Secular Sabotage

by William A. Donohue

  The one person who had seen the movie, and who had translated it into Aramaic and Latin, was Jesuit Father William J. Fulco, a National Endowment for the Humanities professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University. He not only said that the ADL had nothing to worry about, he argued “there is no hint of deicide.” In this regard, it is important to remember that every Sunday Catholics recite the 1,700-year-old Nicene Creed, and every time they do they mention that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate.” They do not say Jesus was killed by the Romans. Nor do they say He was killed by the Jews. They individualize the guilt. 35

  On November 6, the ADL convened its 90th Annual National Meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel. One of the sessions explored the controversy over the movie. Paula Fredriksen, professor of theology at Boston University, branded the movie “inflammatory,” saying it was in the “toxic tradition of blaming Jews for the death of Jesus.” These were strong words from someone who had not yet seen the film. But it was not unexpected: Fredriksen was already on record predicting violence. “When the violence breaks out,” she wrote in the New Republic months earlier, “Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to.” 36 Notice she said when, not if.

  Also speaking at the meeting was Sister Mary C. Boys, a theologian at a liberal Protestant enclave, the Union Theological Seminary. She went beyond an ad hominem attack when she ridiculed Gibson for saying that he believed he was guided by the Holy Spirit in making this movie. “I don’t believe that [given the divisiveness] that he could claim that the Holy Spirit is behind this,” she said. She also had not seen the movie. More important, it obviously never occurred to her that she and her colleagues were contributing to the very divisiveness she so loudly deplored. 37

  When Foxman spoke at the convention, he took another shot at Gibson, saying, “I think he’s infected—seriously infected—with some very, very serious anti-Semitic views.” What proved to be embarrassing was the reaction of Rabbi Eugene Korn, a top ADL official. Unlike the others, he had seen the film. While he did not like what he saw, he took umbrage at the overheated rhetoric of Foxman and others. So he quit the ADL. 38 His resignation came at a time when many Jewish leaders were questioning Foxman’s strategy.

  For example, Elan Steinberg, an official at the World Jewish Congress, openly wondered whether Jews were alienating “those who are our allies in many struggles.” Gilbert Rosenthal of the Council of Synagogues also said that the ADL’s approach was backfiring. Rabbi Michael Cook, a Hebrew Union professor, warned that Jews who were predicting violence following the film “risk embarrassment when it hits the theaters.” Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and Rabbi Daniel Lapin of Toward Tradition also weighed in against the ADL. Michael Medved really unloaded when he commented that Foxman’s campaign “is provoking far more anti-Semitism than the movie itself ever could.” 39

  Critics of the movie had the wind knocked out of them when Peggy Noonan wrote a piece for the online edition of the Wall Street Journal saying that Pope John Paul II had seen the movie and endorsed it. “It is as it was,” he reportedly said. It didn’t take long before some Vatican officials were expressing doubts about the accuracy of Noonan’s story, but it also didn’t take long before others sought to confirm it. Alan Nierob, a spokesman for the producer, said that “I saw it [the pope’s words] in writing myself.” He maintained that the e-mail in which the pope’s words were printed was sent to Noonan and Steve McEveety, the movie’s producer. 40 When Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the Vatican’s press secretary, told Noonan that he never gave her permission to use the pope’s words, she and the Wall Street Journal were able to trace his e-mails back to the Vatican server to prove he had. 41

  McEveety reported that the pope watched the film with his private secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, and that Dziwisz was the one who disseminated the pope’s words, “It is as it was.” This was independently confirmed by John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter and by the Reuters news agency. After much hullabaloo, Navarro-Valls announced that the pope had indeed viewed the film, but that he had no public statement about it. He did not say that the pope never expressed the five controversial words. Which in Vaticanese means he undoubtedly did. 42

