In vino veritas

Having denied charges that he shares his father's anti-Semitic views, a drunk Mel Gibson showed allegedly showed different colors in his traffic stop last weekend, when he was pulled over for driving drunk at almost 90 miles an hour.

Despite attempts by the police department to cover them up, Gibson's remarks--including, "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world"--have now hit the news and won't be going away any time soon, and for now his apologies are falling on deaf ears.

Mel's defenders point out he was drunk--and he is a recovering alcoholic, so there's no joy for anyone in this--but as film critic John Anderson, pointed out, according to Reuters, "How many people when they are drunk and angry start lashing out at the Jews?" Indeed.

Well, perhaps Mel will be less ready to wear his (Tridentine) Catholicism on his sleeve--although the Catholicism of that age was pretty anti-Jewish. As Philip Cunningham points out in a recent article in Commonweal:

The 1938 draft [never published] of an encyclical on Nazi racist ideology prepared for Pope Pius XI . . . reflected the church’s longstanding teaching that the Jewish people collectively were responsible for Christ’s death. As a consequence of that inherited guilt, it stated, there was an “authentic basis of the social separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity.” This was not due to race but to religion: “The Savior . . . was rejected by that people, violently repudiated, and condemned as a criminal by the highest tribunals of the Jewish nation.” Bearing a collective responsibility for the death of Jesus, the Jews were doomed “to perpetually wander over the face of the earth . . . through the ages into our own time.” And the church was charged with guarding against “the spiritual dangers to which contact with the Jews can expose souls."

Wow, post-conciliar Catholicism ain't lookin' so bad after all. Let's hope this is the last we hear from those who celebrate Gibson and his torture flick (The Passion of the Christ) as the zenith of all things Catholic and Christian.