Movies Depicting the Church Incorrectly

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Very true! I can’t imagine having a person or persons follow me around all the time, even if their motives are pure.
 
LilyM said:
An English Catholic Cardinal is ‘Sir’ John. Assuming this is a title awarded by the Queen of England and not a Pontifical Knighthood, I don’t think a Catholic cleric.would be allowed to accept.
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However, I don’t think there is any canonical law that prevents somebody who has been knighted from subsequently becoming a priest.
 
@MNathaniel A brilliant example, in my opinion, would be Brooklyn, based on the novel of the same title by Colm Tóibín. Tóibín’s relationship with Catholicism is fascinating in itself and worth looking into further. Brooklyn opens with a scene of a Latin Mass. Throughout the movie (and novel), the Catholic Church is portrayed in a refreshingly positive light. In short, it follows the story of a young Irish girl who goes to New York for a better life than she can have in Ireland. Two Irish Catholic priests are responsible for finding her a job, getting enrolled into an accountancy course and paying her tuition, finding her somewhere to live, and looking after her throughout her early months in America. The Catholic parish is the center of the community, providing weekly dances for the young people and a Christmas dinner for older men who have nowhere else to go. The Catholicism is a bit more prominent in the novel, as a few more minor scenes have had to be cut for the movie I guess just to make it easier to watch. It also has some nice historical observations about interactions between the Irish and Italian communities in New York at the time. Definitely worth seeing.

Another nice film is Lady Bird, also starring Saoirse Ronan. She plays a non-Catholic girl attending a Catholic high school. Priests and nuns are portrayed in a sympathetic and accurate light.

@Jenniferolg I would suggest The ABC Murders, a 2018 BBC adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel of the same name. Spoiler warning:
A theme which runs throughout the series, but which is only finally revealed at the end, is that Poirot is a Catholic priest, albeit presumably laicized or at any rate not engaged in active ministry. He has an intense but difficult relationship with Catholicism throughout the series, e.g. prayer, confession, and the Mass. Of course, Agatha Christie’s character was never intended to be a priest. There’s a clue from the outset when Poirot swaps his usual term of address, “mes amis”, for “mes enfants”.

I’d also suggest ‘Duty and Honor’, an episode in the fantastic series The Americans. There is a character who is supposed to be a priest, but it’s never explained how he managed to be ordained when he has a wife and children. Also, his ministry seems to consist of trying to have himself recognized as president of the Polish Republic in exile (presumably in opposition to the actual president in exile, Edward Raczyński as well as the de facto president Henryk Jabłoński). And he doesn’t wear clerical dress.
 
@catholic03 @LilyM @(name removed by moderator) A baronetcy is hereditary, but knighthoods are not (the one surviving exception is the hereditary knighthood of Kerry). Catholic clergy can indeed be knighted. Another example is a former archbishop of Sydney, Norman Gilroy. The correct form is “His Eminence Sir Norman Cardinal Gilroy, K.B.E.” The title “Sir” always appears directly in front of somebody’s name, e.g. General Sir Mike Jackson, Professor Sir Peter Ratcliffe, etc. Anglican clergy are allowed to receive knighthoods, but are not normally allowed to receive the accolade, so cannot normally use the title. There are exceptions, e.g. Sir Paul Reeves and Sir Ellison Pogo.
 
For some negative material, there is an Irish / British comedy called Father Ted about three priests in a presbytery who are always doing all sorts of strange things but are hardly ever shown doing actual priestly tasks. The oldest of the three lives in a state of advanced dementia and alcoholism and sexual fantasies. the youngest is an imbecile who doesn’t understand even the most basic things about the faith (or life even) and is continually having to have these explained to him. It isn’t explained how somebody like that even made it through seminary.

The series is a pastiche on an older (circa late 1970s) series called Bless me Father about a senior priest of Irish descent in a parish in London (played by the great Arthur Lowe, whose Irish accent is unconvincing) and a young somewhat naive English curate who he tries to teach. The series is much more respectful and accurate than Father Ted. However the elder priest is at times portrayed as being conniving and crafty and always looking out for ways to make money.
 
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Yes, it is certainly to do with his appointment as governor-general. As I recall, it was a pragmatic fudge. The Queen wasn’t prepared to confer the accolade, but it was agreed that it was more appropriate for a governor-general to be styled as a knight than as a bishop. Therefore, his predecessor as governor-general made him a knight bachelor, conferring the accolade, so that he would already be a knight before he received a more senior knighthood from the Queen.

A similar issue arose when an Anglican bishop became governor-general of Australia, but rather than a knighthood he got a doctorate, basically because a bishop cannot be styled “Mr”, but it was considered inappropriate for a governor-general to be styled as a bishop.

The Queen apparently has quite an aversion to knighted clergymen. Several decades ago she awarded a knighthood to an Anglican ordinand, not knowing that he was about to be ordained. It is said that she was rather upset by this and if she had been told he was about to be ordained she would have deferred his award and given him a knighthood without the accolade.

