Movie Review: Doubt (2008)

On Friday I watched most of the film Doubt from 2008.  I missed the last twenty minutes or so because I had to leave for 5:30 Mass, but I checked out the ending at Wikipedia.  The film stars Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn, Amy Adams as Sister James, and Viola Davis as Mrs. Miller.  The basic plot: in 1964, a black boy, Donald Miller, attends a Bronx parochial school where the student body is exclusively Irish and Italian (i.e. white).  Donald is taken under the wing of Father Flynn who is determined to help the boy survive.  However, doubt is cast on Father Flynn's motives in the minds of Sister Aloysius, the school principal, and Sister James, Donald's teacher.

All four of the lead actors are convincing in their roles.  I am always impressed with how Philip Seymour Hoffman has morphed from the weak George in Scent of a Woman and the manic Dusty in Twister to his mature roles in the last decade.  I never saw that coming.  Meryl Streep is always fine in her roles, though I admit I am not completely enamored with her like so many others.  Amy Adams as young Sister James and Viola Davis as Mrs. Miller, the mother of the boy, both did fine in their supporting roles.  The children who acted in the film were very believable.  I have no firsthand experience of teaching sisters and priests; I have read that some felt that Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman were not entirely convincing in their roles.  But I thought they did fine in that regard.

I enjoyed the location shooting.  The use of schools that evoked that time period really gave the film heft.  When certain films are trying to create an atmosphere, I think shooting in the autumn does a lot to help that effort and it shows in Doubt.  As events proceed in the film and the tension builds, several scenes involve the tilting of the camera so that the frame is not level.  This only adds to the tension, especially in the scenes with Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn.

Doubt came out about three years ago, so I am not going to hold back on the plot here.  If you haven't seen it and have read this far and don't want spoilers, don't read on.

The film is about suspicion and doubt on many levels.  Most obviously, Sister Aloysius suspects Father Flynn of abusing the black boy Donald Miller.  Sister sees things and has things reported to her by the young and naive Sister James that leads her to suspect, but she has no proof and Father Flynn when confronted adamantly denies any wrongdoing.  In the past when such issues came up, Sister Aloysius went through back channels to allies in the priesthood who handled the issue quietly, but in the case of Father Flynn, she has no one to whom she can turn with her suspicion.  In the end Father Flynn resigns and is reassigned; nothing is resolved.

On a deeper level, the movie examines the tide of change within the Church in 1964.  Vatican II is underway and Father Flynn and his attitudes represent that change to a kinder, friendlier Church.  Sister Aloysius represents the old ways that are now in doubt.  I wonder if the writer/director John Patrick Shanley realized the irony of Sister Aloysius when he was writing her given that she is determined to instill in her students and the sister-teachers under her the sense of hierarchy that she herself fights in dealing with Father Flynn.  Even the arrival of a black family in an Irish and Italian neighborhood foretells the upheavals that are to come with urban renewal and white flight to the suburbs.

Is the film anti-Catholic?  I wouldn't say so, no.  It certainly relies upon the Catholic milieu of the time and place in which it is set to tell its story and I can't fault it for that.  It tells a story well, its characters are not caricatures as far as I could tell.  I'll give it four out of five stars.

Winter Has Finally Arrived

Here in Iowa winter has finally arrived.  Earlier this month there were record breaking high temperatures; a few days there the high during the day was in the upper fifties.  But it did not last and the mercury bottomed out this last week at the same time as a few rounds of snow have covered up the faded greens and browns.

For those of you who are interested in such things, a consistory has been announced and with it the list of cardinals-to-be.  It's a pretty underwhelming list of names even when considered in the best light.

More recently, the Vatican approved certain 'celebrations' of the Neocatechumenal Way (Wiki link).  Again, that is looking at it in the best light in that 'celebration' does not mean the infamous form of Mass to which the Way subscribes.  On the other hand, many are of the opinion that it is an outright approval and even if it is not, the devotees of the Way will view this Vatican approval as general vindication, ignoring the subtleties of it.

Finally, this morning it is being reported by various sources that former Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno is dead.  There were erroneous reports that he died last night.  Earlier this autumn, Paterno was fired after being caught up in the Sandusky sexual abuse case.  The former coach, a Catholic, received the Last Rites.  Requiescat in pace.

A New Year

Merry Christmas! Happy Epiphany! Happy birthday to the Maid of France!

