There's an asymmetrical relationship here. Christians must be Jews. That is, the truth of what we believe depends on the truth of Judaism, depends on the first covenant. If God should abandon the Jewish people, the people of the first covenant, what hope could we have? Why should we trust in the covenant? The asymmetry is that Jews, of course, do not have to be Christians. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism -- but too utopian, too hopeful, too unrealistic a turn. But Christians must be Jews. Everything we believe comes out of that. What we learned about the compassion of God comes out of that. In our way of thinking of it, Jesus just fulfills that. He doesn't cancel, it, doesn't contradict it. He fulfills that and brings it to fruition, and the fruition is the suffering love of the Lord for his people, and now a universal people.

All the characters in the movie are Jewish, except for some Romans -- Pilate, a leadership figure, and then the soldiers. The soldiers are terribly brutal, and they are the ones who execute all the pain upon Jesus. I have been through any number of movies, and [in] practically every movie that ever shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures. If you're a Catholic sitting through movie after movie after movie, you feel a kind of assault that sometimes is truthful. Sometime the pope or bishop in question was not a good man, and they're not showing him untruthfully. But it's painful. Sometimes they're exaggerating, or sometimes they're doing it falsely. I understand what it's like. I thought of this during the movie: if I were Jewish, what would I feel like in certain scenes? Because I have felt that when Catholics are in that position, and I didn't like it; I didn't like it one bit.

On the other hand, I don't think this is untrue to the gospel story. Gibson takes care to show the whole panoply of human behaviors -- the compassion of Veronica, who comes forward and wipes Christ's face; the tears and the protests of men and women from the crowd and from among the priests; the division in the community. The first Christians were just Jews, not a separate group yet, and there's division in the community. It's not one community. It would be untenable as a Catholic to hold the Jews responsible for this. Jews stand in for the rest of us. We can see our behavior in their behavior. They're no different from us. We have taken positions such as they have taken many times. Look at all the Christians in the show -- the betrayals, the flights, the denials, the shame, the fear. They didn't stand up very well. This looked like a very broken and breached community that day when the so-called Messiah (let me put myself in the eyes of an unbelieving observer) dies like a common thief and there's no God to save him. There is no kingly look about him. He looks abject and broken, and the flock is dispersed.

This is about the human race, and from the first movements of this movie, that's what you see. It's about the whole human race. It's about the creator being tempted -- knowing what the father wants him to do, and not wanting to do it. And yet going forward. That involves every man and woman who ever lived.

This is where the idea of freedom is really born into the world and given political effect, because everybody must answer to this Lord: yes or no. It's an inalienable duty. Your mother and your father can't do it for you, your sister or your brother. Nobody can do this for you. You have to do it alone. Therefore it's an inalienable right. This is where the whole idea of individual freedom comes from. It's a Jewish idea, but it's one of the functions of Christianity to make this idea universal -- to make the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob known to the whole world through Jesus. And that's pretty much what has happened.

This may be the best religious discussion this country has ever had. We've had, so far, pluralism based on the lowest common denominator and not talking about what really divides us, and now Mel Gibson has put this in our face and said, "Now you have to talk about it." And we are talking about it. I have never seen so much conversation among Protestants and Catholics and Jews and others, too, and nonbelievers -- about Jesus and about what we really believe, and about violence and love and suffering and forgiveness and liberty -- all those things. And that may be a wonderful thing. That may be a turning point in American pluralism, from which at last we begin to speak about the deepest views that each one of us has -- the things we don't usually say in public because we don't want to embarrass anybody. That's the way pluralism ought to be. It ought to be the pluralism of people who say what they believe to one another, and who have enough respect to hear that from one another. Because someone else believes it, I don't have to believe it, but we ought to at least hear it and then understand the reasons for it. I think we will all have to get better at giving reasons. The Lord God, the creator of Judaism and the God of Judaism and Christianity, empowered our minds and gave us the ability to question. That's one of our great inheritances. We ought to have not just faith, but good reason for our faith. We ought to be able to tell why we hold what we hold. And I think that's going to come out more and more. It could be a very healthy moment for this country. I hope, and I must say I pray, that's what happens.

I'm Catholic, and those of us who are Catholic will remember saying the Stations of the Cross, particularly in Holy Week. There are fourteen stations; if you go in a Catholic church you'll see seven little murals on each side of different scenes from the Passion of Jesus. Jesus falls a second time, a third time; the crowning of thorns; the scourging; the mockery; all of them -- they are all showed one by one. It's called the via dolorosa -- the sorrowful, unhappy way of suffering. You will see that, you will feel that [in the movie]. It's like making the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. It doesn't take two hours, but it takes almost an hour. So it's not too different -- meditation on the sufferings one by one and imagining them to yourself. And then often in Catholic churches there are paintings or statues that show the terrible scourging or crowning of thorns. We're a little bit more used to the blood, I think. Behind it, though, you see Gibson always referring to the Last Supper -- these little flashbacks to the bread, "my body which will be broken for you." And it's broken; we see it. And "This is my blood, which will be shed for you," and there it is all over the white floor at the scourging, and there is Mary his mother trying lovingly to wipe it up afterwards with a cloth. And the blood dripping from the cross.

I can never go to the Mass in the same way again. The Mass is, in our view, simultaneous with Golgotha. In God's eyes, there's not before and after. Every moment of time is simultaneous to God. So as he sees his son on the cross, he sees us at the Last Supper in the same moment, as it were. And when you're connected to it, and you have these powerful images for it, it's a great gift that Gibson has given our imaginations that make us be present more easily to grasp what we are doing and to awaken us from our slumber. I found it amazingly powerful.