Another Lent, another anniversary for Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, released by Icon Productions and Newmarket Films in 2004. Having watched now for the fifth time, it continues to affect me profoundly, bringing me to tears. For our readers, we now reprint a post from when it was first released.

The other day at work, I heard three Jewish colleagues and bosses of mine berating the film and Mel Gibson as being clearly anti-Semitic. They were citing all sorts of articles from the Jewish press and added such quips as, “Before the Holocaust, there were plenty of warning signs that we did not follow. Now, before the release of this movie, there are plenty of more warning signs.”

I marvel at this pessimism. First, The Passion of the Christ is only a movie — a marvelous, beautiful, awe-inspiring movie, in my opinion — but still only a movie.

It is like watching a documentary by Caravaggio. The images are so vivid, and the story so familiar, that language becomes almost incidental… The violence, though intense, is never gratuitous… It rescues Christ from myth and grounds him in a reality that makes his actions more heroic…”

Raymond Arroyo
‘The Greatest Story, Newly Told,’
The Wall Street Journal

Gibson is portraying the Truth as we Catholics know it to be, basing the story of the Passion on the Gospel and other inspired writings, such as Emerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Artistically, it tries to capture the realism and dynamism of the Chiaroscuro movement of such greats as Caravaggio and Gentileschi. It is violent and bloody and gory (initially earning it an NC-17 rating), but this is not without cause: Too often is our Lord’s grand Sacrifice forgotten or glossed over — not only by Protestants but by lukewarm, ‘cafeteria’ Catholics as well — in preference of the glory of the Resurrection. It is not uncommon to hear, “I prefer not to see my God dead on a cross,” and churches (even Catholic ones) lose the Crucifix for the Cross. Well, this movie is a brutal reminder of what actually transpired; and in the words of the [late] Pope [John Paul II] after a screening at the Vatican, “It is as it was.”

Second, I marvel at the two-facedness of the world. When the Last Temptation of Christ came out — a movie filled with blasphemous inuendos — I didn’t see anyone stop and listen to the Catholic objections to the movie. (Incidentally, Mel Gibson was offered to star in that movie, and he refused.) When Dan Brown’s best-selling The DaVinci Code hit bookstands in 2003 [and now with the upcoming movie adaptation], one heard tons of hype of the ‘truth’ that had been “suppressed over the years by the Catholic Church,” as if the book had revealed some great reality instead of just collecting new-age conspiracy theories and resurrecting age-old heresies (all of which, by the way, have been shown to be in error by the great minds of the Church, such as saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas)… But no one gave more than a moment’s notice to the Catholic defense of the Faith. It is scary to think that one-third of people polled regard the book as factual. Yet, had Catholics demanded that this book not be released for fear of propagating anti-Catholicism (not to mention heresy) in this world, we would have been laughed at. Sadly, that fear would not be without cause, as anti-Catholicism is truly one of the few prejudices still accepted in the world and especially in the United States.

The Passion of the Christ is by no means an anti-Semitic work. It does not blame the Jews for the death of Christ — it blames mankind for the death of Christ. And books and movies like The DaVinci Code are but more stripes across His back and spit in His face.

See also:

• Via Crucis (Way of the Cross), featuring scenes from The Passion of the Christ.
• Buy The Passion on DVD!
• Catholic League for Religious & Civil Liberties
• Be sure to boycott The DaVinci Code!