Legendary, Oscar winning actor and director Mel Gibson posted a video message on Sunday in support of a rally held by the Coalition for Canceled Priests (CFCP), a group set up to support clergymen who have been run out of the church or persecuted for advocating traditional Catholic teaching.
In recent years many Priests who have continued to preach Orthodoxy and refused to bow to the more “progressive” elements that have seeded themselves inside the Catholic Church have been severely reprimanded or even dismissed from the priesthood.
The Passion of the Christ director said he knew many priests in the 1970s who were persecuted and even sent to insane asylums from resisting the reforms of the Vatican II council.
“But not for the reasons you’d think,” Gibson said. “It’s not like they did a hit-and-run drive and left the scene of the crime, or embezzled church funds, stole the altar wine, or committed some other heinous crime. No, not at all. And who’s persecuting them? Well, their own bishops.”
The devoutly Catholic Oscar winner went on to describe the bishops as “a pack of men who generally, passively sit by and tolerate any kind of nonsense, but if one of their priests utters something that resembles orthodoxy, well then they spring into action, they reprimand him and they bully him and do their best to cancel him.”
Gibson was shunned and attacked by Hollywood after he made the “Passion of the Christ” with the lead actor Jim Caviezel saying his career was essentially killed as forces inside the entertainment business were not pleased at the moving film depiction of Christ’s final hours.