Cinematic priests

In these slowly waning days of summer, I have found myself thinking about priests in the movies. For such an infinitesimally small portion of the population, Catholic priests appear on screen far more often than you might expect.

Great actors seem to want to try their theatrical hand at playing priests. And the audience enjoys watching them. The two popes (2019) wasn’t a great film, and historically nonsensical about Benedict and Francis, but it was great fun to watch Sir Anthony Hopkins and Sir Jonathan Pryce give free rein to their episcopal imaginations. Another knighted actor, Sir Alec Guinness, indicated that he was playing a priest – Chesterton’s Father Brown – with a key role in his conversion to Catholicism.

Movies are stories, and priests are supposed to be the best storytellers, since their words come to life at the altar every day, more than any combination of writer, director, and actor ever could. Sacraments are a lot easier to perform than movie magic. And that’s a good thing, because salvation depends on it.

Mine The Catholic Thing My colleague Fran Maier introduced me to this topic. His beautiful book True Confessions came out earlier this year, and he revealed that the title was chosen in part as an homage to the 1981 film of the same name, starring Robert De Niro as Mgr. Desmond Spellacy. I hadn’t seen the film and was intrigued because I’ve long admired two of De Niro’s other priestly roles, as Father Rodrigo Mendoza in The Mission (1986) and Father Bobby Carillo in Sleepers (1996). So I looked True Confessionsthe movie.

De Niro, who has made a career of playing characters from the dark world of the Mafia, plays priests who are admirable but not untouched by the shadows. His characters raise a question for Catholic moviegoers. What kind of cinematic priests do you prefer?

It’s a different question than what kind of priest you’d prefer to have in the pulpit or the confessional. CS Lewis said that sin is boring and virtue is truly original in real life, but on screen it doesn’t quite work that way.

I asked Fran if he preferred De Niro’s priests over, say, Father O’Malley, played by Bing Crosby in Going my way (1944) and The bells of St. Mary’s (1945). Fran chose De Niro, as did I. It goes without saying – but I’ll say it anyway – that De Niro the actor is different from De Niro the person, or De Niro the political activist.

Crosby’s Fr. O’Malley is pious and inspiring, which should not be surprising, since genuine piety is inspiring. Piety does not mean weakness. Father Pete Barry, played by Karl Malden in At the waterfront (1954), is perhaps the toughest character in a movie full of tough guys. His speech, “Boys, this is my church!” interprets Matthew 25 in the language of dockworkers.

O’Malley and Barry – and, as another example, Gregory Peck who played Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty stars The Scarlet and the Black (1983) – are good men doing good things. De Niro’s priests are good men tempted to do bad things for good reasons.

A good guy doing bad things for good reasons is more interesting than the good guy doing good things, or the bad guy doing bad things. Or at least it seems that way on screen—and sometimes in ethics class, where a common question is surely whether a lie can be justified for this or that compelling reason.

In SleepersDe Niro plays Fr. Bobby, who is called upon to testify under perjury in order to achieve a level of justice that the courts cannot provide. That a correct verdict in law can have a perverse outcome is not uncommon. Fr. Bobby can lie to avoid that. It’s a complicated story, but the moral question is simple. Can a witness—a priest, no less—take an oath and then lie? The audience hopes that Fr. Bobby will lie for what seems a more just outcome.

The Mission is, in my opinion, the best Catholic film ever made. Written by Robert Bolt – an apparent agnostic who also A man for all seasonsfor both stage and screen – it depicts two Jesuit priests, Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) and Father Rodrigo (De Niro), who lead an indigenous mission in Latin America. The territory is to be transferred from Spain to Portugal under the Treaty of Madrid (1750), which will mean the end of the mission and the probable enslavement of its inhabitants.

How can you resist this injustice, even when it is grudgingly sanctioned in the film by the Vatican and the Jesuit superiors? In the spectacular final scene, Father Gabriel leads a Eucharistic procession, while Father Rodrigo violently defends the mission in battle. Father Gabriel tells Father Rodrigo to defend the people “like a priest” and not like a soldier. De Niro’s Rodrigo disobeys. The two good priests both give their lives for their flocks, one doing purely good things, the other doing some demonstrably bad things. The film inspires sympathy, even admiration, for both.

Father Rodrigo seems animated by a line De Niro utters while playing Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987): “You can get further with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.” There is some truth in that.

Mgr. Spelling (True Confessions) is formally pious, but admits that “I have no gift for loving God.” He’s a rising star in the Los Angeles archdiocese, a right-hand man to a worldly cardinal who tolerates corruption for the good of the church, which means building schools and hospitals and the like. Eventually, De Niro’s Spellacy shifts from spiritual politics to pastoral work in the countryside. He no longer has to give public praise and sacramental absolution to the corrupt and unrepentant.

True Confessions opens with an elaborate 1940s wedding—De Niro had to learn the rubrics of the Tridentine Mass—where the wedding cake might as well be a whitewashed tomb; the local church is presentable on the outside but filled with filth on the inside. Spellacy is a good man forced to do bad things, until he is freed—humiliated and banished—to do good things.

Priests on screen, as in novels, are powerful characters because viewers expect good things to be done. Sometimes those good things are done with apparent ease and abundant virtue, as in the saintly bishop in Victor Hugo’s The wretched. Or else those good things are ultimately done only after a great struggle against an all-consuming vice, like the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The power and the glory.

De Niro’s priests are somewhere in between. Like many priests. And many moviegoers.

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