Doubt
I’m impressed: not the heavy-handed jab at the church I feared and half-expected (leftish priest good, traddie nun bad). Complex characters well acted in a story full of the subtlely of the title. How personally involved can priests and nuns become in their charges’ lives without compromising their work? When does righteous anger about the priestly underage gay sex scandal become harassment and a witch-hunt? For good measure add race and a dash of feminism.

The historical-period re-enactment seems spot-on except for a few liturgical and other ecclesiastical clangers, mostly anachronisms. The real Sister James (still in Mother Seton’s order — whence come the film’s unusual nuns’ habits with the early-1800s widow’s cap — but no longer using her name in religion) was the technical adviser. The Masses strike a traditional Catholic much like the setting and people in the sci-fi film Dark City (which were almost but not quite the 1940s for a reason), seeming to come from Sister’s muddled memories over several decades. It gets the general feel of the old Mass but lots of little things wrong:

• The so-called Benedictine wearing of the stole over the chasuble, unthinkable in a big-city neighbourhood parish in 1964.
• A pro-life rose lapel patch on a chasuble, and in ’64 at that? No. I think somebody vaguely recalled that as something RCs wear and threw it in.
• The chasubles at the second and third Masses look very Novusy.
• A choir singing the Old Hundredth at the offertory? Possible but not likely. I can imagine Irish-American parishioners in ’64 recoiling in horror: ‘That’s Protestant!’
• Speaking of things Protestant, the ‘Christian flag’ on the stage?! (Where the papal flag, actually just the flag of the Vatican city-state, is used in the US.)
• The consecration at Mass seemed bizarre: altar boys IIRC in the wrong places and Fr Flynn was still saying the words quietly while genuflecting.
• Interesting breviary Father’s got: the modern Liturgy of the Hours in English, which of course didn’t exist in ’64.

Labels: film, history, the Catholic faith