The Gibson God.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: Beyond Belief - The Enemy Is Here!: A Reorganized Synthesis of The War Is Now!, January 1977-August 1994 - The Enemy Is Still Here!: A Reorganized Synthesis of The War Is Now!, November 1994-March 2003 - Book Review

Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels Random House. 257 pages. $24.95.

The Enemy Is Here!: A Reorganized Synthesis of The War Is Now!, January 1977-August 1994 by Hutton Gibson Christian Book Club of America. 498 pages. $13.95.

The Enemy Is Still Here!: A Reorganized Synthesis of The War Is Now!, November 1994-March 2003 by Hutton Gibson Faith & Freedom Publishing. 391 pages.

I never know what to say when people ask me if I am still Catholic. Part of me wants to say yes. My whole family is Catholic. I attended Catholic schools, just like my parents, siblings, and cousins. I even starred in several grade-school productions of "The Stations of the Cross" (a version of the passion play). My all-girls Catholic high school, Queen of Peace, defined for me the world that I want to live in--a world where we seek to build God's kingdom on Earth, a world where social justice reigns.

But, unlike the majority of my kin, I do not attend mass weekly, though I go with my family on holy days. I can't even remember the last time I confessed my sins to a priest, but the idea of absolution still appeals to me. Images of the Virgin Mary hang in my home, but I have disliked the pope ever since I had to get up at three in the morning in 1979 to see John Paul II preach in a church parking lot at a Southside parish in Chicago.

Hutton Gibson, Mel's dad, shares my antipathy for the pope, 'albeit, for different reasons. He is the editor of a newsletter entitled "The War Is Now!"--a collection of caustic writings on the Catholic Church and its sins of the last century. Gibson belongs to a sect called Traditionalism, which demands a return to the Catholicism of the early twentieth century. The church he longs for is a church I cannot imagine, much less get excited about.

Gibson is at war with a church that has betrayed not just him but "tradition" itself. He sees the Catholic Church as falling down into decrepitude. He dismisses Pope John Paul II as "Garrulous Karolus Wojtyla, Koran Kisser." Gibson wants to go back to pre-Vatican II days and to have every Catholic celebrate mass in Latin.

"The Church is in chaos--the peculiar product of evil, the trademark of Satan," he writes in his first newsletter. "Without mass, the Church has no purpose."

This newsletter calls for holy war. He even writes "an alphabet of militant Catholicism," where A is for "Aggression: The war is now. Do not hesitate. Fight habitually. Never miss a chance. Create chances. Hit first. Hit often." I is...