The news that Robyn Gibson, Mel Gibson's wife of 28 years, filed for divorce last week has inspired a certain amount of snickery coverage in the media from those who regard the highly regarded actor and Oscar-winning director as a bit of a reactionary religious loon, and we'd hate to get left out of that completely. Gibson is famous for his Traditinalist Catholic views, which are stubbornly pre-Vatican II. In 1999, Gibson created the A. P. Reilly Foundation in order to build his own church in Malibu, where mass is conducted in Latin, women are required to wear skirts and dresses and keep their heads covered, people wear shoes on their hands, and hamburgers eat people. (Some of this may be inaccurate. I was pretty drunk the day I stopped by to use the restroom.) Obviously, a divorce would not get Gibson many green stamps in the more-Catholic-than-thou sweepstakes, but he probably deserves a lot of credit for having put in almost thirty years with a woman who won't be able to fetch his pipe and slippers for him when he's in Heaven. In a notorious interview with an Australian newspaper, Gibson acknowledged that his wife's soul is beyond saving, but tried to adopt a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attitude towards the whole thing: "There is no salvation for those outside the church. I believe it. ... Put it this way: My wife is a saint. She's a much better person than I am. Honestly. She's, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it's just not fair if she doesn't make it. She's better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it."

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