- ROME -- With movie executives
wondering whether Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" will
do as well in Europe as it has in North America, at least one person hopes
that the film's popularity signals renewed interest in the forgotten basics
of Christianity. He is the priest who rose before dawn every day during
the final weeks of filming to celebrate Mass for the cast in Rome, a Mass
attended by Gibson every day.
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- "The film reminds you of the incarnation and the
suffering of God," Father Jean-Marie Charles-Roux said, adding of
the movie's high-gore factor: "Christianity can't be a bed of roses."
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- Its success in the United States, where the film grossed
more than $260 million in its first three weeks, could be an indication,
he said, that "people, who had gone rather vague, might be brought
back to want a clear manifestation of the sacrifice."
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- The film opens around Europe this month and in early
April.
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- Charles-Roux celebrated Mass for the cast in a makeshift
chapel at Rome's Cinecitta Studios. It was not just any liturgy, but the
Mass offered according to the Tridentine, the traditional Roman rite. The
Tridentine is recited almost entirely in Latin, and mainstream Roman Catholics
have not used it for 40 years. But Gibson, a conservative Catholic, still
does.
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- Gibson was always present at the 6 a.m. service, while
other cast members came and went. Charles-Roux could not say how many attended
on any given day. "When you say Mass you don't spend your time counting
heads like a platoon or a classroom," he said.
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- He described the atmosphere on Gibson's set at Cinecitt¦
as "monastic," more of a "religious enterprise" than
a big budget Hollywood picture, and said that more than one conversion
had taken place. He was less enthusiastic about the film's graphic violence.
"I told Mr. Gibson that I don't like realism in opera or poetry, I
prefer things that are symbolic or suggestive," he said.
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- Speaking at his home near the Roman-era Caracalla Baths
- a room in the College of the Rosminian Fathers, a congregation founded
in the 19th century - Charles-Roux recalled his discussions with the director:
"I told him there, look here, in the meat trade you have two professions:
the butcher and the person who makes the meat edible. You are the butcher
and I make it edible at the altar. His reply was that that was exactly
what he wanted to do."
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- Charles-Roux looks as though he stepped straight out
of a central-casting call for the role of benevolent clergyman, from his
natty dress - traditional black cassock with buttons running down the front
topped by a short cope, or cape, around his shoulders - to the wisps of
white hair framing an intelligent face and lively eyes.
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- Gibson called Charles-Roux to the set after seeing him
defending the Tridentine rite in a BBC documentary on traditional Catholicism,
but Charles-Roux had never heard of the A-list Hollywood actor.
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- "I don't follow cinema at all. I'd never heard of
'Mad Dog' or 'Mad I don't know what' and only learned later who he was,"
Charles-Roux said, presumably referring to Gibson's "Mad Max"
movies. But the priest has had more than one brush with celebrity during
his 90 years, more than 40 of which were spent in London, where he was
the parish priest of the 13th-century St. Etheldreda's Church, the oldest
Roman Catholic church in Britain.
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- After retiring, Charles-Roux came to Rome to be close
to his sister, Cyprienne del Drago, 86, the widow of Prince Marcello del
Drago, who was also a member of Benito Mussolini's cabinet. His other sister
is Edmonde, 83, one of the 10 board members of the Goncourt literary academy
in Paris.
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- Conversations with Charles-Roux are peppered with reminiscences
of figures better known today through history books: Edda Ciano, daughter
of Mussolini and the wife of Galeazzo Ciano, his foreign minister; Princess
Margaret; Princess Marina, who was duchess of Kent and the daughter of
Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark. He counted Italy's last king, Umberto
II, and his wife, Marie Jose, among his closest family friends.
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- He still hobnobs with royalty. A few years ago Charles-Roux
made headlines in Britain when a rumor circulated that he had been asked
by Camilla Parker Bowles to intervene on her behalf with the Vatican to
have her marriage to Andrew Parker Bowles annulled. He dismissed the episode
as "nonsense," a misunderstanding prompted by a photograph that
caught him and Parker Bowles together at a London party. "It was all
a pipe dream, but it took weeks to discourage journalists to stop calling
me," he said.
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- His small room at the college is sparsely furnished.
Shelves of his crammed bookcase are devoted to British and French royalty.
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- The son of the former French ambassador to the Holy See
in the years leading up to World War II, his family lived in a succession
of grand manors in Rome, including the Villa Taverna, now the residence
of the U.S. ambassador, and the Palazzo Farnese, now the French Embassy.
Charles-Roux took the Eton-Cambridge route before joining the French diplomatic
corps as a chargÈ d'affaires. He was also a domestic prelate to
the pope, before he found his calling and joined the church. He was ordained
50 years ago ("I was very old," he quipped) when the Tridentine
rite was still used, which is why he sees no reason to use any other formula.
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- The priest defended Gibson's film from charges of anti-Semitism.
The point of the film was to show what "the Lord went through for
our own salvation." Instead, he said, Gibson's decision to be graphic
about it followed a longstanding Christian tradition present in much art
of the past, where painters did not "soft-peddle the blood."
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- At 90, Charles-Roux is not brooding over his own mortality,
but he is philosophical. "I'm not living in Rome, I'm dying here,"
he said brightly. "It's comforting to grow into a ruin among the ruins
of Rome. You don't feel too ridiculous dying in a city like this. Though
dying in a city that's called eternal is a bit of a paradox, don't you
think?"
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- Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune
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