sonified by a terrifying androgynous figure of a woman with a man's voice and (at one stage) a horrible child-like creature.  Christ stamps on a snake (the tempter) during the agony in the garden at Gethsemane.


Perhaps the most beautiful few lines in the gospels are when the good thief on the cross next to Jesus, after a life-time of crime, repents and is promised entry to eternal life that very day.  In the film this is balanced by the scoffing abuse of the "bad thief", whose right eye is then savaged by a fierce black raven.

The outstanding performance is from Maia Morgenstern, a Romanian Jew, playing Mary the mother of Jesus.  She is strong and beautiful in her suffering and tenderness, a convincing mother for the teacher and public figure who is being persecuted. Actors who play the role of Jesus are at a severe disadvantage with me, because the demands of the role are impossible.  I would not have gone across the road to hear some Christ figures in other films, but James Caviezel does well as Jesus.  While Jesus' upper denture was probably not as perfect or pearly white as his, he has reverence for what he is attempting and comes closer than anyone I have seen in the role.

This film is not anti-Semitic because the heroes Jesus and Mary are Jews.  We witness a terrible quarrel within the Palestinian Jewish community.  Neither Jesus, nor anyone else calls for revenge.  He explains that his attackers do not know what they are doing.  Neither does the film lay the blame for Jesus' death on the Jewish nation. The High priest Caiaphas and his supporters are not pleasant people, but we do not normally stereotype and condemn a whole people because of a few villains.  This film gives
anti-Semites no comfort. No one has accused the film of

By His Wounds We Are Healed


By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
22 February 2004


On Ash Wednesday, Mel Gibson's film "The Passion" premiered around the world, depicting the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus Christ. Through a combination of anti-religious hostility, fear of anti-Semitism and shrewd marketing "The Passion" has received more publicity before its release than most films do during their brief span of life.

The film is a contemporary masterpiece, artistically and technically.  It is not absurd to compare it with the paintings of the Italian master Caravaggio, because of its beauty and drama.  It is more genuinely spiritual, even more violent but less erotic than Caravaggio's canvases.

"The Passion" belongs to turn of the twentieth century, the cruelest in history, because of its violence which is explicit and continual.  The scourging is worse than the crucifixion. It is like Gibson's film "Braveheart", only more so, and confronting; viewers need to be warned.  As a believer I found the film draining. Some with me at the screening wept.

It is certainly an antidote to those who think the crucifixion was like an afternoon tea party. Jesus is not trivialized or sentimentalized.

The film is not a literalist transcription of the gospel accounts, but a work of art where the terrible conflict between good and evil is illustrated symbolically. Evil itself is per