Television TV drama looks at city priest
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
In the hierarchy of Catholic popular
culture and the literary mythology of the priesthood, the city priests -- the
hoodlum priest, the waterfront priest -- are the
heroes. They are, bluntly, the real priests.
And myth and reality are not far apart.
They, like Jesus, belong to the poor, the victims, the junkies,
the lepers of contemporary society. In a way that their suburban parish,
university campus and diocesan chancery counterparts are not, they are daily
face to face with the lost souls whom the prophets and gospels single out as
the Lords favored ones.
If they once had shirts with cuffs and cufflinks, they have given
them to beggars; if they have dinner at a good restaurant, it is because an old
friend gives them a treat; if they have a few bucks to hand to a street beggar,
it is because a stranger after Mass has pressed a $20 bill into their hand and
said, Father, use this for the poor.
They live alone and they are worked to death.
Fr. John P. McNamees Diary of A City Priest attracted
deserved attention when it first appeared and now has become the basis of a TV
drama.
Its model, of course, is Georges Bernanos great classic,
The Diary of a Country Priest (1936), which was not really a diary, but
a novel in diary form, of a naive and saintly young French curé who
embraces poverty -- he would be uncomfortable having a good restaurant meal
while his parishioners were hungry -- and dies alone of cancer, struggling to
love as Christ calls him to do. French director Robert Bressons 1950 film
is as bleak and brilliant as the book.
McNamees story leads us through about a year of his lonely
life in St. Malachys, an inner-city, African-American, Philadelphia
parish, with a cadre of white former parishioners and friends who return for
special events and respond to his desperate fund-raising appeals.
He must deal with 18 to 20 callers a day, drug addicts who need a
few dollars for another fix and car fare to transport them to a
job, or hungry families to be fed with canned goods from the parish pantry.
When hes not answering the door or dealing with beggars on the street,
hes listening to the pain of old ladies in the local hospital or
accompanying parishioners to court.
Fr. John lets his diary -- which he expects to publish -- know he
is not 100 percent happy with the church: So many of his friends drop out of
the priesthood; he sees the value of celibacy (it frees him to serve), but he
is very lonely; he is depressed that young men do not want to follow him into
the priesthood; his fellow priests give irrelevant sermons and have no
comprehension of what ordinary people must endure.
He prays and he reads. Simone Weil is quoted ad nauseam. Flannery
OConnor, Graham Greene, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Leon Bloy,
Commonweal, NCR and John Henry Newman are almost as present to
him as the children in his school.
He escapes briefly to Ireland for a month of retreat and renewal
but is soon back in what the reader, perhaps more than the writer, sees as an
ultimately destructive grind. Of course, he does not tell us his whole life.
But he makes it clear that at 58 he sees himself as getting old and worn out.
And he keeps blowing up. Under pressure he loses his temper and screams at
people.
I close the book with two questions. First, how can the
Philadelphia archdiocese -- or any diocese -- leave a man alone for 20 years in
a job that, no matter how well he does it, is destroying him? Perhaps one
answer is that no ambitious clergyman wants a thankless job like that.
Secondly, how can a book that is really a collection of
disconnected episodes, with no developed characters other than the narrator,
and that has no unified narrative -- no beginning, middle and end -- be a
successful TV drama?
Philadelphia writer and director Eugene Martin, whom Father Mac
baptized 37 years ago, and who has won awards in various film festivals, has
tried to stay faithful to both the book and its inspiration, Bressons
film, even though there is no way that low-budget color video, with the
verisimilitude of home movies, can match the unrelenting grimness of
Bressons black and white.
Martin involved Fr. Mac, his star David Morse, and Fr. Macs
assistant, Sr. Cecelia, in writing the script. He filmed interiors at St.
Malachys itself and exteriors in another neighborhood that seemed
cinematically more authentic.
He toned down the character of Father Mac, made him 10 years
younger, subdued to the point of phlegmatic blandness -- as if on tranquilizers
-- as he trudges through each day interrupted every five minutes by hungry
vagrants at the door, phone calls in the night, or his secretary who pops her
head into his bathroom where he sits trying to write the diary on which the
film is based.
As in the book, there is -- refreshingly -- not a word on the
controversies that obsess todays Catholicism: birth control, abortion,
excommunications, womens ordination, pedophilia, celibacy, clerical
infighting or liberation theology. This, of course, could be attributed to
either the narrowness of Father Macs vision, or to a desire to sell the
book by not offending traditional readers, or to his conviction that nothing
matters more than his poverty-stricken neighbors.
The one intrusion of the outside world is a reference to the many
thousands of dollars spent to fly Philadelphians to Rome to celebrate their new
cardinals red hat when Father Mac is trying to come up with bail money to
keep a parishioner out of jail. Yet, Father Mac is, fortunately, worldly enough
to allow himself that fleeting vacation in Ireland, which grants him some brief
quiet but no lasting relief from his daily grind.
The directors challenge in a made-for-TV film like this is
to both portray a real live person, who, we know from his book, is a complex
and troubled man, and also dramatize his highly intellectual spirituality.
Here he only half succeeds. In a gimmick more suited for
Touched by an Angel than inspired by Bresson, the saints who people
his diary appear in person to cheer him up. St. Malachy himself descends from
his stained glass window and promises those tickets to Ireland. St. Theresa (a
blond), who has apparently caught up on her reading in heaven, quotes Dorothy
Day and Thomas Merton, advising him to be there for his
neighborhood. St. Francis of Assisi stops by to fix the boiler and do church
repairs. This is a sentimentality to which the book never stoops. But this is
TV.
And how can the TV version end a story that, in print, does not
actually end -- in the sense of closure -- but stops? Answer: very well. How
does a worked-to-death priest, drained dry by the endless line of poor black
faces at his kitchen door, keep going? By prayer. The Eucharist. By the love of
a handful of co-workers and friends. By the presence of grace in rare moments
of tangible success -- a college scholarship for one of his young men, the
wedding of one of his staff. Father Mac describes himself as a most
incomplete man, but as the bride and groom process down the aisle at the
end of Mass, we know that the priests completeness is
accomplished in the love of the married couple, and that the applause that
arises from the congregation is for him as well.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is the Jesuit Community Professor
of the Humanities at St. Peters College in Jersey City. His e-mail
address is raymondschroth@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, March 30,
2001
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