I can go on for quite some time, if that's not sufficient. And I can show you anti-jewish SS posters on the subject that echo 1400 years of official catholic sentiment about jews. And the reason I can do so, is that Germany was ready for the Jewish solution well before Hitler, who was a Catholic, and who voiced anti-jewish catholic rhetoric conspicuously in his speeches to an audience primed to hear it.
Thanks to the churches 50 years of mealymouthed avoidance of this uncontested history, it doesn't surprise me that you, like most people, sport such a sanitized version of history. Hitler had plans to bugger the Church despite having signed the concords with Pius the Silent but as for the Church having "pissed off Hitler". It did no such thing, to any significantly useful extent, (except, interestingly enough, for opposition to the eugenics genocide plan, late in the war, which was halted due to church opposition. Think of that--the church could stop the lame and the old from being gassed, but was curiously toothless to defend jews) until xmas of, um, 41, I think, after the damage to the jews was pretty much done and the allies were closing in. And Pius the Silent thought he had better grease some bacon, before he had to eat it raw.
Pius the Silent ex-communicated every communist shortly after WWII. In the space below you can list the number of high ranking SS officials he ex-communicated. It won't be as large as the number the Church spirited out of Germany to avoid prosecution.
But I guess they didn't know as much Jewish history as you
Do I need to go on?
Yes. You need to go on. Since Pius is up for canonization, his tawdry record has become irrelevant, and has been replaced by glowing, but substanceless, testimonials, which the mighty can be just as easily suckered by as the humble.
Like most popes, he was a kindly disposed person, and the jewish problem vexed him to tears, and into saving a handful here and there--but not enough to persuade him, for example, to condemn the holocaust until it was too late. Note, once again, that he bravely exercised his official moral duty toward the infirm, and stopped their murder--but apparently, I guess, had no such equivalent moral duty toward the jews in the same predicement.
I, in fact, am not guessing--he had no such equivalent moral duty toward the jews--it's plain as plain can be in the fundamental doctrines and official laws promulgated by the church and not repudiated in the least by Pius the Silent, who, however much flim-flam gets him canonized, history will remember as piusly, and with postwar brassband trumpeting, saving a pitiful handful (less than one single person, Wallenberg, is credited with) of the peoples he handed into Hitler's maw upon the signing of the protocols between Hitler and the vatican state, without significantly effective official protest, in keeping with the long-established doctrines of his church.
Pinchas Lapide credited the Pope with saving 860,000 Jews from death. That's Rabbi Pinchas Lapide, by the way, the former Israeli ambassador to Italy. Was he a liar?
Albert Einstein said that only the Catholic Church opposed the Nazis in Germany. Was he a liar?
Rabbi David Dalin says that Pope Pius XII deserves the title "righteous Gentile". Is he a liar?
Golda Meir eulogized the Pope before the UN General Assembly at his death as a friend to the Jews in their time of need. Was she a liar?
Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, upon being thanked for his efforts at saving Jews from the Nazis in Turkey, said, "All the credit belongs to the Pope. I was following his orders." Was he a liar?
The first criticism that the Pope was in league with Hitler didn't come until the play "The Deputy" in 1963 (well after his death), which I believe (I may be wrong) was written by an East German.
Again, the Jewish leaders who actually lived through WWII had nothing but praise and gratitude. Hitler's own documents demonstrate how much he hated the man, referring to him as a "Jew Pope", "Jewish Mouthpiece" and a great deal worse. Documentation of the time clearly demonstrates that "the silent guy" did more to fight Hitler and his ideas before the war and more to save Jews during the war than any other western leader. This is apparently not sufficient for you...tough.
Pius was militantly anti-communist before and after WWII, since he saw that Communism represented the greatest long term threat to the Churh and Mankind. He was right. During the war he muted practically all criticism of Stalin, focusing all on Hitler, who he saw as a more immediate threat at the time. He was right. The fact that he constantly criticized Hitler and largely ignored Stalin during the war made him even more detested by the Nazis - their own words and documents demonstrate this.
Criticism of this Pope from non-Nazis seems to be pretty much the province of either socialists or anti-catholic bigots with chips on their shoulders. Wonder which category you fall into?
Don't bother answering, from your tone I can guess...
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