Vatican Cardinal Wants 'Everyone in the World' to See Gibson's 'The Passion'

Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion" has won another ringing endorsement from the Vatican.

"I would gladly trade some of the homilies that I have given about the passion of Christ for even a few of the scenes of his film," Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos says in an interview published today in the newspaper La Stampa.

As for naysayers and would-be censors who haven't even seen the movie: "Anti-Semitism, like all forms of racism, distorts the truth by putting an entire race in a bad light. This film does nothing of the kind."

He saw an unfinished version of the film that director Gibson brought to Rome.

"I felt moments of deep spiritual intimacy with Jesus Christ," said Hoyos, one of the Vatican's most prominent cardinals and Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.

Hoyos is also a leader of a Vatican commission trying to bring conservative traditionalists back to the church.

"I would like all Catholic priests in the world to see this film. I hope that all Christians can see it, everyone in the world."

Rejecting complaints about the movie's violence, he said "The Passion" depicted "the horror of sin and egoism and the redemptive power of love."

William Donohue, president of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, stated: "The big winner in this is Mel Gibson. The big loser is the ad hoc committee of scholars who condemned the movie without seeing it.

"Regarding the latter group, the most embarrassed must be the Catholic scholars. They were the ones who read a stolen script of the screenplay and then set themselves up as the supreme authority on the New Testament. Now they look rather silly."

Why Won't Anti-Defamation League
Attack Woody Allen's 'Anti-Semitism'?

"Forget Mel Gibson — the new anti-Semitism is coming from Woody," Fox News' entertainment reporter Roger Friedman wrote today.

In "Anything Else," his absolutely dreadful new comedy (and I use that term loosely), Allen plays an enigmatic, violent, self-loathing Jew. At one point, his character, called David Dobel, refers to Danny DeVito’s character, a talent agent, as "your Jew manager. Hey, I’m a member of the Tribe," he tells Jason Biggs’ character, Jerry, "but you know what I mean."

It’s maybe the strangest and most unforgiving moment in any Woody Allen movie. Is it Dobel speaking or Allen? And, either way, is it necessary?

It doesn’t help that DeVito’s character, depicted as the kind of agent who uses garment-center metaphors to describe everything artistic, is named Harvey Wexler. With his roly-poly mien and garrulous personality, DeVito’s caricature of a shrill, unlikable, easily mocked Broadway Danny Rose type is not exactly hard to figure out. I just can’t believe DeVito didn’t know what he was doing at the time. ...

Dobel is an anti-Semite who fears anti-Semitism. He is passive-aggressively violent and has perhaps a sinister backstory. He says he has guns within reach in every room in his house. Toward the end of the movie he does something extremely violent off-camera — provoked, he says, because his victim told him "the Holocaust was really just a theme park."

In my screening, you could hear a pin drop when Allen said that line. No one laughed, trust me.

Editor's note:
James Hirsen’s "Tales from the Left Coast" - Find out the real stroy behind Mel Gibson`s "The Passion," and more!

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