Mel Gibson is Not a Catholic

Well, he's not Catholic if this Sep. 15 New Yorker article, posted at Free Republic, is right (emphasis added):

.... Gibson has half-jokingly remarked that “The Passion” may be a career-killer for him. If it is not, if it somehow manages to open, and even to succeed, it will be in no small measure owing to Lauer's efforts. Lauer, whose father is Jewish, is a practicing Roman Catholic who has often heard Gibson's Traditionalist views about the current Vatican (that the last “real” Pope predated Vatican II), and seems mostly unperturbed. More pressing, to him, is the difficult question of opening a movie that, even without the attacks against it, presents some formidable marketing problems: it is a religious film, whose actors speak their lines in two dead languages. Lauer has always known that the make-or-break audience for “The Passion” is the active Christian community, which could effectively kill the film if it discerned even a hint of blasphemy. As Paula Fredriksen has written in The New Republic, “evangelical Christians, in my experience, know their Scriptures very, very well.” ....

If (I do say "if") this article is accurate, and if (I do say "if") Lauer's observation is correct, then Gibson is a sedevacantist. That means he is a schismatic and a heretic:

Therefore, if anyone says that it is not by the institution of Christ the Lord Himself (that is to say, by divine law) that blessed Peter should have perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole Church; or that the Roman Pontiff is not the sucessor of blessed Peter in this primacy: anathema sit. (Vatican I, Session 4, Chapter 2, "On the perpetuity of the primacy of blessed Peter in the Roman Pontiffs"; July 18, 1870; emphasis added)

Somebody who denies there has been a "real" pope for the past four decades effectively denies the perpetual succession of St. Peter's primacy in the Roman Pontiff.

Even if Gibson is not a heretic, he is (according to the article) a schismatic by his own declaration. Neither schismatics nor heretics are Catholics.

Hopefully, the article garbles the truth about Gibson's position. Failing that, may God grant him the grace to reconcile with the Catholic Church.

(Thanks, Mark.)

P.S. I hope I'm not sounding too much like a RadTrad myself. :-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 09/25/03 10:08:07 PM
Categorized as Religious.