By Gary Topping–
This posting is actually about a movie, but I want to begin by recommending a wonderful—and relevant—book: Philip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice (Oxford, 2003). The thesis, which Jenkins supports with a depressing myriad of examples, is that one can get away with saying things about Catholicism that one would never think of saying about women or Jews or African-Americans or any other group. Where Catholicism is concerned, it’s always open season with no bag limit.
Okay, on to the movie, The Novitiate, which came out late last year and which we were finally able to rent online a couple of weeks ago. It’s the story of a young girl with no real religious background who enrolls in a Catholic school and becomes so enamored of the faith that she announces—to her mother’s enormous consternation—that she is going to enter a convent. At first things go well enough. Although the harsh Mother Superior warns her and the other postulants that as they prepare for their novitiate (the second year, at the end of which they will take their permanent vows) they are going to find a life of rigid discipline, they are all in love with God and embrace the program of prayer and instruction led by a wonderful formation director.
But things take a turn for the worse. The Second Vatican Council is underway and change is in the air—change that the Mother Superior finds threatening. Feeling her control slipping away, she circles her wagons and her latent sadism comes to the fore. She hounds the lovely formation director out of the Order for seeming to question her authority and verbally abuses one of the girls until she has a nervous and physical collapse (Donald Trump, you’ve met your match!). But that course of action begins to appear hopeless, so she claims what I can only regard as a jailhouse conversion and gives a big oration extolling the virtues of the Council reforms, thus retaining control of the community.
But things are going south for the community anyway. Our heroine and another girl find themselves consumed with passion for one another (celibacy is always a sham, you see), and as the time for their permanent vows draws near, doubts ascend. Although some of the girls do make their vows, our heroine reneges literally at the last second. One of the final frames of the movie announces, triumphantly, that historically some 92,000 nuns (or some such figure) left their Orders in the wake of Vatican II.
So the last acceptable prejudice has its day once again.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The movie industry has made some wonderful films about people remaining faithful even unto martyrdom. Jeremy Irons, in The Mission, plays a Jesuit who is gunned down carrying a monstrance in procession even as his jungle church burns in the background. The Algerian Trappists trudge silently through the snow to their martyrdom in Of Gods and Men. Andy Garcia, playing a non-religious Mexican businessman in For Greater Glory, finds his faith while leading the Christeros and suffers death for it. I watch movies like that over and over again with a mixture of inspiration and outrage. They really linger in the mind. The Novitiate has had its say, and that’s fair enough. But I find nothing that will ever draw me back to it.
