It may be a little dated to trash Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of The Christ,” but writer Mary Gordon goes all out in the June edition of The American Prospect, complaining that all the usually reliable liberal Catholics have gone soft on Mel. The wildest critique arrived over outspoken liberal Richard McBrien, whose pre-Passion column was way too wimpy for Gordon when he tried to focus on Gibson’s views of Protestant salvation instead of anti-Semitism:
“In reading this, I was reminded of the ‘Son of Sam’ case, in which the eponymous Sam, owner of the dog that the killer David Berkowitz thought was telling him to kill women, told a journalist that what most upset him was not the dead women but that Berkowitz was sending get-well cards to friends of Sam’s who weren’t sick.”