DEFYING PREDICTIONS 'PASSION' IS TRIUMPH AFTER ALL - FOR US ALL.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

WITH the arrival of Easter, ``The Passion'' is now behind us, and in its place, the resurrection, the redemption - the triumph.

Six weeks after first hitting the big screen, Mel Gibson's epic film about the suffering and death of Jesus, like the story that inspired it, is having a profound social impact, although not at all like the one its critics warned us about.

In Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., a man who held up a bank three years ago and made off with $25,000 turned himself in to police after seeing the movie. When detectives asked what spurred his confession, he cited ``The Passion'' - then encouraged them to go see it, too.

In Arizona, a man confessed to six burglaries, claiming that the guilt induced by Gibson's film had compelled him to come clean.

More dramatic yet, there's the case of Dan Leach in Richmond, Texas. By his own admission, Leach literally got away with murder. He killed his 19-year-old pregnant girlfriend, then made it look like a suicide, successfully fooling investigators. He probably never would have faced justice except that he saw ``The Passion,'' which drove him to turn himself in.

And most notable of all is the story of Johnny Olsen, a Norwegian neo-Nazi who twice bombed a youth group's Oslo headquarters during the 1990s. Olsen, too, experienced a conversion while watching ``The Passion,'' prompting him to own up to his crimes. According to news reports, when he entered the courtroom for his detention hearing, he announced, ``Jesus lives'' and, ``I distance myself from my past and neo-Nazism.''

The stories of redemption and countless testimonials from the film's viewers make clear that the critics who savaged ``The Passion,'' both before and after its release, had it all wrong - and that should please no one more than the critics themselves.

The film's detractors had said the graphic violence in ``The Passion'' was desensitizing, but audiences, witnessing the horror of their own sins, had their sensitivities heightened. Leach, for example, says he got the know-how about how to fake his girlfriend's suicide by watching his favorite TV show, ``CSI'' - proof that not all media violence is created equal. If the blood in ``CSI'' hardened Leach's heart, the blood in ``The Passion'' changed it.

Critics also predicted that the film would incite an outbreak of anti- Semitism. Instead, it sparked an outbreak of contrition, even in the case of a neo-Nazi like Olsen, precisely the sort of person it was supposed to inflame.

According to a nationwide poll from the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, 83 percent of respondents said the film had no impact on the extent to which they feel contemporary Jews are to blame for the killing of Christ - and a sizable portion said it's made them less likely to hold Jews collectively responsible.

The critics - reviewers, pundits and social activists - saw a very different movie than did the millions of ordinary viewers who have made ``The Passion'' a blockbuster. The critics thought it would provoke anger, when, in reality, it's led to greater faith and atonement.

The story is admittedly different elsewhere. ``The Passion'' has recently been released internationally, and, already, it's a hit in the Middle East among radical Muslim clerics, who cite it as yet one more reason to hate Jews.

That sad albeit predictable response may give some sense of vindication to those who accused Gibson and his script of anti-Semitism. But there's something telling about radical Islamists who take delight in a movie that unambiguously professes the divinity of Christ - which they reject - and focuses on his crucifixion, which the Quran says never happened.

The mad clerics seem to believe both that Jesus was never crucified and that the Jews crucified him. Such are the intellectual back flips of the bigoted mind.

In a region where state-sponsored schools pump out anti-Jewish bile and imams accuse Jews of all sorts of outlandish atrocities, this is hardly surprising. Radical Islamic Jew-haters, like bigots everywhere, project their biases onto everything around them. Of course, they can find justification for their prejudice in ``The Passion'' - they could find it in a turnip.

But among the open-minded, the effect of ``The Passion'' has been markedly different. Churches report greater attendance, while police report not a single hate crime associated with the film. After six weeks, it would seem not only that the critics owe Gibson an apology, but that the state of American interfaith relations is far healthier than they had feared.

That's good news for everyone.

For the most part, it's been devout Christians - Evangelicals and Catholics in particular - who have flocked to see this movie. And rather than leaving the film feeling angry or vengeful toward Jews, as many did after watching anti-Semitic passion plays throughout European history, the movie's viewers have left with a deeper sense of their own culpability for Christ's suffering.

Christians' benign reaction to ``The Passion'' should bring relief to its critics. Apparently American Christianity is not the hotbed of anti- Semitism that many believed it to be, and ours is a society in which no one need fear each other's open expressions of faith.

For most viewers, watching the horrors through which Christ suffered wasn't an enraging experience, but a transformative one. This is nothing new.

For more than two millennia - well before Mel Gibson, well before mass media - meditating on Christ's sacrifice has radically changed lives for the better. Seeing the pain, the cruelty, the persecution of goodness, makes the eventual victory, the Resurrection, all the more glorious.

Mocked, ridiculed and condemned, only to triumph in the end, ``The Passion of the Christ'' has experienced a small Easter of its own.

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Photo:

(color) Muslim girls in head scarves wait to see Mel Gibson's ``The Passion of the Christ'' in Amman, Jordan.

Hussein Malla/Associated Press