Metromix.com:: "A good Hollywood publicity campaign does not stumble over technicalities -- like the truth.

Still, it takes a particular sort of chutzpah to put a phony quote in the mouth of Pope John Paul II. But according to the pontiff's longtime secretary and confidant, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, that is precisely what filmmaker Mel Gibson and his company have done as part of the run-up to next month's Ash Wednesday release of 'The Passion of the Christ.'

That film has been a continuing source of controversy, since Gibson adheres to a 'traditionalist' sect that has broken with the Catholic Church over the reforms adopted since the Second Vatican Council, including abandonment of the Latin Mass and a complete rejection of any collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ, which is the foundation of Christian anti-Semitism.

The Web site promoting Gibson's film, which is his personal re-creation of the arrest and execution of Jesus, proudly displays a pair of articles -- one by a Reuters correspondent, the other by Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan -- in which the pope is said to have watched a tape of the film with Dziwisz, then commented: 'It is as it was.'"