  We know for sure that about a week after the pope saw the movie, several top Vatican officials gave their unanimous approval to the film. Members of the Vatican Secretariat of State, the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (which oversees doctrinal issues) applauded Gibson for his efforts. Most vocal was Father Augustine Di Noia, undersecretary of the doctrinal congregation. He said the guilt for Christ’s death was dispersed, leaving only Mary as “really blameless.” When asked point-blank whether the movie was anti-Semitic, he replied, “There is absolutely nothing anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish about Mel Gibson’s film.” 43

  The behavior of some Catholic theologians, including nuns and priests, was deplorable. Father John Pawlikowski labeled Gibson a “heretic,” and he, along with Philip Cunningham and Sister Mary Boys, blasted the director for violating their own carefully crafted rules for governing depictions of the Passion. But if Mel was a “heretic,” then what lien did they think they had on him? Was he supposed to report to them like an obedient altar boy asking permission to distribute his movie? Did they think Mel wanted to show his film in the basement of a Catholic elementary school and needed their okay? It was obvious what was going on. These ego-bruised, self-appointed guardians of the truth were angry that Mel didn’t run his script by them, tailoring his film to their liking. Their audacity was mind-boggling, but not at all out of character for those who live in the academy. 44

  There were some Jewish leaders who made remarks that were so inflammatory that they worked to poison Christian-Jewish relations. Take, for example, Harold Brackman, consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. “It is Christians who bear the responsibility, after 2,000 years of religious-inspired anti-Semitism,” he railed, “to inhibit rather than inflame the excesses of their own haters.” He managed to top this when he said, “When filmmakers with a Christological agenda fail to accept this responsibility, the blood that may result is indeed on their hands” [my italics]. It made me wonder—if Christian hatred of Jews is so visceral—why have there been no pogroms in the United States in over 200 years? Just as irresponsible was Ken Jacobson, associate national director of the ADL. “We have good reason to be seriously concerned about Gibson’s plans to retell the Passion,” he warned. “Historically, the Passion—the story of the killing of Jesus—has resulted in the death of Jews.” 45

  Not being a scholar on the Passion, I sought one out. I asked James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University and author of Oberammergau, two questions: when was the last time, in any country, Jews were beaten up following a Passion play, and has this ever happened in the United States? He had no evidence of any Jews ever being beaten up in the U.S. after a Passion play, and aside from one assault in Germany in the 1930s, the most recent incidents occurred in the late Middle Ages in Europe. 46 In other words, there was no real substance to the fears of people like Brackman and Jacobson. Yes, there was the monstrosity of the Holocaust, but as former New York City Mayor Ed Koch once informed, “It should never be said that Christians were responsible for the Holocaust—Nazis were. Blaming Christians would be as unjustified as holding Jews accountable for the death of Jesus. Individuals were responsible in both situations.” 47

  The movie opened on February 25, Ash Wednesday. I went to see it with Father Philip Eichner, chairman of the board of directors of the Catholic League, and several prominent members of the New York Jewish community. When the film was over, the Catholic League and the New York Board of Rabbis, headed by Rabbi Joe Potasnik, held a joint press conference outside the theater. Several speakers had their say, and there was plenty of disagreement, but it was also cordial (Joe Potasnik would have it no other way).<
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  Movie critics who hated the film got their talking points down in predictable fashion. They were aware that attempts to brand it anti-Semitic had failed miserably, and they also knew that the “too violent” tag wasn’t catching either. So they decided to label it “pornographic” and “sadomasochistic,” as if they really had a principled problem with, either.

  Best of all was Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News. She had previously expressed her love for Quills (the film about the S&M hero the Marquis de Sade) but branded Mel’s movie “a compendium of tortures that would horrify the regulars at an S&M club” (what she had against violence was also strange given that she had voted Gladiator movie of the year in 2000). 48 Then there was Frank Rich of the New York Times who called the film “pornographic.” Most embarrassing for Rich was the box office tally. On August 3, 2003, he said that “it’s hard to imagine the movie being anything other than a flop in America.” After a couple of weeks, the film was already grossing well in excess of $200 million. 49

