Church expert restates rules for Passion portrayal

As interfaith temperatures rise before Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ film opens, a US Catholic expert recalled yesterday the Vatican's strict rules on depicting a Jewish role in Jesus Christ's death.

Eugene J. Fisher, the Church's top US expert in relations with Jews, said "ancient errors" in interpreting the Gospels had given rise to the "unjust and unjustified view" that Jews were collectively responsible for the crucifixion.

He did not directly mention The Passion, which US Jewish leaders have loudly denounced as a damaging film portraying Jews as Christ-killers, but the timing and tone of his article in the US Jesuit weekly America made the link clear.

Fisher also said the American bishops would stress this message by issuing a book of official Catholic guidelines about portraying Christ's death just before Ash Wednesday, February 25 - the day Gibson's film is to be released.

"It is impossible to overstate the importance of the church's call to Catholic preachers and teachers to exercise an 'overriding preoccupation' with getting the Gospel accounts of Jesus's arrest, Passion and death just right," he wrote.

"Both Christians and Jews involved in (interreligious) dialogue rightly understand that removing once and for all the ancient charge of 'deicide' is the litmus test of the integrity of all our efforts."

Catholics involved in dialogue with Jews have said privately that Gibson's film was complicating their work because of its apparently harsh depiction of Jews. "I hope it all blows over quickly," one Midwestern priest told Reuters.

Jewish leaders who have seen the latest version of the film say it depicts Jews as sinister and includes a line from Matthew - "His blood be on us and our children" - which has been used for centuries to blame Jews for Christ's death. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Si-mon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said last month the film made Jews look evil and sinister "like dark-eyed Rasputins".

Fisher said Church guidelines set down that any depiction of Christ's Passion must stress the Christian teaching that Jesus died for mankind's sins and not because of "the particular Jews or Romans who were historically involved".

Passion plays must put the story in context because the four Gospels differ in style and substance. "It is not enough simply to say that a given passage is 'in the Bible'," he said. Gibson has said his screenplay was based faithfully on the Gospels.

"The presentation of Judaism must be nuanced," Fisher wrote. "Positive images of Jews and Judaism from Scriptures should be as or more plentiful than negative ones."