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Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Reviews of The Passion


Russell Hittinger and Elizabeth Lev in First Things


US Catholic Bishops - Office for Film and Broadcasting


Roger Ebert " What Gibson has provided for me, for the first time in my life, is a visceral idea of what the Passion consisted of. ... This is not a sermon or a homily, but a visualization of the central event in the Christian religion."


The New York Times seems relatively cluessless; the warning signs are in the first paragraph where the reviewer seems to think that the realism of the death of Christ to the wackiness of the "Mr Smith Goess to Washington" remake from ala Homer Simpson. A sentence that really stood out for me: "'The Passion of the Christ' is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus' final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than in uplifting it. Mr. Gibson has constructed an unnerving and painful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one." It's one of those sentences that you end up parsing closely; because it gives you hints as to the author's mind set.... what does he mean by uplift, exactly... to be kinda "feel good" ? Why rage -- and not, say "gratitude" to Chirst for having suffered through all of that to save us?


Thomas S. Hibbs at NRO ... in St. Ignatius of Loyola's 16th-century manual, The Spiritual Exercises. Founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius counsels use of the imagination to place oneself in the setting of the Gospel stories, to see and hear the events and voices, and to be moved in appropriate ways. "In the Passion," he writes, "the proper thing to ask for is grief with Christ suffering, a broken heart with Christ heartbroken, tears and deep suffering because of the great suffering that Christ endured for me."

posted by DRH 2/24/2004 11:28:00 AM



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