CANADA
The Globe and Mail
KONRAD YAKABUSKI
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Published Monday, Dec. 23 2013
My sister and I have a running argument. Whenever we get together, the conversation inevitably turns to the Roman Catholic Church and whether it’s done more harm than good in the world. The journalist in me takes over to enumerate the atrocities: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the sexual abuse scandals and the anti-contraception doctrine that has destroyed countless lives.
If that’s not enough, anyone who grew up Catholic can testify to the church’s use of shaming and shunning to keep the flock in line. Think of all the brilliant minds left fallow because of priests who frowned on inquisitiveness and challenges to doctrine. Or the rampant hypocrisy and lavish lifestyles of church authorities that belied any claim to holiness.
My sister, who’s 18 years older than me, is no church apologist. As someone who mostly grew up before Vatican II’s modernization of the mass, she has more bones to pick with a church that put a bigger cramp on her intellectual freedom than mine.
Yet, she also has what I don’t: faith. It’ s why I know I’ll never win this argument. But can she?
Now, along comes a movie made for our sibling symposiums. Director Stephen Frears’s Philomena tells the true story of Philomena Lee, a Irish woman who spent more than 50 years searching for the child she was forced to give up for adoption, by the nuns who took her in as an unwed teenaged mother in 1952. The film is a crowd-pleaser that takes plenty of artistic liberties. But there is no mistaking the villain of the piece.
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