Posted on 09/13/2002 1:15:18 AM PDT by glorygirl
MEL GIBSON, a Roman Catholic who is to play Christ in a new film, has attacked the Vatican, saying that he does not believe in the Church as an institution. The actor, who says that he is an “old fashioned Catholic” who rigorously supports the Latin Mass, is shooting Passion in Rome and in the southern Italian town of Matera. He says that he is happy that his only daughter has decided to become a nun.
Gibson, 46, had a Catholic upbringing and attended a Catholic boys’ school in Australia. He is scathing about the Church’s hierarchy, saying that the Vatican was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”.
“I believe in God,” he told the newspaper Il Giornale.
“My love for religion was transmitted to me by my father. But I do not believe in the Church as an institution”. Gibson has a private chapel at his home in Malibu, California, at which the service is conducted every Sunday in Latin.
The abolition of the Latin Mass was one of the key reforms adopted in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, which sought to bring the liturgy closer to the people by ordering clergy to say Mass in the vernacular.
Vatican II allowed for local bishops to apply for “exceptions”, however, and Mass continues to be said in Latin in about 20 churches in Italy. These include the church of Gesù and Maria in Rome, where it has become fashionable for high-society Catholics to hold weddings and baptisms to the sound of Gregorian chant.
Church officials say that there is a growing movement for the restoration of Latin, which Vatican officials regard as dangerous and potentially schismatic.
In private the Pope continues to say Mass in Latin but permission for local dioceses is granted grudgingly.
A seminary near Florence that still trains priests in the Latin liturgy claims that its conservatism has “growing appeal”.
Gibson, whose latest film, Signs, is released today, is said by friends to have become more conservative in his religious views in middle age.
He has been married to his wife, Robyn, for more than 20 years, unusually long by Hollywood standards, and says that his faith enabled him to survive as a family man despite the drinking binges and infidelities that accompanied his early success.
He protects the privacy of his seven children (six of them sons) fiercely, but he said that his “adventuresome” daughter Hannah wanted to be a nun, and he was very happy about it. She was “healthy, smart and well travelled” and he did not have to worry about her.
Gibson, who is renowned for his swashbuckling heroics in action films such as Braveheart, Mad Max and Lethal Weapon, said that portraying Christ during his final earthly hours would be the most difficult role of his life.
He said that what attracted him to the story of Christ’s last hours before the Crucifixion was that it was “the drama of a man torn between his divine spirit and his earthly weakness”.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, on the road to Calvary and at Golgotha, Jesus was usually described as resigning himself to death without a tremor of fear, whereas “my Jesus will be shaken by his human suffering. Real blood will flow from the wound in his side, and the screams of his Crucifixion will be real as well.”
He said that he had chosen Matera, noted for its palaeolithic caves, or “Sassi”, because it had formed the backdrop to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew (1964), which he greatly admired. He would not need any special effects because Matera provided a “photocopy of the landscape you travel through as a Christian pilgrim in Israel”.
Catholic sources said that Gibson, who sought the advice of theologians and prelates in Rome for his film, had strong views on divorce, abortion and contraception that would appeal to Vatican conservatives.
It remains to be seen whether Passion will join the list of Vatican-approved films on the life of Christ, which include Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) starring Robert Powell.
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