POPE JOHN PAUL II, frail with Parkinson's at age 83, is rarely able to celebrate mass. In recent weeks, such annual holiday ceremonies as the ordination of bishops and the baptism of children in the Sistine Chapel were dropped from his schedule. But why should his suffering deter a Hollywood producer from roping him into a publicity campaign to sell a movie? In what is surely the most bizarre commercial endorsement since Eleanor Roosevelt did an ad for Good Luck Margarine in 1959, the ailing pontiff has been recruited, however unwittingly, to help hawk ''The Passion of the Christ,'' as Mel Gibson's film about Jesus's final 12 hours is now titled. While Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed a margarine for charity, John Paul's free plug is being exploited by the Gibson camp to aid the movie star's effort to recoup the $25 million he personally sank into a biblical drama filmed in those crowd-pleasing tongues of Latin and Aramaic.

''Mel Gibson's 'The Passion' gets a thumbs-up from the Pope,'' was the incongruously jolly image conjured up by a headline over Peggy Noonan's column for the Wall Street Journal Web site as she relayed the ''happy news this Christmas season'' on Dec. 17. Daily Variety, a day earlier, described John Paul as ''a playwright and movie buff,'' lest anyone doubt that his credentials in movie reviewing were on a par with Roger Ebert's. Mr. Gibson's longtime producer, Steve McEveety, told Ms. Noonan that ''The Passion'' had been screened ''at the pope's pad,'' after which John Paul declared of its account of the crucifixion, ''It is as it was.'' That verdict was soon repeated by virtually every news outlet in the world, including The New York Times. In Ms. Noonan's view, the pope's blessing was likely to settle the controversy over a movie that Jewish and Christian critics alike have faulted for its potential to reignite the charge of deicide against the Jews. It was also perfectly timed to boost the bookings of a movie scheduled to open nationally on Feb. 25, Ash Wednesday.

Since I am one of the many curious Jews who have not been invited to press screenings of ''The Passion,'' I have no first-hand way of knowing whether the film is benign or toxic and so instead must rely on eyewitnesses. In November, The New York Post got hold of a copy and screened it to five denominationally diverse New Yorkers, including its film critic. The Post is hardly hostile to Mr. Gibson; it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox film studio has a long-standing deal with the star. Nonetheless, only one member of its chosen audience, a Baptist ''Post reader,'' had kind words for ''The Passion.'' Mark Hallinan, a priest at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church, found the movie's portrayal of Jews ''very bad,'' adding, ''I don't think the intent was anti-Semitic, but Jews are unfairly portrayed.'' Robert Levine, the senior rabbi at Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan, called the film ''appalling'' and its portrayal of Jews ''painful.'' On Christmas Day, Richard N. Ostling, the religion writer of The Associated Press, also analyzed ''The Passion,'' writing that ''while the script doesn't imply collective guilt for Jews as a people, there are villainous details that go beyond the Bible.''

And so, John Paul's plug notwithstanding, the jury remains out on ''The Passion.'' What can be said without qualification is that the marketing of this film remains a masterpiece of ugliness typical of our cultural moment, when hucksters wield holier-than-thou piety as a club for their own profit. For months now, Mr. Gibson and his supporters have tried to slur the religiosity of anyone who might dissent from his rollout of ''The Passion.'' (And have succeeded, if my mail is any indication.) In The New Yorker last fall, the star labeled both The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times ''anti-Christian'' newspapers for running articles questioning his film and, in this vein, accused ''modern secular Judaism'' of wanting ''to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church,'' a non sequitur of unambiguous malice.

This game of hard-knuckle religious politics is all too recognizable in our new millennium, when there are products to be sold and votes to be won by pandering to church-going Americans. At its most noxious, this was the game played by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on Sept. 13, 2001, when they went on TV to pin the terrorist attacks of two days earlier on God's wrath, which Mr. Falwell took it upon himself to say was aimed at all of those ''who have tried to secularize America'' by ''throwing God out of the public square.'' The two men later apologized, but this didn't stop Mr. Robertson from declaring this month that he was hearing ''from the Lord'' that President Bush is going to win this year's election in a blowout. ''It doesn't make any difference what he does, good or bad,'' Mr. Robertson said. ''God picks him up because he's a man of prayer and God's blessing him.''

Such us-vs.-them religious oneupmanship is more about political partisanship than liturgical debate. Its adherents practice what can only be called spiritual McCarthyism, a witch hunt in which ''secularists'' are targeted as if they were subversives and those who ostentatiously wrap themselves in God are patriots. Mr. Gibson has from the start plugged his movie into this political scheme; his first pre-emptive attack on the movie's critics (there weren't any yet) took place on ''The O'Reilly Factor'' a year ago. Not for nothing did he stack last July's initial screening of ''The Passion'' in Washington with conservative pundits like Ms. Noonan, Linda Chavez and Kate O'Beirne who are more known for their ideology than for their expertise in the history of the passion play's lethal fallout on Jews. (Should anyone not get the linkage of conspicuous sectarian piety with patriotism, Ms. Noonan produced a book titled ''A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag: America Today'' last summer.)