L'Affaire Mel

OK, so Mel Gibson got himself into a bit of trouble last week. You all know about it, so there's no need to rehash the details.

In the Chicago Tribune, Jim Martin, SJ comments on the situation:

[A]ccording to Gibson, he didn't mean the horrible things he said during his drunken bender in Malibu, Calif. He didn't even believe those things.

That makes him the only person in history whose true feelings don't come pouring out after having too much alcohol. Besides, someone who loves Latin so much should know that wine makes people speak the truth. In vino veritas, right?...

The weirdest part of Gibson's drunken rant was his statement that the Jews are responsible for all the wars. So, did he mean throughout history or just the recent ones, like World War II? And I wonder if that includes Jesus of Nazareth, who, as Gibson may have discovered during his extensive research for his movie, was Jewish. Maybe the fact that Jesus' mother had a nice Catholic name was confusing.

The biggest irony is that the guy who acted the most Christian in this whole affair is Jewish: the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who arrested Gibson. After the arrest, James Mee said that he held no grudge against Gibson and didn't want to see Gibson's career suffer, even though he's the guy in whose face Gibson spewed his invective. Despite that, this Jewish fellow gave Gibson a little lesson--a parable you might say--about Christian forgiveness.

Let's not forget that, even though nobody likes talking about it, Gibson's "Catholicism" -- at least, as evidenced by the churches he builds for his daddy and the "I'm just Roman Catholic, the way they were up until the mid '60s." line he gave Diane Sawyer back during Passiontide -- veers toward the schismatic.

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