My mate drinks sometimes. Sometimes, when he’s drunk, he’ll be talking to a girl he knows and suddenly start telling her how, despite all evidence to the contrary, he’s actually crazy about her and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about her for weeks. The girl will, as any sensible woman would, find the nearest sober friend and instruct them that it’s time my mate was taken home. One extremely painful hangover later, my mate’s attention is focussed on laughing off the whole thing.
So, my mate is no stranger to saying stuff he didn’t mean to say. However, I’ll let you in on a secret. Every time my mate did something like that he kind of meant it. So, now we get Mad Max drink-driving and declaring that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world. (Really? Which side are they on in Kashmir?) So, whatever Braveheart says next, you’ve gotta wonder if he kind of meant it.
Now, a couple of years ago Mel Gibson made a very odd movie called The Passion of The Christ years ago. Different people saw different things in it. Atheists saw an absence of spiritual feeling. Catholics saw the work of Opus Dei (the real one…). Screaming fundamentalists saw God, but then they always do. The headlines, though, were about anti-semitism.
My mate’s not one of those to boycott a movie, went and saw it anyway. Ninety minutes of explicit torture scenes later, my mate thought the case unproven. Certainly there were bits that could be construed as anti-semitic, but weren’t those bits in the bible, too?
The church and anti-semitism has a long and unpleasant history. The teaching that Jews killed Christ and were, in some sense, fundamentally evil has run through history, giving rise to all sorts of unpleasant words: ghetto, pogrom. Not that you need to be a Christian to be an anti-semite, but it’s only this century that the Church has finally apologised.
But when you’ve got Opus Dei’s most famous member getting drunking and spouting stuff that could come straight from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, my mate gets suspiscious. Is the movie anti-semitic? Is this his opinion? Or does Opus Dei cling to some really rather unpleasant outmoded beliefs along with their rather harmless obsession with self-harm. Well, it’d probably help to watch the movie again, but frankly, my mate doesn’t fancy it.
My Mate Says 