'Cabrini,' 'American Fiction,' & the American aversion to subtlety
+the impossibility of American Catholicism
The best novels are not, should not be, tendentious, expressing or promoting a special cause or program, no matter how worthy that cause or program…Moral realism attempts to establish morality in what is often its daunting complexity. Moral righteousness is content to reside in its own sense of self-superiority. [Good novels] depict the struggle not only to establish what is good, but to be good.
It’s not exactly news to anyone that I have a knee-jerk reaction to a particularly American brand of moralism. I often sing the praises of amoralists like Wilde and Paglia, who swing the pendulum in the opposite direction of our simplistic, nuance-averse, puritanical culture…though at heart I am not an amoralist, and recognize that this position–when unchecked–can lead to excessive decadence, nihilism, and even fascism (Wilde eventually recognized this, and I hope Paglia will too).
There are several reasons I have such an intense urge to swing the pendulum the other way. I grew up being told by my teachers that I should aspire to moral heroism, that I should will myself to always do the right thing and to be on the right side of history. In college, I was told that to say or do something politically incorrect is to commit a sin crying out to heaven for vengeance. And when I first started exploring Christianity more seriously, I met numerous people for whom religious faith consisted of a set of moral dogmas to be adhered to and sentimental pietistic practices. No one seemed to be able to reckon with Genesis 2 or Romans 7:19.
Eventually, I met people for whom morality was something secondary, flowing out of an ontological and aesthetic awareness of who they were and their place in the universe. Such an attitude toward ethics was not only more appealing, it was also more coherent–it lent itself to being lived in a more realistic way. Whereas the moralists I met–both the religious and secular ones–ended up becoming deeply narcissistic or anti-social, finding the weight of their moralism impossible to bear, took to constantly pointing the finger at the sins of others (or of “the system”) and looking to absolve themselves of their own responsibility, clinging to claims about the need for “self-care” and “protecting my peace” as an escape.
This attitude, which prioritizes ethical matters of what we “ought” to do over ontological questions about what “is,” about the nature of “being,” bled over into the way people I knew engaged with art and culture. For such moralists, the value of a work of art is to be judged by its moral expediency or usefulness. If the message, the content, is “good” or “correct,” then to hell with the form. A poorly written book is good if it tells us to think the right things. I think of a professor who told us that the Spanish film Marcelino Pan y Vino–despite being an utter masterpiece of cinema–was bad because it was used as fascist propaganda (a debatable claim). And I remember attending a screening of the atrociously corny film October Baby at campus ministry, which my classmates claimed to be deeply moved by because of its (overt, in-your-face) pro-life message.
Khachiyan: You have to prepare [when watching most films today] for the woke truck coming to run you over until your skull is splattered on the pavement.
Greenwald: Yeah. They always preach and moralize in a crude way.
Khachiyan: They may as well include a voice over spelling out for viewers who the heroic, virtuous characters are…
Nekrasova: [There’s a difference] between art that’s prepackaged with a correct interpretation and art that generates interesting debates without paralyzing open discussion.
Greenwald: That’s when art is most interesting, when it can take actual parts of life and make you think and make you have doubts about your own initial impressions and reactions and judgments instead of just having to digest messaging.
This past weekend, I saw two movies that were perhaps completely antithetical to each other. In American Fiction, the main character Theolonius “Monk” Ellison complains about so-called “woke” literature, which is bestowed a stamp of approval for having a blatant, straight-forward moral message, despite often being quite poorly written. While working on his own novel, he says that he doesn’t want the protagonist “to do some grandiose speech spoon-feeding everyone the moral of the story. There is no moral. That’s the idea. I like the ambiguity.”
Anti-woke reactionaries, often of a conservative and/or religious persuasion, love to rag on how tedious woke films, shows, and books are. Yet they often forget that woke posturing is merely a secularized version of a certain strain of puritanical Protestant Christianity. Despite having foregone explicit references to God or Scripture, it retains the same moralism, the same simplistic, Manichean metaphysical undergirding…rendering them two sides of the same coin.
Before I tear apart the second film I saw, which perfectly fits Ellison’s characterization of stories full of “grandiose speeches,” “moral spoon-feeding,” and a lack of “moral ambiguity,” allow me to offer a disclaimer. I am personally very close to Mother Cabrini. If you’re close friends with me or was ever a student in one of my classes, I probably have taken you to the Cabrini Shrine in Inwood, where the remains of her body are on display on the altar. (You should also read my reflection on a field trip to the Cabrini shrine, and A.W. Strouse’s reflection on the shrine and immigration.)
Mother Cabrini is one of those saints whose extraordinary feats can only be attributed to something miraculous, to something beyond any human being’s most noble of intentions or earnest efforts. Seriously, how can a small, sickly person–who was told by her doctors that she wouldn’t live past her thirties (she died at 67)–found over 67 hospitals across North and South America with no regular source of income? People like her make me wonder how secular humanists chock up such supernatural acts of charity to mere “benevolence.”
