Passionified


Just a month after the merest glimpse of a black female breast became the tipping point (and is there any point in denying the unavoidable puns?) for unease and disgust with relentless commercialized crassness on television, there's pious violence and the violence of piety unleashed on movie screens. Suddenly Jews are screaming at Protestants, Catholics are screaming at Jews, and Romans are pretty upset as well. Another tipping point perhaps, or just a profitable provocation?

Let us provide you with the recovering Catholic point of view. The Passion of Christ has been a mainstay of a certain kind of Catholicism for a very long time. The in-church movie version is called the Stations of the Cross. There are graphic crucifixes, so-called holy picture, depicting in curious detail the agony of Jesus. It is a stand-in for the suffering of the poor, the mass and minions of the institutional church, to bind them to the church's doctrine and especially its authority by glorifying their suffering. It is at the same time a cleansing identification and an awful exploitation.
It is a profound lesson about bearing the crosses of life, and it is a not too subtle suggestion that good Christians seek solace instead of justice.

This is not the Bleeding Heart of Jesus. No, that Jesus is struck to the quick by the suffering of the poor, the hungry the sick, the mistreated, the victims of injustice and oppression. That's what your religious right is criticizing when they sneer at Bleeding Heart Liberals.

No, the Passion is about quaking in your pew. Sure, it's actually about sacrifice, a somewhat new take on a very old theme, perhaps even a primordial one, and certainly a mystery of human societies. The blood sacrifice. But as the Church used it for centuries, it was about scaring the hell out of you.

It is not, you notice, the Christian message of charity, mercy, blessed are the peacemakers. It's not about love. It's about fear.

And it's about visceral emotions, not cultivating a new way of thinking, feeling and behaving, as one might argue is the contribution of Christ, as well as Buddha and other heroes of the human soul.

So it was only a matter of time before the Passion became an action movie. The bad guys, the ultimate Good Guy, the blood, the violence. Except for the extent of the violence and the names of the main characters, the Gibson movie apparently is little different from others in the genre.

We say that based on what's been written about it, and especially on the scenes shown on TV. We haven't seen it, and we don't plan to.

From what we have seen and what we've heard described, it is a combination of movie sadism and Catholic sado-masochism. It's the greatest pornography ever sold.