Where Mel Gibson Got His Anti-Semitism

By Heidi Beirich, SPLC Intelligence Report. Posted January 27, 2007.

"Fucking Jews!"

So began Mel Gibson's now infamous anti-Semitic rant to Los Angeles sheriff's deputies who pulled him over on suspicion of drunken driving last July. "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," the world-famous movie actor continued, before asking his arresting officer: "Are you a Jew?"

After his tirade made international news, Gibson promptly disappeared into an addiction clinic. He left behind a statement, released through a spokesman, begging the Jewish community for forgiveness and suggesting that booze was to blame. He was, he wrote, "in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display." But their origin is easy enough to pinpoint -- the extremist Catholic beliefs Gibson learned at the knees of his anti-Semitic father.

Gibson's dad, Hutton Gibson, is an important player in the shadowy world of radical traditionalist Catholicism, also known as "integrism" or Catholic separatism. This religious subculture's teachings have little in common with the modern Roman Catholic Church and its universalistic theology. Hutton Gibson, for one, is a well-known Holocaust denier who believes the Second Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s, which made the church vastly more tolerant of other faiths, were the result of "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews." He is particularly incensed by the council's historic declaration, "Nostra Aetate," which condemned "all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews." In Gibson's world, the Second Vatican Council's liberalizing reforms are rejected and anti-Semitic teachings and conspiracy theories are heartily embraced.

Like father, like son.

Mel Gibson has his own traditionalist house of worship near Los Angeles -- a church, funded entirely by him, that is not recognized by the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese. It is unclear what is said in the hallowed halls of the Holy Family Chapel, since, unlike virtually all other Catholic churches, it is closed to the public. What is known is that Gibson is reported to have blamed Jews for forcing him to cut a scene, in which Jews and their descendants are held responsible for the murder of Christ, from his 2004 film, "The Passion of the Christ." Sounding a bit like he did that July night in Malibu, Gibson told The New Yorker: "If I included that in there, they'd be coming after me at my house. They'd come to kill me."

Few Americans defended Mel Gibson's drunken rant about the evils of the Jews. But radical traditionalist Catholics did. A three-year investigation of this subculture by the Intelligence Report has found that these Catholic extremists, including the Gibsons, may well represent the largest population of anti-Semites in the United States. Organized into a network of more than a dozen organizations, scores of websites and several extremist churches and monasteries, radical traditionalists in the U.S. are preaching anti-Semitism to as many as 100,000 followers. A few, such as the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's family, Christopher Ferrara, are even movers and shakers in important right-wing Republican circles.

Jew-bashing at the Holiday Inn

The Philadelphia airport Holiday Inn is an odd place to celebrate a Catholic mass, especially in a city filled with lovely churches and an extraordinary, century-old Romanesque cathedral. But the inn is where the radical traditionalist Catholic outfit, (CFN), held its annual conference in 2003, dressing up one end of a drab conference room with an altar, incense, and a statue of the Virgin Mary, and transforming it into a church.

The rest of the hall looked rather different. Vendors set up folding tables along almost every inch of the remaining walls, piling them high with books, videotapes and Catholic accessories. The stacks were notable for the prominence of anti-Semitic and extremist materials, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Hutton Gibson's Is the Pope Catholic? to CFN head John Vennari's popular anti-Semitic conspiracy tract, The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita. Priests in Roman collars staffed many tables; brown-cloaked monks manned others.

CFN conferences hearken back to the era before the Roman Catholic Church enacted the liberalizing Vatican II reforms, which removed from the weekly Mass prayers for the conversion of the Jews and also ended the centuries-old practice of celebrating the Mass in Latin, the Vatican's official language. At the Holiday Inn in 2003, Sunday's religious activities started with a now rarely celebrated hour-long recitation of the rosary. After that, apostate priests conducted a rendition of the Latin Mass, a format dating to the Middle Ages, before an audience remarkable for the veils that covered every woman's hair and the time it spent on its knees.

Vatican II did not ban these time-honored celebrations, and many Catholics who call themselves "traditionalists" continue to worship in this manner in churches that remain an official part of the Holy See (these churches are awarded an "indult" that allows them to continue celebrating the Latin Mass). The vast majority of those who practice Catholicism in this older form are unrelated to the radical traditionalist Catholics who gathered in Philadelphia. Indeed, the groups that gave presentations at the CFN conference preach a theology specifically rejected by the Vatican, and many have been declared schismatic, or officially separated from the church.

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