Yearend: 'The Passion' top religion event

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" was seen by many believers as the most important religious event of 2004. On that, Catholics, evangelical Christians, and even some moderate Muslims will agree.

Some found it to be more relevant than the debate over homosexuals in the priesthood and same-sex marriages, or the cruelty committed by terrorists in the name of their version of Islam.

Gibson's intensely religious film grossed nearly $700 million -- more than 20 times the original investment -- despite the fact that the dialogue was entirely in Aramaic and Latin.

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, president of the New York-based Institute on Religion and Public Life, ranked the movie's success among the first three faith topics of this year.

So did Richard Cizik, vice president and spokesman of the National Association of Evangelicals, representing a branch of Christianity not known for its enthusiasm for icons. And so do many Muslims whose religion denies not only Christ's divinity but also his crucifixion.

"The Passion" was a hit even in some strict Islamic countries, where hawkers made instant small fortunes by selling pirated DVD's from the trunks of their cars.

Sneered at by many, and booed at a recent Hollywood viewing of films that might be candidates for Academy Awards, this movie contributed to a spectacular development unique in the half-millennium since the Reformation.

It helped cement the alliance between evangelicals and faithful Roman Catholics that was started 20 years ago, says Cizik. "Together, they have become the center of gravity of America today."

Focused on Christ whose suffering Gibson's film portrayed so vividly, both groups proved an insuperable bulwark against post-modernity with its constantly shifting values system. That traditional Judeo-Christian values are under attack has become the overriding concern of people of faith, regardless of denomination and, increasingly, race.

President George W. Bush owes his re-election to the massive mobilization of evangelical voters and the shift of many Catholics' allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans.

As William Donohue, president of the Catholic League in New York, puts it, "This has not been just the work of the religious right. But in the face of the nation's moral slide, ordinary Americans have put up stop signs. This is what makes 2004 a very important year from the religious perspective."

And there is more to come. If the Democratic Party continues to act as the lobbyist for same-sex marriage and abortion rights, one of its prominent functionaries warned in a conversation with United Press International, then it should not count on the black vote four years from now.

"The gay thing has turned off the African-American clergy," this official said. "They are warning us they will not deliver the votes next time."

In a sense, then, 2004 has brought the conflict between post-modernity and traditional faith to a climax. On the one hand there has never been as much "anti-Christian vitriol from the left as now," observes Donohue.

The consecration of the openly homosexual canon Vicki Gene Robinson as Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, and the spate of blessing of same-sex unions is seen by many conservatives as an affront to Judeo-Christian standards.

But then again, never have conservative Christians closed rank to such a degree. And never since the first centuries of the Church has Christianity grown at such a rate -- not in the global North, though, but in Africa, South America and Asia.

In part as a result of the Robinson consecration, the center of world Anglicanism has definitely moved from Canterbury or London to Abuja, See of Peter Akinola, the fiercely orthodox primate of Nigeria, with 18 million faithful the largest Anglican province in the world.

He has become in reality the spiritual head of the majority of the world's 70 million Anglicans. Similar seismic changes have taken place in other denominations in 2004.

For example, a Lutheran bishop from Kenya has accepted to oversee a new confessional diocese of the Church of Sweden. In 2004, scores of missionaries from the former colonies have flocked to Europe, and the United States, to remind their wayward brethren of the traditional tenets of their faith.

And then there was perhaps the most stunning occurrence, which Neuhaus ranks first among the religious phenomena of 2004 -- the "determination of Pope John Paul II to stay on until God calls him home."

There was no more gripping image that that of this crippled old pontiff among fellow sufferers during his pilgrimage to Lourdes in France, surrounded by huge crowds of jubilant young people.

They cheered him because by his very appearance he sent a counter-cultural message to faint-hearted postmodern Christians: "Christ did not come down from his cross. So if you want to be disciples, don't give up as soon as the going gets tough."