Protestant Catholics?

I was chatting with a Catholic friend about the movie The Passion. I mentioned that it strikes me as odd that the main base of support for the movie appears to be evangelical churches. What's odd about this is that I haven't heard of similar support by Roman Catholic churches. I mean, Mel Gibson is a Catholic, so why isn't the Catholic church behind him to the hilt?

My Catholic friend replied that the reason the Protestants are providing a better support base is that they are better organized than the Catholics. This struck me as a pretty weird since Protestants have no central leadership and the Catholic church does. Why, I asked, doesn't some bishop pound his desk and just say, "Get cracking on this!"?

Well, he thinks the bishops aren't very interested in promoting what Gibson is doing. I wondered if that might be because Gibson belongs to a traditionalist Catholic congregation which practices the Latin mass, which is really not what the Catholic church officially does any more. Perhaps that is why the church hierarchy feels uncomfortable with Gibson. He agreed.

That, in turn, got me to thinking about the traditionalist Catholic churches. Though I'm sure they wouldn't see it in this light, it seems they are almost Protestant in their refusal to go along with the modern mass, which, to my understanding, is the direction set by the church hierarchy and the Pope. Since one of the main facets of the Reformation was the rejection of the Pope as the final authority, the traditionalists (oddly) appear to be doing precisely this -- denying the authority of the Catholic church, and ultimately of the Pope,

But take this with a grain of salt. What I know of the Catholic Church is pretty limited, so I may just be talking through my hat.