I’ve consistently debunked the criticism of The Passion as anti-Semitic, by saying that by far Pontius Pilate is one of the major villains, because of his cowardice, his political pragmatism, and his self-preservation in allowing an innocent man to be cruelly punished and crucified for a crime He didn’t commit.
John O’Sullivan of National Review comes to the same conclusion and finds contemporary analogues among the US bishops.
Among the intellectuals who have fallen into Pilate’s error, of course, are the Catholic bishops in the scandal over priestly sexual abuse. Instead of protecting their flock and sternly compelling the sinner to repentance, they washed their hands of the matter and handed it over to psychologists and lawyers. In doing so, they also washed their hands of Christian teaching about sin and embraced the therapeutic gospels of Freud.
What we need are not bishops who are paralyzed by doubt or impelled by it into sloughing off their responsibilities to others. No, what we need are bishops of courage and conviction, like Bishop Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, who are willing to take upon themselves the difficult job of dealing with the problem in their midst even if the secular and ecclesiatical elites accuse him of not listening to them or their “solutions.”
