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Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | Sep 16, 2014
SPOILER ALERT!!! If you intend to see Calvary — and you should — and you don’t want to know how this spiritual whodunit (or rather, who’lldoit) turns out, read no further.
Last evening I saw Calvary, John Michael McDonough’s remarkable movie about Father James, a righteous and caring Irish priest played exceptionally well by Brendan Gleeson. The movie opens with the voice of a parishioner in a confessional informing Father James that he was repeatedly raped as a child by a now deceased priest, and that as a result he will murder him in a week’s time — not because he is guilty of anything but precisely because he is a good man.
Over the week’s course, we discover a Catholic world blown apart by the abuse scandal. The parish, located in beautiful County Sligo, is a grim community of skeptics, adulterers, depressives, and drunks. This being Ireland, there’s no shortage of gallow’s humor, and there’s also no doubt that Father James is doing his level best to hold things together. But in the end, his church is burned down, his dog has its throat cut, and his life is, as promised, terminated.
The movie’s title makes it only too clear that this is a parable. It is the Passion of Father James — the final week of a man of God who sacrifices his life to make up for the — original? — sin of another. He throws the revolver he has brought to defend himself — his last temptation — into the sea. He is shot on a beach below the headlands that point to the name of the place outside the walls of Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified — Golgotha, Calvary, Skull. There is, perhaps, a hint of redemption at the end.
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