Abstract:

With their distinctive habits, Catholic priests and nuns provide filmmakers with visual shorthand for ostensibly pious figures, resulting in their ubiquitous presence on movie screens. Cases of child abuse by the clergy and conspiracy theories involving the Vatican dominate in the media and current screenplays, eclipsing a wide range of altruistic acts and positive portrayals of these religious characters from Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’ through contemporary world cinema. Utilizing a cultural studies lens and Pope Francis’ excursus on the ‘Good Samaritan’ in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti as backdrop, I will explore these encouraging alternative scripts, cinematic portrayals of the compassionate Catholic cleric who tends, sometimes at great personal risk, to the physical and psychological wounds of society’s marginalized and outcasts. I will argue that these films evidence a long-standing tradition of indiscriminate charitable work by members of the Catholic clergy with off-screen analogs such that Francis’ inclusive vision of fraternal love among all peoples is less a radical reform and more a timely renewal of an ideal Christian praxis of compassion for the ‘other’ in response to a growing climate of intolerance and the threat of global conflict.