Cathedrals of Bone: The Role of the Body in Contemporary Catholic Literature

6. The Body ‘‘As It Was’’: On the Occasion of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ

6. The Body ‘‘As It Was’’: On the Occasion of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ On 22 January 2004, Peggy Noonan, columnist and contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal, recounted her efforts to report accurately papal reaction to the year’s most popular artistic work about the human body by a Catholic: Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. ‘‘My December 17 column,’’ Noonan wrote, ‘‘reported that Pope John Paul II had seen Mel Gibson’s movie on the crucifixion of Christ, The Passion, and had offered a judgment on it: ‘It is as it was.’’’ That quote,’’ Noonan went on to explain, ‘‘came from the film’s producer, Steve McEveety, who told me that it was given to him by the Pope’s longtime private secretary, Archbishop Stanislau Dziwisz.’’1 Although Noonan may have been the first to report papal reaction to Gibson’s drama about Jesus’ last hours, she was not alone. Both the National Catholic Reporter and the Reuters news service published similar stories, independent of one another. In their respective accounts, both NCR and Reuters claimed that John Paul II had seen the film, and both referred to sources within the Vatican to confirm the papal pronouncement that the film showed the Passion ‘‘as it was’’ for Jesus. Such verification would prove to be important, because within weeks other Vatican sources would come forward to deny the papal quotation. Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro -Valls, for example, would attempt to clarify the situation by describing Gibson’s work in different terms. ‘‘The film,’’ he said, ‘‘is a cinematographic transposition of the historical event of the Passion of Jesus Christ according to the accounts of the Gospel.’’ As NCR correspondent John L. Allen noted shortly after Navarro-Valls’ statement: ‘‘There’s some Vatican-speak here, but the thrust seems clear. Navarro is saying the film depicts what’s in the Gospel.’’ That claim, as Allen went on to point out, ‘‘was the essence of the ‘It is as it was’ remark’’ all along. Thus, even though the terminology changed, the Vatican position did not: according to an institutional hierarchy that reportedly included the Pope, Gibson’s film remained historically accurate and true.2 147 148 The Body ‘‘As It Was’’ This was a greater claim for the movie than Gibson himself dared to make; repeatedly during interviews surrounding its release he referred to the film as the product of his ‘‘belief.’’ The rush to laud it therefore says much more about the Church that watched it than it does about its director, and in fact the apparent need to see it as a true report about what happened to Jesus is remarkably consonant with the ideological moment in which much of the current Church hierarchy has chosen to live. In this age of ‘‘certainty ’’ for members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the Church, as Francis Cardinal George of Chicago has pointed out, may be ‘‘a mystery of communion because it arises from and is centered in the mystery of God,’’ but there is no mystery surrounding either the source of its authority or how that authority is to be asserted. The ‘‘Church’s authority,’’ writes the Cardinal, ‘‘is not the authority of secular power but the authority of truth emanating from God.’’ In exercising that authority, ‘‘Regrettably,’’ he continues , ‘‘an ecclesiology of communion is sometimes presented as an alternative to ecclesial hierarchy. No such opposition exists.’’3 God’s intentions, according to the Cardinal, are clear. This sense of certainty, which characterizes so much of the new Catholic apologetic, is echoed in other voices from the teaching authority of the Church. For example, Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis has written that Catholics ‘‘are obliged to inform our conscience with the knowledge of God’s law, both the natural law inscribed in our hearts and the law revealed in God’s Word taught with authority by the Church.’’4 Once informed by the hierarchy, the Catholic course of action is prescribed. Thus important voices within the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops insisted during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, for instance, that there is only one way to vote. According to Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Denver , ‘‘Real Catholics,’’ must vote exclusively for candidates who support the current position of the Catholic Church on the issue of abortion. To do otherwise, as Chaput said at a breakfast honoring President George W. Bush, would be to engage in a ‘‘habit...