  Father John Pawlikowski, director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at the Catholic Theological Union, also looked foolish. He wrote that “Christians who react favorably to Gibson’s film are shamefully evading their religious responsibilities.” Thus did he indict Pope John Paul II, several leading Vatican officials, and many bishops throughout the world, all of whom embraced it, to say nothing of the millions of Catholics and Protestants worldwide who loved it. All because he felt snubbed by Mel for not letting him vet the script. 50 No sooner had Pawlikowski gone bonkers when Joaquin Navarro-Valls spoke for the Vatican. He called the movie “a cinematographic transcription of the Gospels. If it were anti-Semitic, the Gospels would also be so.” To top it off, he said that the pope would have criticized the movie if it were bigoted against Jews, but, he declared, there is “nothing anti-Semitic about it.” 51

  Also looking dumb were all those critics who claimed that the film would trigger violence against Jews. Not a single act of violence against Jews took place anywhere in the world. No one looked worse than Paula “when-the-violence-breaks-out” Fredriksen. When asked to explain how she could be so wrong, she insisted she was not wrong: she decided to simply redefine violence to constitute a “hostile environment.” Still spinning, she said it was Mel’s supporters who have “redefined violence” to exclude anything less than “dead bodies strewn everywhere.” 52 Funny thing is, there was violence. It was directed at Dario D’Ambrosi, who played the burly, sadistic Roman soldier who took delight in whipping Jesus: he was cursed and spat upon in real life and his daughters were heckled at school. 53 Not exactly what Professor Paula had in mind.

  Nothing demonstrated the pure hypocrisy of the critics more than their passivity to the story in the New York Post that reported how 20 detectives of the NYPD were ordered into theaters to monitor the movie. Had they been ordered into theaters to monitor an anti-Catholic film—to see if it might provoke a backlash against Catholics—all hell would have broken loose. In this regard, no one appeared less principled than the woman from the New York Civil Liberties Union to whom I spoke. After she got my press release on the detectives going into the theaters, she called wondering why I sent her a copy. I had to explain to her that I thought the NYCLU might be concerned about the “chilling effect” this police action entailed. She was slightly amused, acknowledged that I had a point, and then said it was proper for the police to assess whether the film might promote violence! 54

  Mel’s blockbuster was, of course, snubbed by the Hollywood establishment when it came time for the Oscars. Many media outlets reported on Hollywood’s hatred of The Passion. As one Oscar campaign veteran put it, “a lot of older Academy voters, who are largely Jewish, refuse to even see this movie.” Tom O’Neil, one of the most prominent students of the Oscars, described what happened when the film was being considered by the experts: “At this religious movie, there was more cussing and swearing by Oscar voters than has ever been seen in an Academy screening before.” That said it all. 55 Hollywood would never forgive Mel for standing behind a movie it intentionally snubbed, and this was doubly true given that it proved to be a box office home run. Thus did he incur the wrath of the secularists.

  The Da Vinci Code

  In all likelihood, had Dan Brown never claimed that The Da Vinci Code was based on historical fact, the reaction to the movie version of his book would have been muted. Brown, however, was good at playing both sides of the street. While pitching the book as a novel, he also said it was historically true. For example, on June 9, 2003, Matt Lauer of the Today show asked him, “How much of this [the book] is based on reality in terms of things that actually occurred?” To which Brown said, “Absolutely all of it.” It was this dishonesty that motivated me to write to the movie’s director, Ron Howard, asking him to put a disclaimer at the beginning of the film noting that it is a work of fiction. 56

  This genre of mixing fact with fiction is intellectually dishonest. It had been done before by people like Alex Haley, who coined the term “faction” to describe Roots (he said it was a blend of fact and fiction) and by Oliver Stone (JFK) and Steven Spielberg (Amistad). Bad as they were, they were nothing when compared with the extraordinary claims that Dan Brown was making. Given all this, it seemed absolutely reasonable to request a disclaimer in the film. Both Sony and Howard, it should be noted, had previously inserted disclaimers in their movies.