I am extremely grateful that her story, which unfortunately is known to too few people, is being told in mainstream theaters thanks to Angel Studios’ massive budget and marketing smarts. I hope that all people–Catholic, non-Catholic, even atheists–get the chance to hear Cabrini’s story, and are inspired to aspire to live a life of such grandiosity.
All that being said, I must admit to how painful it was to watch Angel Studios’ rendering of her story. The film smacked of all of my worst pet peeves: blatant and simplistic moralizing, kitschy sentimental piety, and a flimsy commitment to artistic integrity. It managed to take the story of an Italian Catholic and pass it through the food processor of the American Protestant imagination…so as to make it easier to digest for American audiences, I suppose.
Angel Studios generated controversy for its release of The Sound of Freedom, which was less a film and more propaganda against child trafficking. Look, child trafficking is horrible. And despite the outlandish musings of certain fringe conspiracy theorists, the fact points to the possibility that influential elites do indeed participate in some dark, organized behaviors–whether you want to chock it up to ritualistic sacrifices is on you. But unsurprisingly, the film drew ire from liberal critics mainly for fanning the flames of reactionary Q-Anon types, but also for its lack of artistic integrity. Angel Studios, which is run by vaguely non-denominational, Protestant-esque Christians, seems to operate off the assumption taken up by many “woke” artists today that the true value of a work of art is in its capacity to impart to viewers a “good” or “correct” message, rather than making a piece of art that is beautiful in itself.
I’ve criticized this tendency–both of conservative Christians and SJWs–on numerous occasions. This theme has appeared in my reviews of Rosalia’s MOTOMAMI, White Lotus, You People, Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos, The Passion of the Christ, Hallmark’s gay Christmas movies, the English translation of Pasolini’s the Gospel According to Matthew, Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi, Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, as well as in podcast episodes with Matt Binder and Jordan Castro.
It also made up a significant part of our discussion during Holy Lit!, where Matt Binder brought up Becca Rothfeld’s Liberties essay against “Sanctimony Literature.” I argued my usual Paglian-Wildean point about the amorality of art, which Tara Isabella Burton compellingly challenged, pointing to examples like Houllebecq and other decadent or nihilistic artists who have inspired some truly heinous ideas and behaviors (see more in her book Self-Made).
My main purpose of pushing Paglia and Wilde’s line of thought is to emphasize that art should not “spoon feed” the right moral conclusions to viewers. Rather, it should provoke us to contemplate the nature of humanity, morality, and God…and to arrive at the answers ourselves–trusting in our intelligence and good will rather than spoon-feeding us like dumb children. Conveying a “good” moral message does not make up for making a crappy piece of art. It especially pisses me off when Christians do this. Good Christian art should not be preachy. A good piece of Christian art should bank on its inherent beauty to provoke viewers to pursue the Good, rather than telling them what is Good.
It’s hard to do this with movies based on the Bible or the lives of saints. Such stories don’t really render themselves to subtlety. Some movies have accomplished this: Pasolini’s Gospel of Matthew, Therese by Alain Cavalier, Of Gods and Men, Kieslowski’s Dekalog. Thus, I don’t underestimate the difficulty of adapting Mother Cabrini’s story to film.
Yet the film’s style of simplistic moralizing, pitting people on good versus bad sides, disallowing space for complexity, nuance, gray areas, realism–especially on political issues–whiffed too much of American puritanical dualism for me. This Manichaean rendering of the battle of good vs. evil collapses the tensions that exist within the Catholic moral and social imagination. Mother Cabrini had to deal with the tension between freedom and obedience, male and female, the objective and the subjective, hierarchy and equality, bureaucracy and spontaneity head on, but at no point did she settle for simplistic solutions.
The movie shoves polemical posturing down viewers’ throats. Surely, Christians have a moral obligation to pay special attention to the needs of immigrants–which Jesus himself was. But the simplistic sloganeering of the movie ignores the need for reasonable and measured immigration policy fueled by a healthy dose of realism, and not purely abstract, idealistic moralism. Such idealism at the cost of realism continues to plague too many of our “culture war” debates in the US (see Thomas Fazi’s helpful piece on balancing idealism and realism).
Poorly written novels—no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.
Now a statement like this creates problems. An individual may be highly edified by a sorry novel because he doesn't know any better. We have plenty of examples in this world of poor things being used for good purposes. God can make any indifferent thing, as well as evil itself, an instrument for good; but I submit that to do this is the business of God and not of any human being.
A good example of a very indifferent novel being used for some good purpose is The Foundling, by Cardinal Spellman. It's nobody's business to judge Cardinal Spellman except as a novelist, and as a novelist he's a bit short. You do have the satisfaction of knowing that if you buy a copy of The Foundling, you are helping the orphans to whom the proceeds go; and afterwards you can always use the book as a doorstop. But what you owe yourself here is to know that what you are helping are the orphans and not the standards of Catholic letters in this country. Which you prefer to do, if it must be a matter of choice, is up to you.
