The Collar

Reading Christian Ministry in Fiction, Television, and Film

Sue Sorensen

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630871918
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

Combining thematic analysis and stimulating close readings, The Collar is a wide-ranging study of the many ways--heroic or comic, shrewd or dastardly--Christian ministers have been represented in literature and film. Since all Christians are expected to be involved in ministry of some type, the assumptions of secular culture about ministers affect more than just clergy. Ranging across several nations (particularly the U. S., Britain, and Canada), denominations, and centuries, The Collar aims to encourage creative and faithful responses to the challenges of Christian leadership and to provoke awareness of the times when leadership expectations become too extreme. Using the framework of novels, plays, TV, and movies to make inquiries about pastoral passion, frustration, and fallibility, Sue Sorensen's well-informed, sprightly, and perceptive book will be helpful to pastors, parishioners, those interested in practical theology, and anyone who enjoys evocative literature and film.

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Heroism and Suffering

Do not be ashamed, then, of the testimony about our Lord or of me his prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel. (2 Tim 1:8)

Therefore, when we feel pain, when we suffer, when we die, let us turn to this, firmly believing and certain that it is not we alone, but Christ and the church who are in pain and are suffering and dying with us. . . . We set out upon the road of suffering and death accompanied by the entire church.
(Martin Luther, Fourteen Consolations)27

A remarkable turn has occurred during the last half century in the Christian attitude toward religious heroes. For centuries veneration of martyrs was a fundamental part of the worship experience; while one might assume this is a predominantly Roman Catholic reality, the story of Thomas Becket has been important for both Anglicans and Catholics, and in the radical Reformation tradition of the Mennonites, the book The Martyrs Mirror is acknowledged traditionally as having a place second in importance only to the Bible. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is similarly a product of the Reformation. Yet in my lifetime the place of martyrdom in the worship experience has become questionable, if not objectionable. In Robertson Davies’s 1970 novel Fifth Business, Dunstable Ramsay begins a career as historian and mythographer in part because of his early exposure to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The action is set in the early twentieth century; this late twentieth-century reader found the protagonist’s tolerance, and even fondness, for martyrs’ tales bizarre, although Davies’s magnificent storytelling skills carried the day.

The subject of martyrdom makes me uncomfortable, I freely admit, and I suspect, based on a lifetime of observing other Christians at worship (admittedly mostly Protestants), my feelings are widely shared. Two men who could be considered the most important Christian martyrs of the past century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., are more usually termed political martyrs, killed for their determined stances against Nazism and racism, respectively. Only a few generations ago they would have more definitely been designated Christian heroes—people who suffered pain, disgrace, torture, and death, following the example of Christ. While there were certainly other ways of being entered in either Alban Butler’s Catholic Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (1756–1759) or Sabine Baring-Gould’s Anglican Lives of the Saints (1872–1877), for the majority of Christian history the customary way of distinguishing oneself as a hero in the church has been to die for love of God and God’s church. As James Doyle says in the Preface to the 1895 edition of Butler’s authoritative collection of tales, “here the doctrines of the Catholic Church are presented to us passing through the ordeal of time.”28

I will say little here about the way in which the current avoidance of stories of suffering and death marks the cowardice and comfortableness of our era. There is truth in that. But in our century the transformation of notions of Christian heroism has been, in many ways, a necessary and valuable one. For one thing, the unrelenting violence of most martyrologies has done little enough to “guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79). Additionally, as Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us in his poem “Pied Beauty,” God is also in the “dappled things,” in “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow,” and for many (if not most) Christians such lovely but homely particulars suggest the numinous more commendably than any tale of flaying or beheading. This chapter, then, details some of the fictional representations of martyrology in recent times, but takes note of a lessening emphasis on violent suffering, until we arrive at Marilynne Robinson’s astonishing work Gilead, a novel which proposes a gentle new ideal of Christian hero, one who dies slowly, lovingly, peacefully.

The Willing Sacrifice

I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men of the army. . . . Brothers, you are part of our own people. You kill your own campesino brothers and sisters. And before an order to kill that a man may give, the law of God must prevail that says: Thou shalt not kill. No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. . . . In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I ask you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!29

Oscar Romero, Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, delivered these words during a long Lenten homily one day before he was assassinated on March 24, 1980. Romero’s words are used nearly verbatim in John Duigan’s film Romero, released in 1989 and starring Raul Julia. The highlight of Romero’s March 23 sermon is when he moves from request to order, attempting to use his authority to compel the soldiers to his point of view. Neither request nor order succeeds for the historical Archbishop, but in the years since 1980, in artistic and inspirational terms, his words and example have been notable.

