A Profoundly Catholic Movie that Many Catholics Would Hate

By Kevin O'brien
Waiting for Godot to Leave
September 10, 2014

http://thwordinc.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-profoundly-catholic-movie-that-many.html

It's got some rough language and some violence, but it's the most serious attempt to deal with the Sexual Abuse scandal I've seen.  It's also about a Good Priest.  And it's about the sacrifice of Christ, played out in the life of a Good Priest.  The acting, writing and directing are brilliant.  The characters
are mesmerizing.

It is a fully Catholic movie, deeply spiritual, but set in a very modern, realistic believable anti-christian setting.

It is the most Christian film you're bound to see.
 

• And you'd never see it on EWTN (the Catholic network - even if the foul language were bleeped and the violence edited out).
• The Media Report would hate it and condemn it.  
• That Donohue guy would denounce it.
• And Super-Catholic Michael Voris may very well miss the point and rail against it, if he ever sees it.

But it's the most profoundly Catholic film that's been made in years.  It is a retelling of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  And it is therefore, for many of us, a stumbling block.


ADDENDUM

A Facebook friend says that this movie is so foul that most "innocent Catholics" should avoid it.  And that's the problem.  There are no "innocent Catholics".  If there were, we would not need this film.  And we would not need Christ.


ADDENDUM 2

Some readers are upset that this is not a real review.  Others are glad I'm not offering spoilers.

I will say this much.  This is from a message I sent to a group of fellow actors and artists yesterday ...
 

If any of you see the movie Cavalry - which is very good and is about an Irish priest in modern rural Ireland doing his best under very difficult circumstances - there's a scene in which an atheist taunts the priest with a description of terror, despair and hell that is all about darkness, about innocent children trapped in darkness. It provokes the priest to fury the way nothing else in the movie does. It's a chilling scene, in which the atheist describes a three year old boy waking up after surgery, having had a reaction to the anasthesia, being blind, deaf and dumb for the rest of his life and the horror and abandonment the boy must have felt, not knowing how he's trapped, where his parents are, when it will end.

And St. John talks about how the light has come into the world, and the darkness has not overcome it - and yet some people prefer darkness to light, for their deeds are evil. 

In this movie (as in life), the light is fidelity and love, though in the movie (as in life) it shines through unexpectedly and shockingly in the most glum of moments.

It is rather overwhelming that we are the light of the world, as Our Lord tells us. We dark souls are light for others. Yes, our art is part of that. But much more so is who we are as people. That's the light that others, who may be trapped in a darkness we cannot imagine, seek.