A panel of U.S. Jewish and Roman Catholic leaders said this month that religious educators should not use Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" alone to teach young people about the Crucifixion.
The Catholic-Jewish Consultation Committee said teachers should also use educational material, such as the U.S. bishops' guidelines on how to depict Christ's final hours, to explain the "complex historical context of the Passion narratives that no single film could fully convey."
Jewish leaders, along with some of their Christian colleagues, have said the Gibson film contains disturbing stereotypes of the Jewish role in the death of Jesus. Many Christians have countered that the movie is the most powerful depiction they had seen of the Crucifixion.
The bishops' guidelines emphasize the teachings of the Second Vatican Council that Jews are not collectively responsible for Christ's death.
Gibson denies that the blockbuster movie is anti-Semitic.
The Catholic-Jewish panel issued its statement May 19, following an April meeting in New York. The committee took up other issues as well, drawing attention to the plight of Christians in Israel as Mideast violence drags on.
The panel also expressed its "joint concern" over what it called anti-Catholic attitudes in the "secular media and in certain intellectual circles" as a result of the clergy sex abuse crisis.
The group said much of the coverage of the scandal has been fair, but "far too much appeared to us to be exploiting the crisis in order to attack, not just the abusers and their enablers, but the Catholic Church as such."
The committee is led by Rabbi Joel Zaiman, rabbi emeritus of Chizuk Amuno Congregation in Baltimore, and by Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler, who moderates Catholic-Jewish relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.