Part of the appeal of Romero’s dramatic life and death is the distance he traveled in the three years he was Archbishop. As a priest, Oscar Romero had been a conservative, with little patience for the liberation theology so prevalent in the Latin American church. However, during his term as Archbishop, six priests were murdered and Romero became increasingly outspoken about government corruption and his nation’s neglect of the poor and vulnerable. Increasingly he allied himself with the poor; the collection of his writings called The Violence of Love is replete with statements like this one: “A church that does not join the poor, in order to speak out from the side of the poor against the injustices committed against them, is not the true church of Jesus Christ.”30

In some respects John Duigan’s film does not stray far from documentary, but it has little need to. Such a recent martyr in the church is well documented. What distinguishes this film is Raul Julia’s fine and subtle performance as Romero, a man not known for his passionate nature and one who had little personal charisma. Julia, without histrionics, demonstrates how remarkable was Romero’s transformation from dull and careful conservative to someone who preached radical openness, as evidenced in these words from 1978:

Everyone who struggles for justice, everyone who makes just claims in unjust surroundings is working for God’s reign, even though not a Christian. The church does not comprise all of God’s reign; God’s reign goes beyond the church’s boundaries. The church values everything that is in tune with its struggle to set up God’s reign. A church that tries only to keep itself pure and uncontaminated would not be a church of God’s service to people.31

It must have been tempting in the film Romero to make this personality shift overly melodramatic, but Duigan and Julia resist the temptation. It is precisely the passionate martyrdoms of the past that they counter with their film. Their Romero is dogged, grim, almost plodding. He does little that is more remarkable than refusing stubbornly to be untrue to his principles, demonstrating to the audience the potential that anyone has to be heroic. It is Romero’s environment that is unusual, rather than the man; given another era or another place Oscar Romero might have been ordinary. But his response to circumstances that were vicious and inhumane moves him out of the category of the ordinary. Still, the message is there: he did not have a particularly startling or eloquent message, nor did he have supernatural powers or strength. He was, however, obstinately committed to the ideal that the church must represent the downtrodden.

Romero’s martyrdom in this film does resemble prevailing notions of religious martyrdom: he is calm in the face of death; he appears prophetically to see his end coming; he dies in the act of serving others. Like other martyrs over the centuries he is marked by loneliness and isolation. But the novelty in Romero’s martyrdom is his insistence that God’s reign is not only about or for Christians. Before his death Romero came to a wide and all-embracing view of God’s love that appears to dissolve boundaries between the secular world and the church. Although responsibility for Romero’s death has been variously attributed to military forces protected by the government of El Salvador, to U.S.-trained opposition death squads, and to the rebel forces who did not welcome his pacifist approach, Romero’s statement that the “church does not comprise all of God’s reign” must have also unsettled Romero’s superiors in the church.

Romero at first seems different in its politics than the other great nineteen eighties film about religious leaders making the ultimate sacrifice, Roland Joffe’s The Mission. While Romero ultimately promotes a radically open view of the church’s responsibility and membership, The Mission looks very old-school in its allegiance. Father Gabriel, played by Jeremy Irons, is a devoted servant of the church, sent to convert the forest-dwelling Guarani nation in South America. Father Gabriel’s remote mission is presented in idealized terms as a place of education and tranquility. (Although Robert Bolt’s screenplay purports to be based on actual events in the eighteenth century, this is a European vision of the events, and somewhat patronizing to the aboriginal peoples in the story.)

The twist in The Mission occurs when Spanish missionaries, of which Father Gabriel is one, are ordered to abandon the missions they have painstakingly created because these colonized territories in Paraguay are being reassigned to Portugal. In refusing to leave the mission, Father Gabriel is, on the one hand, standing up for the institution of the church as he understands it. But on the other hand, Father Gabriel’s stance can be interpreted as his transfer of allegiance to the Guarani people, who are presented in Joffe’s film as the true people of God, sincere in their worship and unwaverin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• Interlude: "The Collar" by George Herbert
• Chapter 1: Heroism and Suffering
• Interlude: The Diary of a Country Priest
• Chapter 2: The Counselor/Confessor
• Interlude: Scenes of Clerical Life
• Chapter 3: Fools for Christ
• Interlude: Barbara Pym and Jan Karon
• Chapter 4: The Collared Detective
• Interlude: Cry, the Beloved Country
• Chapter 5: Passion, for Better and for Worse
• Interlude: The Book Against God
• Chapter 6: Failure, for Worse and for Better
• Interlude: Doubt, a Parable
• Chapter 7: Disaster
• Interlude: Pale Rider
• Chapter 8: Frustration
• Interlude: The Bing Crosby and Richard Burton Movie Priests
• Chapter 9: Clergy Wives and Daughters
• Interlude: The Bell
• Chapter 10: The Canadian Collar
• Interlude: Lights and Shadows of Clerical Life
• Postlude: Corpus permixtum
• Bibliography