Tonight I saw an interesting commercial on the US cable channel TNT. It was for CatholicsComeHome.org, a website with a rather self-evident mission. The commercial I saw was the US national spot that can be viewed by running the cursor over the 'About' button on the main page, then clicking on 'Commercials' which should bring up a page with the commercials. Effective? It looked okay to me, but I'm sure sound would add a lot to the message.

There is a new movie in theaters now in the US, The Devil Inside. I caught the TV teaser for the very first time today, despite the fact the movie opens today. It claims to be a documentary with actual forbidden footage of exorcisms. This documentary style for horror films is in the grand style of The Blair Witch Project. The teaser for The Devil Inside had all the Hollywood trappings for the Catholic Church: priests in cassocks, sisters in habits, a priest genuflecting before a main altar (against the wall).

CatholicsComeHome.org might want to take notes: the visual trappings of traditional Catholicism sell.

The Light Flickers

This morning, The Drudge Report's headline is "Pope Health Concerns."  The actual article makes no claim that HH is suffering from any health problems besides fatigue from a grueling schedule and advacing years.  Which is natural and as intended.

The article mentions that in the past, HH ha indicated resignation is preferable when one is physically, mentally or spiritually unable to discharge their duties. Also mentioned are potential downsides of resignation, such as setting a precedent that future Pope's might be pressured follow or perhaps causing fissures by the existance of two living Popes at the same time.

These are legitimate concerns, to be sure.  But I am more concerned with simple continuity.  There is so much work to be done.  And I believe the present Holy Father is the best man to do it.  Please, pray for the Holy Father, that God strengthen him to continue to do his work.

Merry Christmas

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20111217/D9RMBAQG0.html

EF in Afpak

A blogging colleague contacted me this morning with the following:

Good morning everyone.

Sorry for the mass email but I'd appreciate you taking a look at this and putting it on your blog, writing about it or, simply, emailing it around if you don't have a blog or paper to write for.

These pics show something I feel is simply incredible for so many reasons -- the Traditional Latin Mass being prayed in Afghanistan.

Please consider doing anything you can to tell this story. It's one that deserves to be told:

http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2011/10/traditional-latin-mass-in-afghanistan.html

Afpak of course refers to the Afghanistan-Pakistahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifn theater of operations. Click on the link and check it out. Be sure to pray for the Pour Souls of the Society.

Twitter

We've joined Twitter. Down the right sidebar there is a button to click to follow us @VaticanWatcher. Please do so if you're so inclined.

The 2005 Conclave Diary

A couple of days ago, Father Z posted about a story by the Italian Vatican watcher Andrea Tornielli at the Italian daily La Stampa.

Tornielli's story is about excerpts from a diary supposedly written during the 2005 conclave in which Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, the excerpts published in the Italian journal Limes.

I am not going to recapitulate the details of Tornielli's story given Father Z has already done so. Reading Father Z's post, I was instantly reminded of something I had read a number of years ago about Limes publishing a diary recording the very same event, the 2005 conclave. Longtime readers of this blog will remember that I cited Limes' original story in the past in the sidebar in my list of papabili. I couldn't find anything in my archive, so I checked out Sandro Magister and found his original story on the subject from 2005, "The Vatican Codes: This Is How I Rewrite My Conclave". I'm not going to rehash what Magister wrote back then beyond his point that the diary had too many inaccuracies to have come from a true-blue cardinal.

So we have Tornielli's recent story of Limes publishing excerpts from a diary on the conclave and we have my remembrances and Magister's analysis of Limes publishing excerpts from a diary on the conclave. Comparing the details of what the diary said in Tornielli's story to those from Magister make it clear to me that the Limes diary cited by Tornielli is the same as the one from long ago.

Why is Andrea Tornielli bringing up an article from six years ago about a diary that one of the most eminent of his colleagues showed to be most likely fake, a clumsy attempt to undermine the new pope's support?

Poor Timing

Magister has this article up today about Cardinal Bertone's efforts to secure control of two hospitals in Italy to build a Catholic medical hub. One of them is already controlled by the Italian bishops' conference and is basically a turf war over who gets to be on the board.

The other hospital, the San Raffaele, Magister describes as follows:

The San Raffaele is a massive, cutting-edge medical center, founded and headed in Milan by a priest, Luigi Maria Verzé, which does not, however, have anything in its statutes binding it to the Church, nor much that is Catholic in what it does.

Suffice it to say that artificial fertilization, which is condemned by the Church, is practiced there, and that in its highly modern laboratories experiments are conducted without any regard for the ethical criteria affirmed by the magisterium.

