Mel Gibson on Resistance to The Passion of the Christ, the Catholic Church, and The Resurrection

the jogan experience you know like subtitled movies you feel like you're a smarter person watching a movie where you're reading it as well yeah and there's yeah there's something about the written word that's like it's a pretty interesting thing to throw into the mix I know when I first started it was kind of confusing but then I got really good at it and I think uh especially with something like what the passion that I did the written word was very important because it was you know you got all those books the Bible you know you've

got the the different gospels and stuff that people are quite familiar with half the time they didn't even need to read the subtitles they could look at it and know what was going on that was a crazy movie because uh it was a great movie but it seemed like there was resistance to that movie oh yeah no there was which uh I I thought was very strange there was like Hollywood resistance to that movie like people didn't like that you were making it it seemed like yeah there's a lot of there was a lot of

opposition to it and uh I don't know it's I think if you ever hit on that subject matter you're going to get people going because of course it's big subject matter and it's like uh you know and my contention is you know when I was making it it was like you're making this film and the idea was that we're all responsible for this that his sacrifice was For All Mankind and that for all all our ills and all all the things in our fallen nature it was Aid Redemption so you know and I believe that

you know I I actually am you know I was born into a Catholic Family I'm very Christian in my beliefs you know so I do actually believe this stuff to the full so depicting that was an honor but it was also yeah you got the you got the Daylights beat out of your for it yeah because there's there's resistance first of all from secular Hollywood where for whatever reason Christianity is the one religion that you're allowed disparage yeah Christianity is the one religion where people all these Progressive open-minded leftist people they'll embrace all these different

religions until it comes to Christianity and for whatever reason that represents like white male you know whatever it represents colonialism you know whatever it you know whatever it represents it's negative yeah sure it's gotten a bad rap and they people do feel free to be up on it mhm even I do when I see it's like you know when it's not fair when I think it's off like uh you know when they appoint some Cardinal in some dasis and he's been covering up for like people who are child molesters you know like Theodor mccarrick or

Cardinal whirl or those kind of guys I mean or the pope yes absolutely I'm I'm Benedict oh not Ben well he was covering up but like so is the guy now is he really well yeah yeah it's it's not great I thought he was like the more Progressive Pope oh he's very Progressive yes but he's covering up for stuff as well well they they all are I mean it's a it's a a dark institution in a lot of ways because it's history you know well you know the institution it was instituted by Christ you know

but that doesn't mean that it can't be flawed and there's a school of thought that says it isn't what it purports to be anymore it's it's moved away from what it was intended to be in what it is uh almost there's a guy called um Bishop vegano who says it's a counterfeit parallel church and it's it's running an entirely different religion I actually don't I don't adhere to a post-conciliar church I adhere can you define what that means okay um there was an event that happened in the in the 60s first there was an event

in the Vatican where they elected John the 23rd Pope right in 1958 I was 2 years old right um he was elected and there was a very funny thing that happened in the conclave you know usually there's white and black smoke that goes out of the the chimneys to tell you we have a pope you know habam us pop him you know and the white smoke came out and everybody cheered and they went crazy and then about a half an hour later blackm smoke came came out that never in history has that happened that the

white smoke came out and then the black smoke came so white smoke means we found a new pope blackm means no Pope that's right they'd have votes or there'd be one reason or another they'd have a round in the conclave and black smoke would come out many times many times maybe maybe it would take two weeks but never was it known that white smoke came out then black smoke came out so what was the scenario that somebody was elected and that maybe something else happened and he was pushed aside and someone else was put in

ah so it was power struggle some kind of power struggle and um of course the man who came out was a man called Angelo ronali and he was John the 23rd now it's interesting to note that never had a pope taken the name of another Pope ever before in history but this man took the name of a known anti-pop from the 15th century that kmo dedich put in there as his own man I'll get you in the chair and then everything will be Rosy you know everything will go good for business you know whatever he

was putting him in there for some corrupt reason but um and there have been corrupt men in that place before I mean there's Alexander V 6 and Julius II as 6us I fourth I mean some of these guys are you know they're not Saints um so he took the name of a known anti-pop from the fifth century who actually said yes I'm an anti-pop sorry I'm not the the right guy cuz there was more than one and he confessed to being and he wanted to you know Square things with with the Almighty I guess so

he confessed to being an anti-pop and uh so he took the same name as that guy John the 23rd so it's interesting don't you think I mean I why would he do that well whenever you have that kind of power like I'm sure you've been to the Vatican right yeah it's stunning yes it's huge it's so cra when you're walking around you see the just the massive amount just the dollar value in the art that they possess yeah it's [ __ ] insane it's crazy yeah and uh you know it's a very small country it's

