Despite concerns about anti-Jewish images in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, even pointed critics from the Anti-Defamation League refrained from labelling Gibson himself as an anti-Semite. Gibson answered that question with a vile anti-Semitic tirade unleashed during his arrest on suspicion of drunken driving in Malibu, California, recently.

Gibson issued a statement apologising for his “vitriolic and harmful words.” One part of the statement reads: “I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display, and I am asking the Jewish community to help me on my journey through recovery.”

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII, rejected the calumny of Jewish deicide. But Mel Gibson made clear in a 1992 interview with the Spanish publication El Pais that he rejected such changes in church thinking. Gibson would go on to make a film thick with images of bloodthirsty Jews.

Gibson has checked himself into a rehab clinic for treatment of alcoholism. He said he would seek to exist “in harmony in a world that seems to have gone mad.” To begin, Gibson would do well to acknowledge, deeply, that his remarks did not reflect the world’s madness, but contributed to it.