Failed crucifixion bid helps presenter to find his faith

From Scotland's Sunday Herald:

http://www.sundayherald.com/58024

Failed crucifixion bid helps presenter to find his faith



By Jenifer Johnston


WHEN broadcaster Dominik Diamond travelled to the Philippines to be crucified for a television documentary he failed to go through with the religious act – but found his faith.

In an interview with the Sunday Herald, the presenter revealed the experience “completely changed” him.

“[My faith] is completely and utterly central to my whole life. I don’t want to sound evangelical but I go to Mass, I pray whenever I have a minute to myself. I pray and I have a daily dialogue with God,” he said.

Diamond was filming the Philippines pilgrimage for a documentary called Crucify Me, which is due to be broadcast on Five this Wednesday. He had planned to be nailed to a cross but said that, in a final act of penitence, he instead knelt, prayed and asked for guidance, which was answered.

His decision to pull out turned into a global story that was reported from Ireland to India. But he says the experience of the media then ridiculing his decision not to be nailed to the cross was “horrible”. He said: “I didn’t go out the house for weeks to be honest. When I came back I was very happy. I’d found my faith and peace with God.

“But it was described all over the world as if I’d chickened out. The way I felt at the time was that it would have been chicken to go through with it – God had told me what to do. But it was like standing up in front of the world’s media and saying ‘sorry guys’.

“Of course, in my infinite naivety I thought when I stood up from praying that at least there’s no story because I didn’t go through with it. But of course it turned out to be the opposite.”

Diamond said with hindsight he can laugh about the way he was rushed out of the village where the crucifixion was to have taken place.

“It was Good Friday. There were hundreds of people there, some of them with knives and guns and loads of press from around the world. When I prayed and didn’t do it everyone started booing. Like, really booing.

“My bodyguard just grabbed me, carried me into the back of an ambulance – with flashing lights shoved in the window in the style of a murderer coming into court – and was screaming ‘Evacuate!’ into his radio as journalists chased us.”

Five is planning to show Crucify Me in an early-evening slot, so some of the extremes he went to on his quest aren’t included, but Diamond said the extra material may be released on a DVD.

Peter Kearney, spokesman for the Catholic Church in Scotland, applauded Diamond’s example of thinking about the cross in such a radical way.

“There is a danger for Catholics that the cross becomes a blasé symbol of Jesus, something you see so frequently that it loses its impact. So we need sometimes to watch the passion and listen to the testimony of people like Dominik who recognise the crucifixion as an intensely brutal and powerful event.”

Diamond and Ginger Productions are considering making a sequel, called Resurrect Me, which will trace the middle part of Jesus’s life.

Diamond added that “actually dying” as part of the show was never on the agenda. “I’m not going to die on TV … I’ve made that quite clear,” he said.




Crucify Me is broadcast on Five this Wednesday at 7.15pm

17 September 2006