Mel Gibson, who has built a $4 million church in Southern California so his family can attend Catholic Mass in a traditionalist setting, credits the Holy Ghost for his latest movie project.
 Church built by Mel Gibson |
The actor-producer-director says he attended Mass every morning while shooting his new movie, ”The Passion,” because ”we had to be squeaky clean just working on this.”
The film, which Gibson directs, stars James Caviezel as Jesus during the last 12 hours of his life and Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene. The $25 million production was shot in the Aramaic
language of the time.
Gibson said his Christian faith inspired the film for which he is
still looking for a distributor.
”I’m not a preacher, and I’m not a pastor,” the 47-year-old director-actor said. ”But I really feel my career was leading me to make this. The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film,
and I was just directing traffic. I hope the film has the power to evangelize.”
Gibson said the film ”was a strange mixture of the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, along with this incredible ease. Everyone who worked on this movie was changed. There were
agnostics and Muslims on set converting to Christianity.”
Gibson recently completed the building of a church, the Holy
Family Chapel in Agoura Hills, Calif. It was built as a place of worship for Gibson’s large family and about 70 fellow Catholic traditionalists, who have turned their backs on the modern-day
church.
It opened for services several weeks ago, just as controversy over Gibson’s latest film raged among Catholic and Jewish scholars.
The actor even threatened a lawsuit against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Jewish-run Anti-Defamation League over a report they sent to his film company slamming the script for its depiction of Jews.
But this week, a select audience of church leaders praised Gibson after seeing excerpts from the film.