-Flannery O’Connor
This all begs the question of whether Americans are capable of living Catholicism authentically without collapsing it into a puritanical Protestant paradigm, on which America is founded. Paglia often decried how the American Catholic parishes she attended whiffed too much of the cringe, pandering, and aesthetically drab style of Protestant parishes, which were drastically different from the Italian Catholic parish her immigrant parents took her to as a child (see her interview with Fr. James Martin and her essays in Vamps and Tramps). This cringe, overly pietistic, sentimental, and moralistic tone continues to pervade much of American Catholic life…especially youth groups. And despite its lack of integrity, I’ve noted frequently how “Dimes Square Catholicism” offers a way out of the cringe rendering of Catholicism.
Of course, to claim that Americans are inherently incapable of living Catholicism is hyperbolic. There are other pragmatic factors that need to be taken into account, like the fact that toward the end of the 19th century, the Church’s mostly Irish bishops in the US tried to Americanize the Church in order to gain legitimacy in the WASP establishment, and thus downplayed much of the sacramental and “ethnic” elements of Catholicism. Cabrini faces this, as the film portrays, when confronting the Irish-American Archbishop of New York.
On another note, when have you ever heard an Italian woman whining about anything…let alone about the sexism and xenophobia she faces? Paglia notes on several occasions being taken aback by the tendency of suburban, middle-class, Anglo/assimilated women who constantly need to point the finger at someone and complain about how unfairly they are treated…expecting parochial figures/institutions to step in and solve the problem for them. Such an attitude toward obstacles and injustices was foreign to the women in Paglia’s Italian family. Anna Khachiyan also has a great bit on how AOC emulates this suburban white girl style in the episode “Ocasio Crytez,” despite posturing herself as a working class Latinx from the Bronx.
Italian women generally don’t whine about their problems—they “deal” with them, and don’t take shit from anyone. They are not afraid to take on challenges—which often include sexist men—head-on. To the movie’s credit, it clearly portrayed that she never took no for an answer, and let nothing stop her–in true Italian Girl Boss fashion. But the endless whining about “I am a woman! I am Italian!” and her tirades against xenophobia, racism, and classism…seriously? It leaves me wondering how many Italian women Alejandro Monteverde has really spent time with.
Also, I wanted to highlight the part where the sexist, xenophobic mayor quips the ridiculous line “it’s a shame you aren’t a man. You would’ve been a great man.” To which Cabrini replies, “a man could never do what we women do.” As much as it’s meant to be another simplistic feminine slogan, it is actually quite loaded, and hints at the Church’s later development of “New” or difference feminist discourse (see Edith Stein, JPII’s writings on the topic). It also echoes much of Paglia’s stuff on gender. The reality is, no, no man could pull off what a Cabrini did, because to be frank, men can’t be mothers, men lack the feminine genius. Yet on the other hand, women cannot do what men can do, because they cannot be fathers. But we’ll leave that can of worms for another day.
Also, the film reminds us about how complex American construals of race really are…that things really are not so black and white. Up until the turn of the century, Italians were not white. Part of it was due to our swarthy complexion, part of it was due to our Catholicism, our speaking a foreign language, and our uncouth behavior and social norms (at least in the south). But we were able to “buy” our whiteness, thanks in part to the federal recognition of Columbus Day.
And while we continue to be culturally rather distinct from Anglos, we too often ignore our white privilege (hate the term as much as you want, but you know it’s real). And many Italians are remain hypocritically indifferent or hostile to the struggle for equality of those who are currently not considered white…but we’ll also save that can of worms for later. (For more on this, see my pieces on Columbus Day, Rick Caruso being “latino,” and our pod interviews with Chloe Valdary, Bill Melone, and Jeremy Klemin.)
On a more personal note, not everyone (including me) has the capacity or the calling to do what she did–some are less courageous, less driven, more prone to accepting rejection and rerouting. And that doesn’t necessarily make someone less holy. We all have different temperaments. The question is one of the intensity with which one offers the fullness of their heart, their mind, their strengths and weaknesses, their circumstances, to God, trusting fully in his providence. So while few of us are going to go around founding orphanages with zero funds, we all have the capacity to live our lives as an offering to God the way Mother Cabrini did.
Cabrini’s sanctity is not due to her heroism, her extraordinary accomplishments, or her refusal to take no for an answer. Rather, it was in her willingness to offer everything wholeheartedly to God, every struggle, every desire, every setback, every ache and pain.
As much as the film does place a great emphasis on her determination, her courage and moral heroism—and downplays the extent to which she relied on divine grace—I think that despite not portraying much of her personal spiritual life, the film does implicitly make clear that Mother Cabrini’s accomplishments were thanks to something greater than her own power…as no human being could have done what she did relying on their own strength.
I acknowledge that I watched the film with a prejudice, and was unusually harsh in my review. But I wholeheartedly recommend that you see it. The production quality may be mediocre, but the story itself makes it worth seeing.
And I’d recommend you watch American Fiction afterwards to relieve yourself of the intense moralizing of Cabrini. The plot will remind you that morality is not black and white, and that people—while called to aspire to the heights of moral integrity and love of God and neighbor—are complicated, and that it’s through our complexity, through the gray areas and straight up failures, that God can swoop in to redeem us.
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Spot on. A pleasure as always