  The debate over whether the film was anti-Catholic ended long before it opened. In August 2005, nine months before Howard’s adaptation debuted, John Calley, one of the coproducers of the movie, admitted that the film was “conservatively anti-Catholic.” 57 It should be obvious that there is not a single producer in all of Hollywood who would brag about his association with a racist, anti-gay, or anti-Semitic movie. But when it comes to Catholic bashing, it is perfectly legitimate to boast about it.

  The Da Vinci Code was more than anti-Catholic—it was littered with lies. The biggest of them all was the one that claimed that the divinity of Jesus was made up out of whole cloth in 325 at the Council of Nicaea. It fact, there are 25 references to the divinity of Christ in the Gospels and more than 40 references in the New Testament. Not only that, the letters of Paul were written in the 40s and 50s—earlier than the Gospels. All of these writings are much closer to the time of Jesus than the so-called Gnostic Gospels, and even those books—which were excluded from the New Testament—regard Jesus to be the Son of God.

  If Constantine concocted the idea that Jesus was divine in the fourth century, then how does one explain the Apostles’ Creed in the second century? After all, it explicitly mentions the divinity of Jesus. Brown said Constantine decided which books to include in the New Testament when, in fact, he had nothing to do with it. Indeed, the Council of Nicaea never addressed this issue. The question was how to understand Jesus’ divinity, not whether he was divine. Was Jesus the first being created by God (as erroneously assumed by a priest named Arius), or was He coeternal with God the Father? As Christians everywhere now believe, Jesus was begotten, not made.

  Another fiction was the one which posited that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. There is absolutely no evidence to support this position. Brown said it would be highly unlikely for a Jewish man to be celibate, but again he was wrong. We know that Paul the Apostle was celibate, as was John the Baptist. Indeed, so were the Essenes, the Jews who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. Speaking of which, Brown contended that the Dead Sea Scrolls imported new information about Jesus, when in fact they never mention him.

  Throughout his book, Brown tells us about the evil machinations of the Vatican and how it consolidated its power base under Constantine. But there was no Vatican in the fourth century—it didn’t exist until the fourteenth century. The book also claims that witch burning led to 5 million women being killed by the Catholic Church, but the number that most scholars accept is somewhere between 30 and 50 thousand. Not all were women and, more important, most were killed by civil authorities, not the Catholic Church. 58r />
  In other words, the movie was based on a book that was a malicious fraud. Even 60 Minutes, hardly an arm of the Catholic Church, took the book apart just a few weeks before the film debuted. Ed Bradley put the definitive question to Bill Putnam, an author who investigated the book’s thesis. Putnam was asked, “When you look at the list of hoaxes that have been perpetrated throughout history, where would you place this one?” He replied, “At the top.” 59

  What places this film in the category of secular sabotage is threefold: a fable that smears Christianity is marketed as fact; the plot is a frontal assault on Christianity; and a producer admits that the film is anti-Catholic. Each aspect, standing by itself, is disturbing enough, but when they are spliced together, the outcome smacks of bigotry.

  The Golden Compass

  There is no debate about Philip Pullman’s qualifications for entry into the Secular Sabotage Hall of Fame—he practically begs to join.

  Pullman is regarded as one of England’s great storytellers. He is also known as one of England’s most outspoken atheists. Indeed, his real talent is pitching atheism to kids. That is what he did so successfully with his trilogy His Dark Materials. All of his books teach children the virtues of atheism and the evils of Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, and in each successive volume the hostility becomes more palpable. Pullman made his biggest splash when The Golden Compass debuted on the big screen in 2007; it was based on the first volume of his series.

  Kiera McCaffrey of the Catholic League offered a good summary of Pullman’s works: “Though much of Pullman’s trilogy involves kid-pleasing romps through mystical worlds with talking animals and magical witches, the underlying theme is no simple fantasy. In the fictional universe of His Dark Materials, there is no real God; rather there is a high angel called the Authority, who purports to be God. The Church does the bidding of the Authority, repressing physical pleasure and subverting the will and wisdom of the people.” 60