With Mel Gibson now in production on the long-gestating The Resurrection of the Christ, scheduled for a two-part release beginning next year, questions about Christianity and film are again moving toward the center of cultural attention. Part One is slated for May 6, 2027, with Part Two following on Ascension Day, May 25, 2028.
There will be much to say about those films: their expectations, risks, devotional possibilities, artistic choices and inevitable controversies. That discussion deserves its own essay. But Gibson’s return to biblical subject matter also raises a broader question, one that reaches far beyond any single production.
What makes cinema Christian, or Catholic?
Is it the subject matter? The presence of Christ, saints, Scripture, priests, nuns, churches and miracles? Or can cinema itself, even without overt religious content, be shaped by a Catholic understanding of reality?
That question has quietly guided a television series I have been developing for EWTN under the working title Catholic Hollywood — an exploration of the relationship between Catholicism and the American motion picture industry from cinema’s earliest years through the Golden Age and eventual collapse of the studio system.
10 Years in the Making
This project has been nearly 10 years in
