Is Gary Wills for real?

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners
By Garry Wills
The Passion of the Christ
a film directed by Mel Gibson

If you relish the sight of a healthy male body being systematically demolished, beyond the farthest reach of plausible endurance, The Passion of the Christ is your movie. It is not simply the scourging scene that is at issue, though that deals out an unspecified number of stripes—more than sixty and still counting, half of them inflicted by whips that have been made into multiple-hook tearing instruments. Even earlier, at the arrest of Jesus, he is chained, beaten over and over, thrown off a bridge to crash below. He arrives at his first legal hearing already mauled and with one eye closed behind swollen bruises. From then on, he is never moved or stopped without spontaneous blows and kicks and shoves from all kinds of bystanders wanting to get in on the fun. On the way to execution, he is whipped while fainting under the cross. A soldier says to lay off or he'll never make it. But the crowd just keeps whipping and beating him all the rest of the way.

My wife and I had to stop glancing furtively at each other for fear we would burst out laughing. It had gone beyond sadism into the comic surreal, like an apocalyptic version of Swinburne's The Whipping Papers. At one of several points where Gibson is following the mystical visions of an anti-Semitic Bavarian nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, he has Mary swab away at the lakes of blood sluiced out of Jesus by the scourging.
...
The alliances formed around the movie are interesting. Gibson has been supported not only by Legionaries of Christ but by members of Opus Dei, an equally conservative Catholic group. Although Gibson does not recognize the validity of the postconciliar Church or the current papacy, those two Catholic groups tried to manipulate a papal endorsement for the film—this despite the fact that Gibson violates almost all the guidelines concerning performances of the Passion issued in 1988 by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops....

For fear they would burst out laughing?

Anyone who would find something to laugh about regarding this film must be extremely sick and perverted. Those who think the suffering and death of Jesus, as portrayed in the film, is funny must be in league with the demonic. I pity this man and those like him.