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 Story of the day:

GIBSON-USCCB Jul-22-2003 (640 words) With photos. xxxn
Actor-director Mel Gibson visits U.S. bishops' building

By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Actor-director Mel Gibson paid a quick visit to the U.S. bishops' headquarters building in Washington July 21, a month after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Gibson's Icon Productions were involved in a spat over Gibson's new movie, "The Passion."

Gibson met with Msgr. William P. Fay, USCCB general secretary. "It was a surprise visit," said Msgr. Fay, who had been notified of Gibson's arrival about an hour before it happened.

Msgr. Fay added there was no bad blood between the USCCB and Gibson. "He wanted the visit to make clear that there was not" any animosity, he said of Gibson.

The dispute centered on the use of what Icon Productions said were unauthorized copies of a draft script used by a group of Catholic and Jewish scholars to critique the screenplay.

After the meeting was over, Gibson signed autographs for employees outside USCCB headquarters before stepping inside a waiting taxi. With Gibson was Paul Lauer, hired to do publicity and promotion for "The Passion."

"I thought I was having a private meeting," Msgr. Fay exclaimed when he saw 20 employees, most of them female, huddling around the 47-year-old Gibson for an autograph.

When signing an autograph for Janet Kistler, who works in the bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, Gibson said, "You're from Pro-Life? I've done my bit." Gibson, a Catholic, is the father of seven children.

Gibson was in Washington to oversee a screening of "The Passion," which Gibson financed with his own money. The film, whose dialogue is entirely in Latin and Aramaic with no subtitles, has yet to find a distributor.

Among those attending the invitation-only screening, according to The Washington Post, were political commentators Peggy Noonan, Cal Thomas, Kate O'Beirne, Michael Novak and Linda Chavez; film director William Peter Blatty; Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America; David Kuo, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives; former Republican congressman Mark Siljander of Michigan; and Mark Rodgers, staff director of the Senate Republican Conference.

The same day as Gibson's visit, William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights blasted an essay written by Paula Fredriksen in the July 28 issue of The New Republic magazine over the controversy surrounding "The Passion."

"The script, when we got it, shocked us," wrote Fredriksen, one of the scholars enlisted to critique the script. She is a professor of Scripture at Boston University and the author of "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews," a historical study of the last 12 hours of Jesus' life.

"Nothing of Gibson's published remarks (in a New York Times Magazine article) or of (Jesuit Father William) Fulco's and Gibson's private assurances, had prepared us for what we saw," Fredriksen said. Father Fulco translated the English script.

"We pinpointed its historical errors and -- again, since Gibson has so trumpeted his own Catholicism -- its deviations from magisterial principles of biblical interpretation. We concluded with general recommendations for certain changes in the script," she said.

Fredriksen said Gibson was fully aware of the script's distribution to the scholars and their intent to produce a critique of the script.

"Why would he be so concerned with our evaluation if he knew that what we were evaluating bore so little resemblance to his actual film?" she asked. "I shudder to think how 'The Passion' will play once its subtitles shift from English to Polish, or Spanish, or French, or Russian. When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to."

Calling Fredriksen "a demagogue," Donohue said in a statement, "Working with an unauthorized script of 'The Passion,' Paula Fredriksen has declared the movie to be anti-Semitic. ... She has libeled Mel Gibson."

END


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