Roy Schoeman, growing up a devout Jew in a New York suburb, never expected to be a Catholic one day.

The author of Salvation Is from the Jews, spoke to Register correspondent Patrick Novecosky about his book, becoming Catholic and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Tell me about your upbringing.

My parents were Jewish Holocaust refugees who came from religious backgrounds in Germany. My Jewish identity and my Jewish faith practice were of primary importance to my parents.

When I was in my late high-school years, I linked up with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and became part of his entourage for a while, traveling with him and sitting at his feet as a disciple. He would sit in the center of a circle, play guitar, leading us in repetitive Hasidic hymns and dancing, lifting us up to an ecstatic worship of God. I had a taste of the sweetness of the Lord through that experience.

What led to your conversion to Catholicism?

At 30, I was a junior rising-star professor at Harvard Business School — quite a success in my own eyes. I had achieved, in an external sense, all that I had hoped to achieve. It didn't begin to address the emptiness inside, which led to quite an interior darkness bordering on despair.

In that state of mind, I was walking alone early one morning when I fell into heaven and found myself in the immediate presence of God, looking back over my life as though I were looking back on it after death. I knew from one moment to the next that the purpose of my life was to serve this loving God.

I was baptized on the feast of the Epiphany in 1992. I didn't want to wait until Easter. I said that if Epiphany was good enough for Jesus to be baptized, it was good enough for me to be baptized.

What led to your book, Salvation Is from the Jews?

I am Jewish and I am Catholic. They're both equally important in salvation history. I thought this was the most interesting topic in the world. When I exposed myself to the Jewish-Catholic dialogue, I found out that was not its direction.

On the Catholic side, it sometimes runs the risk of denying the truths of the faith — the unique role of the Catholic Church in the dynamics of individual salvation. On the other hand, the dialogue doesn't do justice to Judaism if it's stripped of the importance it gains by being the religion of the Messiah. When God took flesh and became man, he became a Jewish man. When one strips that away from Judaism, one strips away the true glory of judiasm

I thought this dialogue would be the celebration of both, but it was something that denied the glory of both. The book is an antidote to that.

You saw The Passion of the Christ. Does it portray the Jewish people fairly?

Yes. But when a Jew sees the movie, he thinks the Jewish characters in the movie are Caiaphas, the other Sanhedrin members and the mob that cries out, “Crucify him!” He thinks that Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Peter and even Simon the Cyrenian are Christian characters and therefore not Jewish.

In an extra-biblical scene, Mel Gibson gave it a very pro-Jewish touch with Simon of Cyrene. He sees Jesus as this very patient and gentle man being brutally abused. He puts his life on the line. … The close of that scene is the Roman guard spitting out the words of a curse to Simon saying, “You Jew!” making Simon every-man-Jew like the unknown soldier. Simon was representing, in some sense, the average Jew, the real Jew as opposed to the corrupt leaders.

There is no way that the movie can justifiably be called anti Semitic. But, that's not to say that some Jews might not find the movie offensive to their sense of themselves as Jews. I think this is being mistaken for anti-Semitism. For example, most of the villains in the movie are Jewish. Of course, so are the heroes including Jesus, but a Jewish viewer probably won't see it that way.

It's intrinsic to the story that the Jews of Jesus' day divided themselves into two camps - those who were right and recognized him as the Messiah, and those who took him for a heretic and blasphemer. Naturally, those who accept him come across as the “good guys” and the latter as the “bad guys.” However, a Jewish viewer might tend to identify himself with the latter, thus seeing the movie as putting Jews in a bad light and thus “anti-Semitic.”

Also, the setting of the movie is overwhelmingly Jewish, even down to the use of Aramaic. Simply because the movie is so authentic, it makes it painfully evident that Christianity is all about Judaism - that it is the fruition, in the coming of the Jewish Messiah, of the promise of Judaism. As the movie in its startling accuracy makes clear, Christianity came originally to the Jews in the person of the Jewish Messiah born of a Jewish virgin in the heart of the Jewish home-land. Gibson, by being so tactless as to accurately portray the world in which Jesus lived and died, has brought this uncomfortable fact into the full light of day.

Are you sympathetic to Jews who find the film anti-Semitic?

One has to consider what is anti-Semitic in Jewish eyes and in Christian eyes. In Christian eyes, anti-Semitism is a hatred, disdain or contempt for Jewish people. There isn't the slightest hint of that in the movie.

In Jewish eyes, however, if somebody were to say, “I love you dearly, my Jewish brothers, but I have some bad news for you. For the past 2,000 years, your religion has been in error and you are relatively in the dark about what your own religion is all about, but I as a devout Catholic know what it's all about and let me tell you what it's all about.” That sounds very antiSemitic to Jewish ears. That's what the movie does. It has to because it's preaching the Gospel.

Patrick Novecosky writes from Ann Arbor, Michigan.