Angelus News | July 31-August 7, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 21

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BY ROBERT BRENNAN
Christopher Carley and Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino."
Of Clint
Eastwood
and
imperfect
priests
The world wags on, despite
everything it has decided to
throw at us, and will surely
continue to hurl in our direction. But
babies are still being born, and people
are still getting to Mass either in
person or virtually, and confessions are
still available, as long as the supply of
plexiglass holds up.
We either count our blessings or wallow
in misery. As I sit here fighting the
urge to wallow away, there really are
more than enough blessings to keep us
all counting on.
Popular culture is probably not one
of those blessings, and its current manifestation
is more curse than blessing
anyway, yet it can still be a source
of inspiration, even though the vast
majority of the entertainment it creates
that involves the Church or her ministers
usually ends badly. The heady
days when Hollywood sent love notes
to the Church in films like the 1940s
“Going My Way” are not coming back.
The 1950s saw more edgy depictions
of the priestly life, like Hitchcock’s “I
Confess” and “On The Waterfront,”
with the latter still being what I think
is the greatest portrait of what a good
priest is all about. But in the past 50
years, give or take a decade, priests
don’t generally fare well within the
confines of popular culture. Sadly,
most depictions of the Church and
its clergy aim to demean, defile, or
deflate.
A lot of the pain is self-inflicted. If we
have a bull’s-eye painted on our backs,
it was put there by sin and scandal. It
is only natural to expect the secular
culture to take its swings.
But just as God permits calamity, he
also shows his light in the darkness,
whether it comes from the flickering
candlelight inside the depths of a catacomb
with early Christians reading
Scripture in Rome circa A.D. 273, or
from the bright fluorescent lighting
in an intensive care COVID-19 unit
in an LA hospital circa now, where a
nurse treating a patient says a silent
Hail Mary.
I found the flickering light of a
profound and positive portrayal of a
young priest in, of all places, Clint
Eastwood’s movie “Gran Torino.”
Eastwood has had a huge career. He
has made a lot of good movies, several
great movies, but all of them seem to
share a modernist nihilism that in the
end leaves an empty feeling.
Not so “Gran Torino.” On the surface
it certainly feels, and sounds, like a
typical Clint Eastwood movie. And
when we see his cranky, retired auto
worker character encounter his freshout-of-the-seminary
priest, things go
poorly, especially for the young priest.
In the hands of a lesser director,
and maybe in the hands of a younger
Eastwood, the newly minted priest’s
first scene would have been his last.
He would have served the purpose of
being a fumbling, ill-equipped foil to
26 • ANGELUS • July 31-August 7, 2020