Free Republic

Hutton Gibson has been making a three-hour drive each week for the past year from his home in Summersville, W.Va., to rural Westmoreland County, a round trip of more than 300 miles, just to attend Sunday Mass. Now, the 87-year-old Gibson plans to have his own church in Mt. Pleasant Township. The church is St. Michael the Archangel Chapel, now located in a ranch-style brick home along Route 982 South between the villages of Lycippus and Weltytown. Gibson is no ordinary parishioner. Gibson is the father of actor-director Mel Gibson and a follower of an ultraconservative branch of Catholicism that...

Hutton Gibson has been making a three-hour drive each week for the past year from his home in Summersville, W.Va., to rural Westmoreland County, a round trip of more than 300 miles, just to attend Sunday Mass. Now, the 87-year-old Gibson plans to have his own church in Mt. Pleasant Township. The church is St. Michael the Archangel Chapel, now located in a ranch-style brick home along Route 982 South between the villages of Lycippus and Weltytown. Gibson is no ordinary parishioner. Gibson is the father of actor-director Mel Gibson and a follower of an ultraconservative branch of Catholicism that...

The conventional wisdom concerning Tuesday's Oscar nominations suggests that the entertainment establishment made an appropriately cautious decision to avoid controversy by simultaneously snubbing both of the year's most polarizing pictures. In fact, the sloppy, dishonest, brain-dead habit of equating "The Passion of the Christ" with "Fahrenheit 9/11" reveals more about Hollywood's bias and blindness than any aspect of the major awards the two films won't receive. "Fahrenheit 9/11" represents an unabashedly partisan piece of propaganda whose primary purpose (proudly and repeatedly announced by its irrepressible creator) involved the attempt to discredit and, ultimately, defeat the Bush administration. "The Passion," on...