The Problem with Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints

Fox Nation’s docudrama series Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, which has been running intermittently since mid-November, aired the final episode of its first season on April 18, right before Easter. The series tells the stories of seven men and women who, according to the blurb, “risked everything to embody humanity’s most noble and complex trait—faith.” The episodes feature Joan of Arc, John the Baptist, Sebastian, Maximilian Maria Kolbe, Francis of Assisi, Moses the Black, and Mary Magdalene. 

I caught the first two episodes, featuring Joan of Arc and Maximilian Kolbe. I found them engaging and well-made. Kolbe’s episode, made in black and white, was especially resonant and moving. But I was visited throughout by certain questions about the putative effect of making and showing films like these in our “modern” moment. What, for example, is the impact of Joan of Arc—and her strange mixture of martyrdom and bellicosity—a quarter century into the third millennium? How might the story of Maximilian Kolbe—who martyred himself to save a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz who had a family to support, whereas Kolbe, a Franciscan monk, had none—serve to inspire or evangelize? What, fundamentally, is different about the receptivity available to such stories nowadays? Are they aimed at the choir or is it possible for them to have a broader and deeper resonance?

As it happens, each episode is followed by a short discussion program, “A conversation with Martin Scorsese and friends,” which includes a priest (Fr. James Martin), an academic, and a poet-professor. 

Following the Kolbe episode, the discussion strayed into the approximate zone of my core question. Fr. Martin observed: “I think it’s important to see this culture, which I think is so foreign to people today, this really intense, almost overheated Catholic culture, where everything is about the Church, and everything revolved around the Church.” He elaborated: “Overheated in the sense that . . . just really intense—right?—and constantly talking about the saints, and suffering, and the sacraments. I think in a way that is hard for modern-day Catholics to understand, you know, what that world was like. . . . In a sense, this is a world that is almost as distant from us as the world of the early Christian Church.” 

Actually, to a high degree, the world I grew up in—the west of Ireland in the 1960s—still approximated Romano Guardini’s description, in The End of the Modern World, of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages as a culture 

filled with a sense of religion which was as deep as it was rich, as strong as it was delicate, as firm in its grasp of principles as it was original and fertile in their concrete expression. From cloister and monastery there shone a religious light whose strength cannot be overestimated. We cannot exaggerate the impact which was made upon the corporate consciousness by the ever-fresh stream of worshippers, penitents and mystics which poured forth from the springs of medieval piety. . . . Medieval man thirsted for truth. . . . The roots for all truths were given him by authority: the roots of divine truth by Scripture and the Church; of natural truth by the thought of antiquity.

There is something here that elided the conversation between Martin Scorsese and his friends: the possibility that what Guardini describes is actually the normal and reasonable response of a people to a reality that is endlessly mysterious to them. The implicit assumption in Fr. Martin’s remarks is that belief in a Creator, in transcendence, in supernatural possibilities, is no longer to be deemed naturalistic or organic, that something—perhaps the passage of time (Fr. Martin uses the word “distant”)—has rendered these perceptions in some sense “foreign,” “overheated,” and perhaps, accordingly, unreasonable. Man, as we know, believes himself to have become cleverer over the ages. 

In 2016, Scorsese released his adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, set in seventeenth-century Japan. The question at the heart of the movie, on which Scorsese’s God remains implacably silent, is this: Would Jesus demand that a Christian refuse to denounce him, when such a refusal would result in the torture and eventual death of innocent parties? 

The “mainspring” of Endō’s story is its paradoxical counterposing of perhaps the two most vital and discrete Christological injunctions, that we should love our God with all our heart and all our soul and all our strength, and that we should love our neighbor “as ourselves.” The story works off a tension between the two, which in its unfolding opens up the meaning of Christianity for what it is: the optimum way for man to be in the world, by which he can truly achieve harmony with the totality of reality. In its identifying of this strange and uncommon tension, Endō’s novel and Scorsese’s movie take us beyond the conventionally banal cultural notions about faith.

In The Saints, on the other hand, Scorsese fails to achieve what I sense is his objective: to “explain” Christianity to a baffled culture. The problem with the series is that it fails to find the code whereby the past might be presented in a manner that translates an “old” idiom into a timeless one. 

It’s especially hard, these days, to tell religious stories, though not because time has passed. The real problem is that the process of collective (as in, cultural) reasoning has been altered, though not in a manner that is absolute as to its logic, and therefore not, as is imagined, irreversible. 

The keepers of the dead god of secular-atheism in modern Western societies are as stricken in the face of a plausible Christ as were those Japanese apparatchiks in their time. But, equally, faith in a Creator God is endangered within itself by pressures from outside—from forms of reason and logic that are alien to it, from ideologies that are inimical to it, and by the hostility of those who seem to fear it more than anything else. I especially loved the tenderness with which the Christian proposal is treated in Silence, the way the inexplicable heroism of its adherents is captured without didacticism, the way it shows rather than tells us that we are watching people who have seen something more extraordinary than anything else they have encountered in their lives. It is as if Christ lives in the movie, just off camera, a presence that despite its silence is inescapably real.

The Saints fails to achieve this level of penetration. The problem, from what I’ve seen of the series so far, is that the stories are prone to read as artefacts of an age of innocence, religiosity, or pietism, rather than ones that can be entered into to achieve understandings concerning eternal or absolute meanings relevant and applicable even in our “modern” world.