Silly fun, serious question

The Pope’s Exorcist ask viewers what is it to have faith in the face of true and terrifying inexplicable evil. Priest Yaroslav Walker reviews.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A priest holds a cross up in his hand in a chaotic environment while a colleague looks on

Father Amorth in action, played with commitment by Russell Crowe.

Sony Pictures.

It goes without saying that all contemporary films about demonic possession and exorcism are seen in the light of the great masterwork. 1973’s The Exorcist is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of what an exorcism film needs to have: believable characters, a strong script, proper pacing, and a genuine respect for the concept of the supernatural – all culminating in an opportunity for the viewer to wrestle with their faith. Exorcism films rise or fall by the metric this cinematic cornerstone inaugurated. I’m pleased to say that The Pope’s Exorcist does a reasonably decent job.

Let’s be clear: it’s silly fun, and a bit of candy-floss fluff, which allows Russell Crowe to launch an assault on yet another accent. Yet, sugary-sweet fun is no bad thing, and underneath the loving horror-genre-cliché surface, there is something of substance to consider. The plot is standard: afflicted family – Julia and her children Amy and Henry – arrive in Spain to oversee the restoration of an old Abbey Julia’s late-husband left the family. Boy is possessed. Boy cannot be saved by medical science, so the exorcist saves the day.

The performances are all committed, and you can tell the performers are having a great time, Crowe especially.

The possession is quick and effective with scenes suddenly cutting from the horrifying to sanitised medical procedures (an homage, I think, to the great original). Attempts to explain matters away scientifically are attempted and quickly abandoned, and the film is proudly unambiguous. The Holy Father knows of this Abbey, and its dark history, and personally tasks Crowe’s Amorth with uncovering the truth. The film’s pacing is excellent in the first half, and wastes little time in introducing the main players. The script is sharp and lean (for the most part), with minimal exposition, allowing details to emerge naturally. The performances are all committed, and you can tell the performers are having a great time, Crowe especially. The final third is tremendously silly and overblown, and probably could have been cut down dramatically, but one can forgive it its excess for the themes it raises.

Purportedly based on the autobiographical writing of the late Father Gabriel Amorth, sometime exorcist for the Diocese of Rome, The Pope’s Exorcist could be viewed as shifting the burden of the question posed by the 1973 classic (what does it mean to have faith in the face of true and terrifying inexplicable evil?) to the institutional level. It is 1987 and the winds of modernity are blowing hard. Amorth (Crowe) is a contradiction of a priest – he rides a Vespa scooter, jokes around with nuns, and demonstrates a relaxed attitude with those in authority, and yet his faith in God and his belief in the supernatural is solid. He works tirelessly in a world and a Church that balks at him: expecting rigidity and conformity in outward appearance, yet sceptically admonishing him for his belief. It could’ve just as easily been set in 2023. Such themes resonate in the context of a Western Church still struggling for self-definition in a modern world of which it is ‘in’ but never meant to be ‘of’.

The film is very much speaking into the moment. What is the supernatural, and does the Church even believe in it?

The question the film raise (whether it means to or not) is how will the Church see itself and its mission in the coming decades. Early on Amorth is admonished by an American cardinal who is intent on making the Church more ‘relevant’ to the modern sceptical generation. He sees little use for the office of exorcist, and seems to disregard the supernatural as fantasy. As Amorth investigates the possession he learns the dark truth of the Abbey and its role in the Spanish Inquisition. He is confronted with the pernicious persistence of sin – his sins, the sins of those around him, and the historic sins of the Church.

The film is very much speaking into the moment. What is the supernatural, and does the Church even believe in it? What is evil, and what does it mean for a man and for the Church to truly deal with sin? How can the Church speak into a world that does not believe, and yet is not equipped to confront the reality of evil?

As the film reaches its conclusion it becomes clear that the Enemy does not wish to simply possess a child, but wishes to possess the Church. Watching the film in view of the present struggles the faith faces – a struggle over the very definition of sin, evil, redemption, etc – one can read the demon as a stand-in for the Spirit of the Age. Whether it means to or not, The Pope’s Exorcist asks the viewer to genuinely tackle the question of who ought to direct the Church – contemporary mores or the eternal truth of Christ? The final scene gives a hopeful answer while also hinting at the possibility of sequels. It is camp, it is silly, but it affirms life, goodness, truth, and faith, and I wouldn’t say no to another outing for Crowe as Amorth.

Explainer

Belief

Culture

22 August 2024

7 min read

The questions that nobody can escape

Seeking answers about beginning, meaning, and of the end, explain why religion refuses to disappear.

Silvianne and Barnabas Aspray

Silvianne and Barnabas are theologians.

An arm and hand stretch out in front of some, a narrow street is the background.

Andrik Langfield on Unsplash.

In the twentieth century many people thought that religion was on the way out. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, it was broadly assumed that “religion would disappear and be replaced solely by secular, scientiﬁc rationalism.” But few people now believe this anymore. Fukuyama himself has changed his mind and says that the disappearance of religion “is not going to happen.” But why is religion refusing to disappear?

A core reason for the persistence of faith is that there are questions that everyone asks at one point or another that lead in the direction of religion. Religion, or faith, addresses questions that nobody can escape: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does it all come from? Is there meaning to this life? And what happens after death? Faith traditions are experts in such ultimate questions. Consider the following examples.

These questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are the questions that religion deals with.

When people experience the beginning of life, they are often caught up in wonder. How can it be that a whole new person is growing inside a woman? Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the great critic of Christianity, who famously declared that “God was dead”, also wrote, “Is there a more sacred state than pregnancy?” There is something deeply moving around the beginning of life. Many who become parents, or in some way experience the beginning of life, are led to wonder: isn’t something more than just biology happening here, something deeper? A new life, a whole new person – and our love for that new person – where does all of that come from?

Another group of questions that most people will face at some point in their lives revolves around meaning. What’s the point of growing up, a teenager might ask? What’s the point of my work, we may ask later on. Especially when we face frustrations, failures, challenges we might wonder what difference we are making to the world. Would anyone miss me if I was not here? Will anyone remember me if I die?

Finally, we all at some point come in contact with death. Even if we are spared the pain of friends dying young, it is the natural course of the world that our grandparents and our parents will one day die. What do we do in the face of such loss? It is hard not to ask: Where is my loved one now? And is there hope of seeing them again one day?

These are the kinds of questions that nobody can entirely avoid in their lives: they never fail to arise and press themselves upon our consciousness. Yet these questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are precisely the questions that religion deals with. And here lies one important answer to why faith won’t just go away: Because scientific rationalism cannot really address them.

Faith offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them.

To be sure, secular scientific rationalism does offer some answers as to how life begins – we know the biology of it all astonishingly well. And yet, biology is not everything, and in fact, it is not the biological aspects of it all that touch us. The wonder, the hope, the love that we experience when we are faced with the beginning of life is more than what can be rationally or scientifically accounted for.

Similarly, scientific rationalism is not well equipped to answer questions of meaning. Science is great at answering how something works or how it should be done, but why-questions fall into a different category. Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer “42” - which is a reference to the comic sci-fi series “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and we intuitively understand that this answer is nonsensical. It is funny precisely because it is nonsensical.

And again, around the end of life: Scientific rationalism cannot and will not, based on its methods and approaches, say anything about the afterlife.

So, the questions of beginning, meaning and end cannot be answered solely by scientific rationalism. And yet they come up in all of our lives. Right here lies an important reason why faith has not gone away. Faith deals with just these questions. It is good at dealing with them – they are the core domain of faith.

Faith offers answers to questions of beginning, meaning and end, but just as importantly, it offers a community in which such questions can be addressed and discussed. It offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them, perhaps showing them ways in which they can find answers. Different faiths and different expressions of faiths do this very differently: organised religions do it differently to loose association of the “spiritual but not religious”, but in all cases, it is faith – broadly understood – that addresses and deals with the questions that niggle away and are not otherwise addressed. Faith won’t disappear, because faith’s questions won’t disappear.

But why does this need saying? Is it not obvious that religion is about ultimate questions that concern everyone?

The problem is that modern Western life is full of opportunities to distract us from these questions. We are wealthy, comfortable, bombarded with entertainment, and often very busy with careers and children as well. All these things help us to repress the deeper questions about the origin and purpose of our existence.

Many people treat the question of life’s meaning like a school or University essay that they can procrastinate from indefinitely: “One day I’d like to figure it out: what it’s all for and where it’s all going: but today there’s another episode on Netflix, Instagram to browse, or tennis on the TV.” The entertainment industry offers alluring enticements to money, sex, fame or success. Wealth is particularly useful because it helps us get what we want, when we want it, and prevents us from facing the harsher realities of life. Making ourselves busy is easy, and we can leave ourselves no time for deep reflection on the bigger questions. All of this adds up to what we might call the “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

The “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

But the problem is that even ordinary everyday life is lived according to (at least provisional) answers to those big questions. Every daily decision we make displays our values, what we think matters. If we work late instead of coming home to play with the children – if we fly to New Zealand for a vacation, or buy beef, massively increasing our carbon footprint and contributing to climate change – we are making choices that have an impact on the planet. All our choices are based on values which reveal our beliefs about what makes life worth living and what we want out of life. You cannot be an agnostic. Your life displays belief in one thing or another. Consider one stark example. A pregnant teenage girl simply cannot be agnostic about abortion for very long. She has only two options: abort, or give birth. The choice she makes will be a practical consequence of her beliefs and value judgments. There is no agnosticism, no “not answering” the question.

Like every religious tradition, Christianity calls us to live lives that are rooted in things of ultimate and lasting value, rather than superficial or self-centred concerns. It challenges us to fight against the narcotic of everyday life by constantly drawing our attention back to the things that most matter. Through worship, Bible reading, and prayer, it incessantly asks us those vital questions: Is it really about making money? Is it about getting promoted? What are our ultimate values and how do we show them in our lives? The real power of secularism is not that it offers alternative answers to these questions but that it distracts from the question. All we need to do is un-distract.

Christianity is not just a set of easy answers to these questions. It is a way, a journey towards the truth. To be a Christian means to belong to a community that trusts what Jesus has revealed about our life’s origin, meaning and end. In that community there are some implicit answers to get us started. We live in the belief that life is meaningful, that selfishness and personal pleasure are not the most important thing. There’s plenty of room for debate and discussion, but let’s at least start talking about the things that matter.