In my new book, The Faith Unboxed: Freeing the Catholic Church from the Containers People Put It In, I explore common misperceptions about the Faith that both Catholics and non-Catholics often hold. Popular films and television shows have contributed to these mistakes, caricatures, or even blasphemies over the years. Too often, Catholics and other Christians are easy fodder for cheap heat in simplistic plots. In other cases, filmmakers present a fragmented view of a much richer whole.
Sometimes the Faith appears on screen as something silly. In the 2014 film St. Vincent, for example, Chris O’Dowd plays a character who dresses like a priest but calls himself Brother Geraghty. He is also a schoolteacher, who explains in a facile way to his pupils that although members of all religions are welcome at the school, being Catholic is “the best of all religions, really, because we have the most rules.”
In a darker vein, filmmakers have rightly been interested in depicting the fallout of Catholic clerical scandals. But the execution of this laudable goal may leave us with the hopeless conclusion that whatever good the Church may have done in the past, its services are no longer necessary in the present. That is, the Church may have always been more trouble than it’s worth.
Take Martin Scorsese’s unconventional 2006 gangster film The Departed, which begins with a monologue by Frank Costello, played by Jack Nicholson. Costello, based loosely on real-life Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, is a malicious opportunist who brings violence and greed into a moral landscape formerly occupied by a once culturally relevant but now compromised Christian community. He declares, “Years ago, we had the Church. That was only a way of saying—we had each other.”
But Costello is mistaken. The real Catholic Church defines itself as “the universal sacrament of salvation.” Thus, the Faith of the Church has always been much more than “only a way of saying” anything. But do today’s Catholics and non-Catholics consider the Church’s actual claims, or do we play along with the secular pastiche?
The enormous issue of thousands of clerical sins notwithstanding, Costello’s words reveal that the Church’s identity may have been misperceived in his community even before the extent of the abuse was widely known. That is, adherence to the Faith was first an expression of belonging to an ethnic enclave of Irishmen, Italians, Poles, Filipinos, or some other group. Or else, perhaps people in a given community simply regarded the Church as an important presence in the neighborhood that provided benefits like education and aid to the poor.
Sadly, even the Church’s leaders in a heavily Catholic town like Costello’s Boston may have projected the Faith as merely a preference, or one option among many—just a big “denomination,” which is a word the Catholic Church does not use. By contrast, the 2015 film Spotlight, also set in Boston, does a superb job showing the importance of getting to the awful truth, even when it compromises the foundation of the Church’s structure. However, the film may also give society permission to dismiss the Church’s true purpose in the world and the prospect of a St. Francis-style ecclesiastical renewal in the future.
No film can represent every viewpoint, but sometimes even films that tell accurate stories about the Church need to be understood in light of a larger narrative.
For example, in Terrence Malick’s 2019 masterpiece A Hidden Life, we follow the tale of the real-life Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, who is imprisoned and later murdered for refusing to join the army of the Third Reich because he rightly believes that swearing a personal oath to Hitler would constitute blasphemy. Jägerstätter’s parish priest tries to talk him out of his idealism, telling him to go along with the Nazis for the sake of protecting his wife and children. Likewise, the local bishop, to whom Jägerstätter’s wife appeals for help, is a complete coward in the face of the Nazis’ coercion. The audience correctly perceives in Malick’s film a lesson in how ordinary Christians should exemplify real Christian sacrifice even when prelates fail to heed the call to radical Christ-like leadership.
But there are a lot of heroic clerics in history.
Watching Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au Revoir Les Enfants, another film set in World War II, we meet a Carmelite priest who faces death at the hands of the Gestapo for hiding Jewish children in his provincial French school. The real priest upon whom the character is based was a man named Jacques de Jésus, OCD, and he is commemorated as “Righteous Among the Nations” at the official Holocaust memorial in Israel. Here we remember that for every morally weak priest like Jägerstätter’s, there were many courageous priests who paid the ultimate price for their faithfulness to the Gospel. Such priests exist today, too, ready to make that sacrifice.
In The Faith Unboxed, I talk about all kinds of ways we think of the Faith incorrectly or incompletely: as an ideology, denomination, religion, institution, club, escape, dictatorship, and preference. I engage with these too-small or completely false categories not because I want to be a contrarian, but rather because I desire a full vision of reality, which is what the Church says it stands for. The Faith fits into no box. Therefore, no film, no book, and no homily, will ever succeed in cramming it into one.