The
Catholic Weekly
Online
Sydney
15 February 2004
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Birthday wishes for Aloysius
SA parishes merge
Focus on family
Gregorian Schola offers singers big chants
Gibson’s Passion ‘work of faith’, says cardinal
How to help create a ‘culture of peace’
Pregnant pause: The joy of showing our baby the way
There is a doctor in the house
Wollongong diocese buys site for high school
Boree log bush bash
Work in Catholic education brings honour for four
Bishop launches ‘significant’ new faith courses
$80,000 boost for drug fight
Editorial: Greatest story
Letters: Something special
Conversation: Fr Aiden Kelly, prison chaplain - Helping souls in a captive Congregation
On a walk with God ...
A credible Jesus
A biblical-based Mary
A life of Mercy with music
Care, prayer still very much in order
The Polding legacy
‘Catholic-only’ order denied
US-bound on the pitcher’s mound
Editorial: Greatest story
For Christians, the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus forms the nub of our belief.
The events of Holy Week focus our attention on the the means and the moment of our redemption.
And the Gospels do not hold back in telling the story of how Christ suffered physical and emotional suffering as well as direful humiliation, from the Agony in the Garden on the evening of Holy Thursday to his cruel death on the cross on Good Friday.
It is a story that over the centuries has inspired writers and artists to try to express the momentous impact that the Passion has had on them personally and on humanity as a whole.
Since the movie medium began, film makers have also vied to re-tell the story, though perhaps from an incentive to make big box office returns rather than a desire to evangelise cinema patrons.
Most of those films have been big budget productions, backed by the moguls of Hollywood and distributed worldwide throughout their distribution arms.
The latest film, The Passion of the Christ, is the creation of one-time Australian actor and director Mel Gibson.
Using his own money, Gibson, himself a traditionalist Catholic, has made a film he says gestated in his
imagination for 12 years as he meditated on the Gospel accounts. He says he wanted to portray the Passion as vividly and as realistically as possible.
From many accounts, Gibson has succeeded. In Fr Peter Malone’s review today (see pages 12-13) he describes the film as offering “a credible, naturalistic Jesus whose sufferings of body and spirit are real”.
Cardinal George Pell, who has seen the picture, says it is a “beautiful production ... a work of faith, truly based on the Gospels”.
Gibson may well recoup, and then some, the reported $50 million he has spent on the production and promotion of The Passion.
It would seem film patrons might themselves be enriched.