Dear Friends and Benefactors,
Your priests in
Dublin pray for all of you and your dear ones to have a blessed
Lent, in union with the suffering Hearts of Jesus and Mary. A simple
recipe with three ingredients to profit fully from the blessings of
the season: each day a work of mercy, an act of mortification, and
an extra prayer. Add to this the traditional Lenten fast and
almsgivings, and you will be rewarded with abundant graces.
Some encouraging words of the Cure of Ars, to
illustrate the spirit of this holy quarantine:
"Even though we may have poor health or even be
infirm, there is a fast which we can easily perform. Let us even be
quite poor; we can still give alms to the church or help others. And
however heavy or demanding our work, we can still pray to Almighty
God without interfering with our labours; we can pray night and
morning, and even all day long, and here is how we can do it."
"All the time that we deprive
ourselves of anything which it gives us pleasure to do, we are
practicing a fast which is very pleasing to God because fasting does
not consist solely of privations in eating and drinking, but of
denying ourselves that which pleases our taste most. Some mortify
themselves in the way they dress; others in the visits they want to
make to friends whom they like to see; others in the conversations
and discussions which they enjoy. This constitutes a very excellent
fast and one which pleases God because it fights self-love and pride
and one's reluctance to do things one does not enjoy or to be with
people whose characters and ways of behaving are contrary to one's
own. You can, without offending God, go into that particular
company, but you can deprive yourself of it to please God: there is
a type of fasting which is very meritorious."
Lent is also the privileged occasion to meditate with assiduity on the
Passion of Our Lord and on the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Mother.
The Stations of the Cross, said in the church or at home; the
recitation of seven Hail Marys while considering Mary's sorrows; the
devotion of the Five Wounds, they all constitute precious methods to
impress in our hearts those vivid sentiments of Faith, Hope, and
Charity, with true contrition for our sins, and a firm purpose of
amendment for which we pray in the invocation before the
Crucifix En Ego, indispensable requisite of our thanksgiving
after Communion. And is there a better way to share in Christ's
sacrifice than attending devoutly the Mass of all times?
*
Mel Gibson's film, The
Passion of The Christ, has provoked quite a debate all over the
world. I cannot go anywhere these days, whether it is the grocery
store, the bank, or the post office, without being accosted by some
inevitable weirdo who wants to know my opinion on the movie.
Predatory journalists keep ringing the priory, curious about our
standing in the matter, and national and local media try to get from
me a statement without success. I reserve it for my readers!.
Allow me then to share my
assessment of this controversy, which –fundamentally– is as old as
the Incarnation and our Redemption. These personal reflections, I
believe, are very much in harmony with the spirit of Lent and not
out of place in my March letter to the friends and benefactors.
Mel Columcille Gerard
Gibson was born in New York, in 1956. His parents emigrated to
Australia in 1968 and, after completing studies at the Dramatic Art
Institute in Sydney, Mel made a name for himself as the
post-apocalyptic hero of the film Mad Max, 1979. The success
of his Hollywood career and a growing disenchantment with the new
Church of Vatican II distanced him from
the faith. In his middle thirties, Mel went through difficult times,
which he describes as "a very desperate place, kind of
jump-out-of-a-window kind of desperate. And I just hit my knees. And
I had to use the Passion of Christ and His wounds to heal my wounds.
And I've just been meditating on it for twelve years." Mel
returned to the faith of his infancy as a result of this extreme
personal crisis, and also through the paramount influence of his
father, Hutton Gibson, a Catholic apologist (unfortunately of the
sedevacantist trend). The actor attended for years the Latin Mass
celebrated in Arcadia, California, by the late
Monsignor Charles Donahue, who bequeathed his church and apostolate
to our Priestly Society. Monsignor Donahue used to tease Mel about
his questionable films, and often told him that he should apply his
exceptional talents to the glory of God and the Church. No doubt
that this plea was at the origin of Mel's brave decision to produce
and direct The Passion.
The idea was both crazy
and brilliant, exactly like Mel. A film depicting vividly the last
twelve hours of Jesus Christ's earthly life, "with the Gospels as
the script and the Holy Ghost as director"! And spoken in Latin and
Aramaic! "I wanted to bring you there," Mel says, "and I wanted to
be true to the Gospels. That has never been done." The uproar of
Jewish Hollywood was immediate, and the Modernist elements in the
Catholic Church obediently expressed their disagreement with the
"simplistic" approach, deploring that Caiphas and the Sanhedrin are
depicted in the film as being "monolithically malevolent." The
recent review of the movie at the U.S. Catholic Bishops website
complains that "by choosing to narrow his focus almost exclusively
to the Passion of Christ, Gibson has, perhaps, muted Christ's
teachings, making it difficult for viewers unfamiliar with the New
Testament and the era's historical milieu to contextualize the
circumstances leading up to Jesus' arrest." Bah!
Is the film anti-Semitic?
The executioners are the Roman soldiers (passus sub Pontio Pilato),
the instigators are the Jewish authorities, and the opening
quotation in the movie are the words from Isaiah which explain that
Our Lord was "crushed for our transgressions," making it clear that
He died because of the sins of all mankind and not as the result of
a racial conspiracy.
Is the film violent? Mel
studied the details of Roman crucifixion, reading, among other
sources, a famous clinical investigation of the practice, On the
Physical Death of Jesus Christ, published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association in 1986. That study explained why
crucifixion inspired the word "excruciating": "Scourging produced
deep stripe-like lacerations and appreciable blood loss, and it
probably set the stage for hypovolemic shock. . . . The major
pathophysiologic effect of crucifixion was an interference with
normal respiration." Mel seems to have relied heavily upon this
study, which describes the Roman tools of punishment ("The usual
instrument was a short whip . . . with several single or braided
leather thongs of variable lengths, in which small iron balls or
sharp pieces of sheep bones were tied at intervals"), the
choreography of the infliction ("The man was stripped of his
clothing, and his hands were tied to an upright post [and] the back,
buttocks, and legs were flogged either by two soldiers . . . or by
one who alternated positions"), and its severity (scourging "was
intended to weaken the victim to a state just short of collapse or
death"). All these elements are directly reflected in Gibson's film.
He is simply recreating the events just as they were. In Mel's
words: "it was pretty nasty."
In my opinion, the
controversy and the worldwide interest in the film (which as
February 29 is no. 1 at box office, having grossed $120 million in a
few days), is not so much on brutality or anti-Semitism as it is on
the crucial dilemma brought about by the Incarnation: can God become
a man, and can He die a terrible death to expiate for our sins?
The Passion of The Christ interpellates the perfidious XXI
century with stentorian voice and in the language of the big screen,
until now effectively the private domain of pornographers,
blasphemers, and liars, enemies of the Cross of Christ. Blessed be
Mel Gibson for this splendid testimony which God will not fail to
use for His Glory and the salvation of souls.
We, my friends, we do not need movies, though. We have
the reality of Christ's sacrifice renewed in an unbloody manner
every day upon our Altars of Tradition. From the True Mass flow all
the graces that the Redeemer obtained for us, "always
bearing about in our body the mortification of Jesus, that the life
also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies" (II Corinthians,
IV, 10).
Father Ramón
Anglés