a country yeah it's a country inside of a small City yeah cuz Rome's not the biggest city no and then it's got a country inside the city yeah with a with walls around it sure and you can't extradite people yeah pretty weird how convenient yeah even B singer he didn't drive from the Vatican to the other place he flew o and it was only a little while cuz who knows why I don't know well he was wanted yes yeah I mean he had done one of the things that he had done was he had moved

a priest that had molested a hundred kids and he moved him to some new place where he molested deaf kids yeah yeah boy yeah yeah I know that's the the dirtiest most evil practice that the Catholic church has been accused of I think so and many institutions as well but that is a very bad one and uh I think it's all part and parcel of the same corruption that crept in and when you asked what's the difference between prev Vatican 2 so Vatican 2 happened and of course they they took the church and they they

reformed it and they changed things in it and it didn't necessarily agree with everything that went before it and up to that point yeah you could find it agreed with itself but all of a sudden you got something else to the point where now I mean I mean we got a pope that brought a a South American Idol into the church to worship really he did the patcha mama he B the South and he got what I don't I don't know what that is it's a it's kind of like a South American God pamam that's

his why would he do that good question but he did did he have an explanation for why he did it yeah it's kind of a weasel worded thing of like oh all religions are just as good as one another but you know if that's his contention he shouldn't be the pope no I mean how can you be the pope if you say all religions are just as good yeah we all worship you know so yeah that's a pcha Mama there you go so he brought that in yeah into the Vatican then the Hier he the

hierarch even worshiped that that ceremony rounded outside what well that constitutes apostasy J it's that's an apostasy move all right worshiping false gods yeah that's number one on the Mosaic Hit List you know Moses goes up on the mountain he comes back down people are worship him in a golden calf yeah you know it's it's that yeah so you can't do that and uh for me that's a departure from what you know that's called apostasy it's a falling away from it and the Very nature of apostasy means that you have to be part of it

to fall away from it mhm so it's an inside job ah so what do you think there's a motive Behind these things I don't think you well probably what do you think it is I don't know but it isn't good I think look I think we're we're looking at a world where and this is the in the next film I'm going to do I'm going to try and Tackle this question that there are big Realms spiritual Realms there's good there's evil and they are slugging it out for the souls of mankind and my question is

why are we even important little old flawed Humanity why are we important in that process where the big Realms are slugging it out over us and I think there's bigger things at play here and institutions that purport to touch on the Divine are necessarily going to be affected by that slugfest that's going on between good and evil right and and sometimes good gives up ground yeah and maybe not on purpose so this this story that you want to tell about Good and Evil like do you have a script or is it just a thing in

your head like what is it yeah it's it's it's the resurrection story and but it's it's uh it's it's not just it's not linear because you can't really it's hard to understand so it's got to be put in a framework where you answer a few other questions as well and you have to juxtapose the event itself against everything else so that it makes some kind of sense in in a bigger picture which is a hard thing to do and it took my brother and I about and a guy called Randall Wallace plus my brother and

I took us six seven years to write it so are you doing this with historians as well you trying to make it yeah yeah yeah historical stuff well I regard I regard the gospels as history it's verifiable history some people say oh it's a fairy tale he never existed but he did and there are other accounts verifiable historical accounts outside the biblical ones that also bear this up that yes he did exist and um and and the the other aspect of that is that the all the evangelists the apostles who went out there um every

single one of those guys died rather than deny their belief and nobody dies for a lie nobody right so that's part of what I'm doing it's like showing nobody dies for a lie yeah well the resurrection is the one that is the most difficult for people to swallow yes that is the one that requires the most Faith the most faith and the most belief yeah Resurrection yeah who who who gets back up 3 days later after he gets murdered in public um who gets back up under his own power Buddha didn't do that [ __

] right you know so you believe that was a real event yeah I do yeah what brought you to that belief is this something you've always had or is it something you you studied it and you've come to this conclusion because of the historical accounts and yes uh I think as a child you know one accepts things on faith because you know you're raised by people who are nice to you and they believe it and my dad was a pretty smart guy he was like Mena smart you know like real smart like back in 1968

he won Jeopardy right and then really and then they brought all the Jeopardy winners back and he played all the winners and he beat all of them too so he had a mind like a steel trap and his memory was practically photo graphic my memory is pornographic but it's like it's like his his was like I don't have that that kind of mind right um but I'm more like he did math and you know I can't add but uh um so as a child you learn um these things and you accept them on faith and

I still have that Faith but as I got older I came to it through intellect and through Reading and putting things together and accounts and then occurrences like in my own life you know I mean just recently they verified the shroud of Trin have you seen that I've been reading about it and I know that there's some contention there's some some discussion and debate about it but they used to think that it was only a couple hundred years old and now they've they've changed that yeah theyve said no it it's back then they also don't

understand how it was made which to me is very fascinating because it's not paint it's not they don't know what caused the image itself and how that technology would have even been available it wasn't yeah a couple thousand years ago an intense light I mean Atomic to leave almost like a photographic imprint on a piece of cloth yeah