So uh yeah, these guys are crazy!!

[Reverend_Smitty]

http://www.truecatholic.org/ Ain't that a kick in the ass, I've been a part of the "false" Catholic Church all these years and I didn't even know it! :eyes:

Isn't Mel Gibson somehow affiliated with these guys? Is this that whole Opus Dei thing?

[Princess Turandot]

1. I saw Mel Gibson being interviewed by one of the blondes..

maybe Diane Sawyer. He told her quite earnestly that God had decreed that the Mass be said in Latin. I hoped she would have then asked 'then why wasn't Jesus born in Rome?' I don't know how organized the Gibson types are; he built his own church for a congregation of mostly relatives and has his own priest, I think. (I refuse to call them by the Media's description of 'Traditional Catholics'.) I don't know how the different groups interconnect or if they even do.

Opus Dei is an extremely conservative organization which does function within the Church as far as I know.

I wonder what this Pius the 13th (an appropriate number) has been doing since 1998? First American Pope and we missed him!

[AngryOldDem]

2. Gibson's dad, I think, is a sedevacantist...

...which is about as far out to the right as you can get. I don't think they are the same as Opus Dei...sedevacantists reject Vatican II as a "heresy," see all Popes elected after 1960 as spurious and view the office as currently being "vacant," see Mary as a coredemptrix, and want the Mass returned to Latin.

Gibson has been kind of circumspect about how much he buys into this. My sense is he is a strict Traditionalist, but he has distanced himself from his old man, and no wonder -- the old man, remember, openly said he doubted the veracity of the Holocaust.

[Princess Turandot]

3. When he is asked about his father in interviews..

the few that I've seen of him, he replied stonily 'I will not discuss my father with you.' It never struck me as a rejection of his father's beliefs, who I think has published books abt the non-existence of the Holocaust, but rather as a way of not expressing his agreement or disagreement with them. I tend to think he agrees with him, if only because he was abt as bizarre as could be in these interviews. The father sounds nuts in what I've read about him, but that's just 'liberal media bias', I've read!

Makes me feel a bit creepy now if I watch a Lethal Weapon DVD!

I was quite surprised to discover that his family are Americans who emigrated to Australia at some point. I don't know whether Gibson was born in the US or not.

[Reverend_Smitty]

4. I think he was born in NY...

and his family moved to Australia when he was a boy

On edit: IMDB confirms this, it also said that he was college roommates with Geoffery Rush...learn something new every day