You can just hear the mocking tone in the Reuters article about Mel Gibson’s Passion. Hollywood types just don’t want to take anybody seriously who make their faith a defining part of their lives, especially when it’s a conservative form of faith, and doubly so when it’s Catholicism.
Yeah, Martin Sheen is the toast of Hollywood because he’s a liberal Catholic who goes to Mass but protests all the right things: School of the Americas, Republican-caused homelessness, unpopular church teachings.
But when it’s a guy who says you’ve got to be a radical believer, that’s something different. Sure, I don’t agree with Mel on some things related to the Catholic faith and if he is as anti-Vatican II as they say he is, then he may be almost as much of a heterodox Catholic as Sheen, but it still shows the hypocrisy of Hollywood.
My prediction is that Passion will set whole new standards for religious movies, unlike even what we saw with Zeferelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, and other great old Bible movies. It may become the gold standard for movies about Jesus Christ.
