Steve and I are under the weather as the new year arrives. As I mentioned a day or so ago, we have come down with a post-Christmas bug.To give ourselves relief from the gruesome sight of watching each other snuffle and down yet another glass of throat-cauterizing scalding liquid laced with lemon, we went out yesterday afternoon to see John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt”—not the play, but the new movie starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And I’m glad we did so. The movie is outstanding. Meryl Streep plays the role of Sister Aloysius with an empathetic brio that is absolutely convincing, even when she carries the character gloriously over the top—as she does at times.
Before I comment on the movie, I should warn readers who haven’t yet seen it that what I say below will contain spoilers. If you intend to see “Doubt,” please proceed at your own risk.
The demographics of the audience were themselves interesting. In a fairly full theater in the middle of the afternoon on new year’s day, we were the sole males present. The audience consisted of couples of women, middle-aged for the most part—not, I imagine, paired couples, but women at loose ends on the holiday, on an afternoon outing with friends.
I was also fascinated by several comments I overheard as we left the theater. One woman turned to her friend and said, “I liked it until they pulled the rug away at the end. They didn’t give us anything certain to take home with us!” Another said to her friend, “All those attempts to trip him up, and she still admitted she didn’t know if he was guilty.”
Both comments surprised me. Though the dénoument does leave room for doubt—was Sr. Aloysius, after all, a vengeful harpy intent on finding an innocent man guilty because she had an animus against him?—the preponderance of evidence, of moral weight, is clearly on her side as the movie ends. Why, then, the need to wrap the plot up in a neat package that is unlike the mess we experience in everyday life, as we approach moral dilemmas? And why did some of the women in the audience read the story as a sordid tale of female vengeance on an innocent man?
In my view, the doubt with which the movie left us to contend is a significant part of the story, of what the story wants to teach us. This is how it is in life: we never have the clarity of moral vision that allows us to transcend conflict. We are never beyond the point of doubt. There is always the obligation to weigh one more bit of evidence that might decisively shift our outlook, if we are intent on remaining moral agents open to a truth we can never entirely own and control. Anyone hellbent on being right, as Sr. Aloysius was, has a strong moral obligation to seek weighty evidence to counter her tendency to certainty, in the absence of eveidence.
And, more to the point, Sr. Aloysius was left with doubt—even when she knew that she was correct, beyond the shadow of a doubt, in her assessment of Fr. Flynn—because that is all the church of her period allowed women who challenged the men who ruled them. It is an . . . unmaking . . . experience to go against those who have absolute authority over you, who have made and who maintain the symbols by which your life and theirs is regulated. It is impossible not to doubt when every authority symbol, every reality-making symbol, in the world around you tells you that you do not have the right to make a moral judgment that runs contrary to that of your betters.
“Doubt” is, in key respects, a parable about moral insight in a church in which power is radically maldistributed on the basis of gender. Throughout the film, Shanley adroitly juxtaposes scenes of clerical license and conventual repression. The camera scans seamlessly from a meal at which Fr. Flynn and his confrères sit at a dinner table laden with bloody roast beef and glasses of beer and wine, around which they sit laughing uproariously, to one at which prim, silent nuns sit eating messes of God knows what, as an equally silent maid pours milk from a pitcher into each of their glasses.
Men with power jubilating. Women with no power at all—no institutional power, no ability to make anything effectively different—chewing in silence.
When Sr. Aloysius finally confronts Fr. Flynn and provides him with such evidence as she has that he is a serial abuser of boys, he reminds her of the rules of the game they are playing, as priest and nun: you report to me, I report to the bishop, the bishop reports to the pope. It is your job to receive, not to initiate the process by which significant information is transmitted. It is your job to listen and obey. Not to speak and command.
Sr. Aloysius stands by what she knows—by what she has seen out her office window, by what she has learned as a nun in other assignments in which priests made advances on boys in Catholic schools. She knows that she is right in her assessment of Fr. Flynn and her determination to remove him from the school and from further contact with the boys in the school.
When he confronts her with the inescapable reality of the game rules they both follow—of his power and her powerlessness—she informs him that she will go against all the bishops in the world and even the pope, if she has to do so. To achieve what she knows to be right, even when it is impossible to obtain evidence to support her moral insight, in a world in which the evidence is controlled by those in whose hands power lies.
And to safeguard the boys entrusted to her care.
I’m surprised that, having seen this social world with its radically unequal power dynamics sketched so sharply throughout the film, anyone leaving the theater would expect Sr. Aloysius to have anything other than doubt, even when she knew she was correct in her moral judgment and vindicated by Fr. Flynn’s decision to resign and not to fight her. Doubt is all that is left to those who have to unmake themselves, in order to stand up for what is right. Doubt is all there is, in the end, for those who have to challenge every authority in the world—including those who make the moral rules—to do what is right.
After all, when Sr. Aloysius succeeded in unseating Fr. Flynn, what happened? She went to the monsignor in authority over her, as the system required her to do. She told him what she had seen and heard.
Fr. Flynn then resigned. And an announcement came from the bishop’s office: he had been made the pastor of another parish (i.e., he had been promoted). And his pastoral charge included a parish school. Where, Sr. Aloysius knew, Fr. Flynn would be free to replicate the pattern that had come to mark his ministry: a pattern of preying on minors who turned to him as a religious authority figure for support.
The dynamics Shanley is describing in this film are, sadly, ones known all too well to anyone who has studied the crisis of sexual abuse of minors by clerics in the Catholic church. Priests who have abused youth have, for generations, been protected and promoted—from the top of the church. They have been transferred from parish to parish and permitted to replicate the abuse to which they are prone, as bishops and religious superiors refuse to inform parishioners of the priest’s history.
Those who have tried to blow the whistle and to stop the replication of abuse have become the victims. They have been told that they are troublemakers intent on destroying the church. They have been punished for speaking out. Those who experienced abuse by priests as youngsters who muster the courage to make their stories public often find themselves attacked by parishioners who will not believe that their priest is capable of wrongdoing, and who accuse the victim of having elicited her or his sexual abuse.
Adult victims of childhood sexual abuse by priests almost always find that bishops to whom they seek to tell their story will not meet with them. They are the enemy. When they press the church for any recompense—even an apology—they almost always find themselves confronted with lawsuits in which diocesan authorities take off the gloves, try to smear their reputations, use ruthless top-dollar attorneys to snare them in legal tangles.
Nuns like Sr. Aloysius have often found themselves in the situation the film sketches, when they dare to challenge the male authority figures of the church and seek to protect youngsters entrusted to their care. When they have tried to speak out, they have been silenced. When they have asked that the welfare of children be taken into account, they have been vilified. They have been reminded that their place is to obey and to pray, not to ask questions or to take moral stands.
“Doubt” is a parable about what happens when those who do not make the moral rules seek to live by those rules—and call the rule-makers to accountability to the moral rules they have imposed on others. The film is a story about the price one pays when one seeks to do the right thing, and in the process, disturbs the taken-for-granted power relationships that obtain in the culture in which the moral challenge is mounted.
“Doubt” is a story about what happens to women who stand up to male authority. In a world in which even women watching this movie can leave the theater still wondering why a kind, jovial, plump pastor (can anyone say Rick Warren?) would be beset by a harpy in black intent on bringing him down, with not a scrap or evidence on her side. With only her ravenous female need to be right . . . .
