There Be Forgiveness
Posted by Rebecca Teti
in Reviews
on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 1:00 PM
Have you seen There Be Dragons?
I haven’t, and a few reviews from people I respect have suggested it’s not that successful as a film.
One complaint I’ve heard frequently is that if you’re looking for a biopic of St. Escriva, you’ll be disappointed. Though his life and character are apparently treated with realism and sensitivity, the bulk of the story actually centers on his foil, and many seem to think that’s not the most interesting part of the story.
This review from Robert Royal renewed my interest in the film, though.
He sees the film as not about either man, but about how reconciliation occurs when society has gone through an upheaval such as that of the Spanish Civil War, where atrocities have been committed by fellow citizens against each other.
Along the way, the review teaches me how little I know about that period of time, and how much my sense of the Spanish Church is conditioned by a Monty Python sketch:
In English-speaking countries, Spanish Catholicism is often portrayed as corrupt, tied to an exploitative upper class, and led by a hierarchy that was more concerned about social privileges than preaching the Gospel. Only an ideologue would deny that there’s evidence of all this and more. Dragons sometimes bends over backward to concede that the Republican revolutionaries had a point in their anger against the Church.
In secular circles, that’s much exaggerated and taken for granted, but here’s a lesser-known side of the story. Some of the Spanish hierarchy may have been corrupt, but none of them abandoned their posts when the violence hit. Every bishop in Republican territory was killed, except two, who happened to be outside the country. In Madrid-Alcalá, 1,118 priests died; 279 in Barcelona; 327 in Valencia, between a quarter and a third of priests in just those cities.
This in addition to the slaughter of whole convents, cloisters, seminaries, religious houses containing people who, of course, had done nothing wrong. When John Paul II asked dioceses around the world to report on people martyred in the twentieth century in preparation for the third Christian millennium, about half the files—6,000 or so—sent to the Commission on New Martyrs were from Spain. Some have claimed Spanish priests were crucified, though there is no solid evidence.
We do know that Christians were, for the first time since the ancient Roman spectacles, thrown to wild animals, this time bulls in the corrida. And priests, in a macabre variation on bullfighting custom, had their ears cut off for trophies after being killed in the ring. The British historian Hugh Thomas, a fair judge, said of Spain, “At no time in the history of Europe, or even perhaps of the world, has so passionate a hatred of religion and all its works been shown.”
That history is not much explored in the film, but Royal says what is explored is relevant to today’s culture clashes in Western countries:
One element that emerges convincingly from the film is how much public reconciliation depends on private forgiveness. There’s been a whole spate of forgiveness studies in recent years in psychological circles, arguing the benefits of forgiving, letting go, and moving on. Perhaps so, but, as we know, most real forgiveness depends on knowing you have things yourself to be forgiven for, and that emerges most forcefully in religious, not secular, contexts.
Royal doesn’t deny the film’s weaknesses, but seems to find in it a lesson about today’s culture wars:
The title There Be Dragons is drawn from the old maps of the world that suggested there were monsters in distant, as yet unexplored regions. The film applies the phrase to the dragons within every person, of whatever political stripe or religious persuasion. It “works” in the end because the youthful figure of the saint seems really to have deeply embraced the truth that the Church must be the Church of all the people and a source of reconciliation, especially where the divisions run deep among people related to one another. As a religious argument, it is consummate sense. In political terms, the picture is much cloudier and it is perhaps not by chance that Manolo, the old Republican opportunist, who is a kind of foil to José Maria in Dragons, only finds forgiveness and peace for his misdeeds decades later—on his deathbed.
So now I again want to see it.
Have you seen There Be Dragons? What did you think?
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