Headline in the Independent: “Gibson follows ‘anti-Semitic’ film with series on Holocaust.”

Listen, you can say what you will about Gibson. I don’t know the guy’s heart, but I do know the movie and what he’s said about the movie and what Gibson and I share in common on this front.

As I recall the whole passionate Passion controversy, the actor/director/producer was tagged with bad Holocaust sentiments a) when a reporter harassed his aged father and b) because Mel made a movie about Jesus, a Jew, who was killed by Romans, egged on by his fellow Jews (the madness of crowds).

Of course, to say that Gibson made a movie where Jesus was killed by or because of Jews is to miss the point of the movie, in my humble opinion. Gibson, a Christian, made a movie that for him was both a religious exercise and a work of his art. Any Catholic girl or boy (it’s how I, graduate of Guardian Angel School, N.Y., N.Y., learned it) knows that it was the sins of man for which we believe Jesus died, for our redemption. Mel Gibson, who used his own hand to put the final nail in Jesus in the movie’s crucifixion scene, pointed a finger at himself, the sinner, as any penitent, believing Catholic boy would.

As Gibson put it in an interview: “The film collectively blames humanity for the death of Jesus. Now there are no exemptions there, all right? I’m the first on the line for culpability — I did it. Christ died for all men, for all times.”

You can buy into that or you can roll you eyes or file it away or whatever you’re comfortable with. But for a lot of Christian viewers that movie was about what I Christian sinner did to Jesus—there was nothing anti-Semitic about it for them, or Gibson, or Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus), etc. Or for Maia Morgenstern, who is Jewish and whose grandfather was murdered at Auschwitz, who has defended the movie against anti-Semitism charges.