Mel Gibson, meet Dan Brown

Does William A. Donohue, president of the Catholic League, owe Abraham Foxman an apology?

Two years ago, Donohue wrote an ominous “Open Letter to the Jewish Community” objecting to the way Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, depicted Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. The thrust of a Jan. 22, 2004, statement by Foxman was his concern that the film “could fuel latent anti-Semitism that exists in the hearts of those people who hold Jews responsible for the death of Jesus, which has always been the source of Western anti-Semitism. Its portrayal of Jews is painful to watch.”

Donohue dismissed Foxman’s concerns about the film’s theological anti-Semitism with a curt — and, if you’ve seen the film, baffling — assertion that The Passion is “wholly consistent” with contemporary church teachings. “Let it be said that reasonable people can disagree about this, but what cannot be tolerated is casting aspersions on ‘church-going Christians,’” wrote Donohue.

And what were those “aspersions”? At the beginning of the paragraph quoted above, Foxman asked, “Will the film trigger pogroms against Jews? Our answer is probably not.”

The “probably not” got Donohue’s goat. “Probably not,” wrote Donohue, “means it may.” And then he fumed: “The idea that Christians will attack Jews in the streets after seeing The Passion of the Christ is pernicious.”

In essence, Donohue had set the bar for criticizing a movie. If it’s guaranteed that it will arouse violence, only then have you a right to complain. If you merely feel it spreads a hateful vision of your religion, well, then, “reasonable people can disagree.”

Flash forward to this week, and the Western world braces itself for the widescreen release of The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown’s mega-bestseller. The movie hasn’t even come out yet (a common charge flung at Foxman and others who had an advance peek at The Passion), but Donohue has already written another “open letter,” this time to director Ron Howard.

“As the director, you have a moral obligation not to mislead the public the way the book’s author, Dan Brown, has,” writes Donohue. “When credence is given to hoaxes, whether it be the notoriously anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the invidiously anti-Catholic Da Vinci Code, the consequences are real.”

What are those consequences? Donohue doesn’t say, and that’s why he owes Foxman an apology. Because now that the shoe is on the other foot — that is, now that a Catholic leader feels his religion is under attack from a motion picture — Donohue finds it fits just fine. Donohue objects to The Da Vinci Code for the same reason that Foxman and so many of us objected to The Passion: because it blatantly disregards a wide body of Christian scholarship to depict a group — the Jews in Passion, the Catholic Church in Da Vinci — in ways that are, in the words of the pope’s chief theologian, “dangerous for the most credulous.”

I feel for Donohue, I really do. Da Vinci is crap, and mischievous crap at that. It’s not just that Brown presents some barely supportable assertions as “accurate” — that Jesus’ early followers viewed him as mortal, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that the church has long tried to suppress the “sacred feminine.” Worse is the book’s accumulating evidence of dark Catholic conspiracies, including murder, led by the self-flagellating followers of the Opus Dei movement. You also wouldn’t know from reading Da Vinci that there are other Christian movements besides Catholicism. When it comes to distorting the true message of Jesus, Brown lets the Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelicals — you name it — off the hook.

If I were a Catholic leader, I’d certainly feel implicated and annoyed. Anti-Catholicism has a long and dishonorable history in this country, despite the church’s evident resources and power. And the Catholic League, like the real-life Opus Dei, is merely asking that Howard put a disclaimer on the film, saying it is a “fictional account.”

But you’ll forgive me if I don’t join the picket lines outside of Da Vinci. The film is a thriller, not a theological tract, and Howard is modest enough to say so. Compare that with Gibson, who gave the impression that his film was a sort of modern-day Gospel, or certainly “true to the Gospels,” as he put it.

There’s also a question of scale. In discussing the impact of the two films, you must consider the relative size of the Jewish and Catholic communities. There’s a big difference in the ways a community of 11 million can field and absorb cultural and theological challenges compared to a faith with some one billion adherents. Size matters. Catholicism, like Islam, is big enough and powerful enough to weather a dumb movie. But Jews needn’t apologize for asking for special treatment by dint of our relative size, and history. This is one of the “privileges” of being a minority.

But mostly I remember the bashing Foxman and other Jewish leaders took for objecting to The Passion and seeking some sort of dialogue — never granted — with Gibson. A gaggle of Christian, and conservative Jewish, commentators rushed to Gibson’s side to defend the film and his right to his faith. You can still read the occasional essay by a Jewish columnist who suggests, like Donohue, that since The Passion didn’t inspire pogroms, Foxman was wrong from the outset.

I can only hope that the ugly portrayal of the church in Da Vinci at least raises the consciousness of those critics and gives them a touch of empathy for those of us who regarded The Passion as refutation of all the progress Jews and Catholics had made in their long and troubled relationship. Reasonable people can disagree, but not on this point.

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