By the way, I always suspected that Diarmaid MacCulloch was given his knighthood by mistake. He is technically an Anglican deacon, but resigned from ordained ministry almost as soon as he was ordained. As he cannot receive the accolade he goes by the eccentric title, “the Revd Diarmaid MacCulloch, knight”. I suspect if someone at the Cabinet Office had realized he was a deacon they would have given him a K.B.E., which has been used for other Anglican clergy.
 
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Dovekin said:
The ultimate Pope sneaks out of the Vatican story, as he does it during a conclave! While waiting for the pope to decide if he will accept his election, they organize a volleyball tournament among the cardinals.
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I saw that movie a while ago. I found the volleyball tournament quite funny! It at least portrays the cardinals as human.
 
This theme is definitely one she’ll want to pick up on, I imagine (whether she watches Ainsi soient-ils, or The Two Popes, or others):

the “villain/hero” trope which frames the progressive (who typically thinks the way the secular world wants him to, or at least closer to it) as a brave/intelligent/empathetic ‘hero’ who understands the ‘nuances’ of ‘real life’, and frames the conservative (who typically defends a traditional interpretation of some religious belief or practice that the secular world does not like) as an irrationally future-fearful/ignorant/unempathetic ‘villain’ who doesn’t understand the ‘nuances’ of ‘real life’.
 
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MNathaniel said:
the “villain/hero” trope which frames the progressive (who typically thinks the way the secular world wants him to, or at least closer to it) as a brave/intelligent/empathetic ‘hero’ who understands the ‘nuances’ of ‘real life’, and frames the conservative (who typically defends a traditional interpretation of some religious belief or practice that the secular world does not like) as an irrationally future-fearful/ignorant/unempathetic ‘villain’ who doesn’t understand the ‘nuances’ of ‘real life’.
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Unless it’s an exorcism movie, in which case the traditional old guy beats the progressive youngster every time.
 
That’s completely ridiculous. When I was four years old I wanted a toy razor and shave cream set from the store so I could shave “just like Daddy”. I had no idea about whiskers, I just thought Daddy’s shaving cream was really neat and fun. I couldn’t figure out why my parents thought this was shockingly funny, and it certainly wasn’t an early sign of me wanting to change gender. I didn’t even know what a gender was. I suspect many four-year-olds are in the same place I was.

I do think Father Ted is a humorous show but I might not be comfortable if a non-Catholic was laughing at it, unless maybe it was somebody I knew was generally okay with and familiar with the Church.
 
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I believe that Fr Ted is morally unacceptable in its portrayal of our Holy priests and the teachings of the Holy Mother Church.

I think us Catholics should condemn it from every angle for its moral wrongness.
 
I just don’t think a series that shows, among other things, a bishop in a spa bath with his girlfriend is morally acceptable.

I suppose we must agree to disagree.
 
I don’t think a Catholic should watch it…it makes fun of and tries to make the Church look bad.

That’s enough to let me run away from this immoral programme.

But if you like it, that’s none of my business, and it’s your decision.
 
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MNathaniel said:
This theme is definitely one she’ll want to pick up on…
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She would be better off picking up on the theme that two people with huge differences can have bigger similarities that can be the basis for friendship and a shared ministry.

The silliness of Benedict being a villain is not really part of the movie, though I can understand why some people see it there.
 
catholic03 said:
I don’t think a Catholic should watch it…it makes fun of and tries to make the Church look bad.
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Isn’t that a bit like saying that if you’re British you shouldn’t watch Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister, because they satirize the British Establishment? (I am guessing that these shows are probably popular in New Zealand as well…)
Johann_du_Toit said:
The Two Popes on Netflix. Bishop Robert Barron and George Wiegel have both blasted it for basically being a hit piece on Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
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Really? I watched it and thought its treatment of Benedict XVI was sympathetic. I thought it was just trying to show the contrasts between the two popes. I don’t think Benedict came off badly from it at all. He was portrayed pretty much as I understand he is supposed to be in real life: intellectual, reserved, gentle, more interested in classical music than sports and popular culture. Of course, it’s necessarily a bit stereotyped: Benedict as the old German professor at home in his cardigan with his books, his piano, and his cats, bemoaning the inability of the cardinals to hold conversations in Latin, while Francis watches soccer in a bar, makes small talk with ordinary folks, sips mate from a gourd, and even dances the Tango. Overall, however, I thought the point was to show how the relationship between the two popes develops and how they discover that they share more common ground than they at first believed, and they eventually have a mutual respect that leads Benedict in effect to hand over power to Bergoglio as his chosen successor. The scene where they eat a takeout pizza together and drink Fanta was a brilliant touch. It showed how they have adapted to each other’s ways and developed a friendship that was absent at the beginning of the movie.

We Have a Pope was another good recommendation. I would add that these movies could usefully be compared with any of those movies that purport to show what Queen Elizabeth II is really like behind closed doors. For example, the 2006 movie The Queen. Of course, nobody really knows what went on in those discussion among the royal family and with Tony Blair, but people love to speculate based on the minimal information available. I think the papacy and the British monarchy are quite similar in that they are two institutions that everybody sort of knows about, because they are constantly in the public eye, but that almost nobody really knows about, because they both operate to a large degree in a secret world to which only a handful of trusted officials have access.
 
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