Yet another unscholarly nimrod swept away by emotion weighs in on The Passion.

"It's a very graphic presentation of the passion of Christ in the Gospels," [he] said Saturday. "For people who think that the passion narratives are themselves anti-Semitic, well then, it's a presentation of those narratives.

For those of us who don't believe they're anti-Semitic, that Christ died for our sins, all of us, and so therefore we all caused his death, it's a way to portray, very graphically, the brutality of that execution in a Roman style."

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"I've read the Passion narratives of the Lord and contemplated them and prayed over them many, many times, and I've never thought of the crucifixion with the images that I received while watching this," [he] said. "I'll never read the words the same way again."

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[The reviewer] said he was impressed that the film gave a more complex and thus accurate depiction of Jesus, who is often thought of as "this nice-boy-next-door . . . who floats around and smiles and is untouched by the sufferings of the human race he came to save.

"That's as much a false representation of Jesus as anything else, and this is a kind of corrective to that," [he] said. "We hope it doesn't have other consequences, but that will have to be seen."

The reviewer? Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago.

Then again, what does he know? He's no Frank Rich.