Not only that. In the connected Università Vita-Salute, dedicated to humanistic studies, philosophy, theology and scientific subjects are taught by professors who are in glaring contrast with the Catholic vision, from Emanuele Severino to Massimo Cacciari, from Roberta De Monticelli to Vito Mancuso, from Edoardo Boncinelli to Luca Cavalli-Sforza.

Fr. Verzé himself has repeatedly worried the Catholic hierarchy, with statements that could be taken as supporting euthanasia or the use of embryos.

Bertone's offer to take the San Raffaele, which is on the brink of bankruptcy thanks to its massive debt to the tune of a billion euros:

The IOR said that it was ready to provide 200 million euros immediately, while one billion over 3-5 years would be guaranteed by an international "charity" still shrouded in mystery (the financier George Soros has denied being part of the deal).

In exchange, Cardinal Bertone has demanded seats on the administrative board of the Mount Tabor Foundation, which governs the entire complex, of four of his proteges...

I am going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that the "charity" to be named is the holding company of the Legion of Christ with its billions now under the control of a papal delegate.

The head priest Fr. Verzé is willing to accept the offer as long as he can expand the board and appoint two of his own men who will counter Bertone's people.

Magister says that it will all be decided in the next few days. He also notes that the character of the San Raffaele was only discussed for the first time a few days ago!

What he conceived of as an "epochal revolution" thus threatens, if not stopped in time, to turn into a costly and disastrous boomerang.

Because rebuilding from the ground up, on Catholic foundations, a complex like the San Raffaele, which has never been Catholihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifc, is simply an impossible undertaking.

Now this story of Bertone's adventures in taking control of hospitals is interesting in itself to me. What makes it more interesting is that the secretary of state is willing to spend 200 million on a hospital and university in Italy right now.

Read here: "Hopeless, But Not Serious: Once Again", by David Goldman. He has a nice graph of population in a key demographic for several southern European countries including Italy.

The present crisis can and will be papered over, because there is no reason not to paper it over, and for the moment, there is plenty of fat to be cut from European government budgets. In ten or fifteen years, the budget knife will cut bone. Italy’s population is on the cusp of a tumble.

My conclusion: there is no reason to panic over the present kerfluffle, but there is no reason to own any exposure to southern Europe. Ever again.

Goldman's assessment rings true to me. Its lesson and the fact pointed out at the very end of Magister's article go well together: Bertone is on a fool's errand for more reasons than one.

Pilgrimage

This last Thursday, we took off for a day trip up to La Crosse, Wisconsin. Thursday ended up being an excellent day to go as it was cloudy, breezy, and cool. The high was 75 degrees for the day. We made it to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The shrine was founded in the mid to late 90s by His Eminence Raymond Cardinal Burke back when he was bishop of La Crosse. After turning off the main highway, we followed the road to the entrance drive to the shrine and on to the parking lot next to the visitors center. Going inside, we looked around and after obtaining a map of the complex, we decided to ride up to the top rather thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhan walk it as it would have been a good hike, taking time we didn't have. So we and I think another person got on the golf cart with the driver and took off.

From the parking lot, one can see the visitors center and above it the candle chapel. The cart took us up the path, which was out in the open up through the first switchback and then to the chapel. We picked up another man there and then went on our way up as the path became shrouded in trees. Along the way were memorials and benches for resting, but our cart kept going up to the shrine church.

The inside of the church is pretty impressive. Here are a couple of pictures to get an idea.

The sanctuary

Down the nave

After that, we decided to hike back down the hill since a ride back down required four and we were only three. Along the way, we stopped at the candle chapel and then the visitors center before heading back home. An interesting coincidence is that we headed south and ended up driving past the Dickeyville Grotto. It will have to wait for another trip.

B16: Close in prayer to the Church in China

TUESDAY, 24 MAY, IS dedicated to the liturgical memorial of Our Lady, Help of Christians, who is venerated with great devotion at the Shrine of Sheshan in Shanghai: the whole Church joins in prayer with the Church in China. There, as elsewhere, Christ is living out his passion. While the number of those who accept him as their Lord is increasing, there are others who reject Christ, who ignore him or persecute him: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4). The Church in China, especially at this time, needs the prayers of the universal Church. In the first place, therefore, I invite all Chinese Catholics to continue and to deepen their own prayers, especially to Mary, the powerful Virgin. At the same time all Catholics throughout the world have a duty to pray for the Church in China: those members of the faithful have a right to our prayers, they need our prayers.