In the Catholic grammar school you attended as a boy the priests kept at a distance while the nuns ran the show, dour and plentiful in their identical costumes, as if they’d tumbled out of a machine that vended them a penny apiece. If a priest came into the classroom on the odd Tuesday it was like Jesus Christ almighty had come down from the cross to tell a few jokes or riddles. One priest was a fanatic for spelling, another asked questions plucked randomly from the Baltimore Catechism.
Who made us?
God made us.
Who is God?
God is the Supreme Being who made all things.
And so on.
Another priest, an older man, the pastor, came into the classroom a few times a year and claimed to be able to read everyone’s thoughts. As he went through the catalogue of what all the children were thinking he threw his arms around and paced violently, in the manner of Bishop Sheen. He scared the bejeesus out of you, you have to admit. Then too, that was the whole idea.
At a certain time of the year the parish priest came to bless the house. You remember your grandmother kneeling down in the cramped living room, her head bowed, the priest intoning the words and sending sprinklets of holy water flying from a small, occult-looking bottle drawn from his inside pocket. You like to remember his black suit, his black hat with its short brim, his small black cigar balanced nimbly on the railing just beyond the open doorway. The priest reeking of cigar smoke and spewing holy water on the dated furniture. Your grandmother kneeling on the spinach-colored carpet, kerchiefed head bowed low. Years later this memory or set of memories was triggered by the climactic scene in The Exorcist: the two priests standing in the room with the possessed girl, throwing holy water and chanting, “The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!”
There have been other movies, other movie priests:
Pat O’Brien as Father Jerry Connelly, the slum priest who has turned away from a life of crime in Angels with Dirty Faces.
Bing Crosby and Bany Fitzgerald in Going My Way.
Bing Crosby once again as kindly and melodious Father O’Malley in The Bells of St. Mary’s.
Spencer Tracy as fighting Father Flanagan in Boys Town.
David Niven as the ambitious but unhappy Episcopal bishop in The Bishop’s Wife (helped to a deeper level of spirituality by Caiy Grant’s angel Dudley).
Karl Malden as the two-fisted activist priest in On the Waterfront.
Oskar Werner as the tormented and dying theologian in The Shoes of the Fisherman. Also of course in that same movie Anthony Quinn as
the Pope who opens the coffers of the Church to the world s poor and hungry. The Pope, don’t forget, is also a priest (he roams the streets of Rome, gives tender counsel to an English woman whose marriage to David Janssen is on the rocks).
A not very well known actor as the priest who believes Jennifer Jones has had a true vision of the Blessed Virgin Maiy in The Song of Bernadette. (The same actor played the father-in-law in The Days of Wine and Roses, if that is any help.)
Rex Harrison as the Pope who commissions the painting of the Sistine Chapel in The Agony and the Ecstasy.
Thomas Tryon, before he became a novelist, in The Cardinal.
Richard Chamberlain as the priest with the untamable lust in The Thorn Birds.
Robert DeNiro as the priest who tries to play the complicated game of church politics in True Confessions.
William S. Burroughs as the junkie priest in Drugstore Cowboy.
There should be more movie priests, priests we have yet to see upon the silver screen.
The priest who solicits oral sex in the sacristy, then absolves the altar boy when he is finished with him. Absolvo te blah blah blah. There has never been a language better than Latin when it comes to being an old priest. Mysterious, arcane, dripping of the long ago.
The cheerful parish priest who lives a decent life, ministers to his parishioners, likes to treat himself to a good dinner, likes even better to be treated by his well-heeled parishioners. He is affable, physically soft, a guy who knows how to go along to get along.
The priest lost in the mysticism of his own religion, sitting alone in his room, chanting gibberish. If he were not a priest he would be on the street, living in a cardboard box. His illness is legitimized, yet who is to say he is not a true mystic? Then too, who is to say the guy living in the cardboard box is also not a true mystic?
The priest who leaves his order and breaks his vows to marry the woman he met working behind the counter in the pizza shop. The priest who leaves his order to many the nun he met in the grammar school. The priest who leaves his order to many the priest he met in the seminaiy or, much later perhaps, the one who reminds him of that charming young fellow.
There was an old woman, one time, the grandmother of an acquaintance, who said that you should be a priest, you had just the right look. You pretended to wonder what she meant by that, but you knew right away exactly what she meant.
There are decent priests there are dreadful priests there are so many priests under the sun. You are sitting in a bar in downtown Atlantic City on a weekday afternoon.
“The Catholic Church,” somebody says.
“Yeah, the Catholic Church,” somebody replies.
“The Gay and Lesbian Society of North America,” the first man sniggers.
“So it would seem,” is the only thing you can say.
“They take their training in the semenary ,” another man chortles.
“They’re just like anybody else,” someone else says.
“But they say not,” another man, all the way down at the end, puts in. “They say they’re in the know.”
“Who says that?”
“They say. They themselves.”
“Someone should be in the know, don’t you think?” you wonder out loud.
“Sure,” the first man says. “But we all know nobody is.”