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  • Gibson's Passion:The Challenges for Catholics
  • John T. Pawlikowski (bio)

A contemporary film on Christian antisemitism terms this centuries-long disease within the Church as a "shadow" on the cross. Recent Catholic documents have spoken in even stronger language. In 1989 the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace at the Vatican issued a major document on racism, in which it clearly placed antisemitism high on its list of continuing manifestations of racist ideologies. In point of fact, it called antisemitism the most tragic example of racism to appear in the twentieth century.

Pope John Paul II has provided decisive leadership in the effort to conscientize the global community regarding the fundamental sinfulness of antisemitism. During a visit to Hungary in 1991, John Paul spoke of the urgent need for the Church to atone for its sin of antisemitism and to repudiate antisemitism as a great sin against humanity, a call he repeated in his book Crossing The Threshold of Hope.

Over the years I have insisted in my writings that we cannot regard Nazism as simply the final and most gruesome form of classical Christian antisemitism. Hitler and his collaborators elevated antisemitism to a new level by setting it within a biological framework that totally dehumanized Jews, making them into vermin. Unlike the Christian version which aimed at marginalizing Jews and making them perpetually miserable as a supposed reminder of what happens to people who reject Christ, the Nazi version of antisemitism aimed at the total annihilation of the Jewish community worldwide. Both forms of antisemitism are fundamentally immoral. But a distinction needs to be maintained.

But, despite my insistence on the need to differentiate classical Christian antisemitism from its Nazi version, any effort to disconnect the two totally, as the 1998 Vatican document on Shoah has, is equally in error. We must [End Page 96] recognize that the widespread acquiescence and even collaboration with the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews was strongly influenced by the antisemitic legacy of Christianity. This legacy provided what I like to term "an indispensable seedbed" for the incubation of Nazism in European society. Nazi ideologues drew upon classical anti-Jewish church legislation in developing the legislation through which they dispossessed Jews of property and civil rights ,and they made use of Christian-based cultural events such as the Oberammergau passion play to promote their attack on the Jewish community among the masses.

In light of the very real involvement of classical Christian antisemitism with the Nazi onslaught against the Jews, Catholics today have a moral obligation in the post-Holocaust era to wipe out any remaining seeds of this antisemitism legacy still embedded within institutional Catholicism. There is need for spiritual chemotherapy in this regard. Regrettably, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ moves us in the opposite direction. It has become a carrier of traditional antisemitism even though it may not bring about immediate, direct attacks on the Jewish community. Its fundamental story line of a Jewish cabal pursuing Jesus relentlessly until its members were able to blackmail a weak-kneed Pilate into ordering his execution, the interjection of the blood libel curse from the gospel of Matthew (27:25), arguably the most toxic New Testament text historically in terms of undergirding Christian antisemitism, the use of devil imagery in connection with the Jews, and the total fabrication about the complete destruction of the Temple at the time of Jesus' death are all repetitions of classical antisemitic themes which Mel Gibson has brought back to the forefront. This is especially troubling in view of the marketing of the film as a DVD for use in Christian education. Fortunately a recent communiqué issued from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Synagogues does warn teachers about using the DVD without incorporating into classroom presentations the official teachings of the Catholic Church on Jews and Judaism found in the several documents issued from Rome since the II Vatican Council.

The Gibson film clearly has the possibility of undoing the more than forty years of painstaking work on revising Catholic textbooks. This possibility creates special concern at a time when the rise of antisemitism has been amply documented by...

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