The patron saint of journalists is St. Francis de Sales – whose feast is today, 24 January. The Holy Father’s annual message for the World Day of Social Communications is dated for the feast in his honor.
St. Francis (1567-1622) was certainly a writer, but not every writer is a journalist. He was assigned the patronage because, barred from entering his own city of Geneva by the Calvinist authorities, the Catholic bishop used instead the media of the time to reach his flock, writing pamphlets and spiritual letters – his Introduction to the Devout Life is a collection of those. While we await the proper patron saint of journalists – GK Chesterton – we already have unofficial patrons in St. Titus Brandsma and St. Maximilian Kolbe, who were proper journalists as well as priests.
Saints Titus and Maximilian were priests who considered journalism not only compatible with their priesthood, but essential to their mission. Kolbe founded a magazine, Knight of the Immaculata, which had an astonishing circulation of one million in 1938. While the circumstances of his martyrdom in Auschwitz are unrelated to journalism, Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz in the first place in large part due to his influence as a journalist.
Journalists and priests are both storytellers. We often think of “stories” as works of fiction, but journalists write nonfiction and file their “stories.” The priest, even more than the journalist, is a storyteller.
A recent murder mystery movie made that point well.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery premiered last September at the Toronto International Film Festival and then hit Netflix in December. It got considerable Catholic attention as the murder takes place in an upstate New York parish – Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude! The older monsignor is killed, and the young, newly ordained priest is a suspect.
It’s not much of a murder mystery, really, as most of the film is not concerned with the intricacies of the killing. It’s more a character study of the various players struggling to figure out the place of religion in a secular, even hostile, age. Given that the two main characters are priests, a lot of priests have commented on our cinematic portrayal.
All the priestly commentators I have seen focused on two scenes as key to the film – a telephone conversation where a distressed woman asks the priest to pray for her and, as one would expect, a dramatic confession scene. (The latter even includes the updated American formula for absolution, so give the writers credit for that.)
That’s fine if you think of priests as primarily leaders in prayer and as ministers of the sacraments. Which we are. But if we are primarily storytellers – and if you prefer cinematic priests played by Robert De Niro rather than Bing Crosby, as I do – then an introductory scene written by Rian Johnson is the most important one.
Detective Benoit Blanc arrives after the murder of Msgr. Wicks. He meets Father Jud, the young priest, and introduces himself, after a fashion, when Father Jud asks him if he is Catholic.
“No, very much not, no,” Blanc says. “Proud heretic. I kneel at the altar of the rational.”
“The architecture, that interests me,” Blanc says of the church itself. “I feel the grandeur, the. . .the mystery, the intended emotional effect. . . .And it’s like someone has shone a story at me that I do not believe. It’s built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairytale filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia and its justified untold acts of violence and cruelty while all the while, and still, hiding its own shameful acts. So, like an ornery mule kicking back, I want to pick it apart and pop its perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth I can swallow without choking.”
Against that indictment of the Church as a fantastic storyteller at odds with the truth, Father Jud speaks of the mystery at the very heart of the Church’s mission.
“You’re right,” he concedes. “It’s storytelling. And this church, it’s not medieval. We’re in New York. It’s Neo-Gothic 19th century. It has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame. . .and the rites and rituals and costumes, all of it. It’s storytelling. You’re right. I guess the question is do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true? That we can’t express any other way. . .except storytelling.”
“Touché, Padre,” replies Blanc. After all, what does a homicide detective do if not permit the murder victim to tell the story of his death?
The Church tells stories and the priest is her primary storyteller. No shame in that – much to the contrary! – if the stories are actually true.
That pivotal scene from Wake Up Dead Man prompted me to go back and read Presbyterorum Ordinis, Vatican II’s document on the priesthood. It was in the Catholic news last month; Pope Leo XIV put out a letter marking its sixtieth anniversary.
Early on it teaches that “priests have the primary duty of proclaiming the Gospel of God to all. In this way they fulfill the command of the Lord: ‘Going therefore into the whole world preach the Gospel to every creature’.”
It’s my favorite line in that document, but not everyone is enthused. The priority of proclamation, even over the sacraments, over leading worship that is truly right and just? That sounds rather low church Protestant.
It’s not. We are storytellers. The fairytales of which Blanc spoke begin “once upon a time” and Star Wars begins “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” neither of which are altogether different from “in the beginning.”
Objection to the primacy of proclamation is that preaching about the parables cannot be more important than offering the Holy Mass. After all, didn’t the Church have generations of “simplex priests” who could celebrate Mass but did not preach? She did, though she no longer does. Presbyterorum Ordinis more or less put an end to that.
Storytelling and the sacraments ought not be opposed. The sacraments are storytelling. So much so that the Church insists with great severity that the story be told exactly the right way. We call that valid “form”; the priest must use the correct sacramental formula.
To call a story “formulaic” is a literary criticism, but not if just the right formula is required for the story to make real what the story tells.
Jews do that at Passover, when the child asks his elders to tell him a story: Why is this night different from all other nights? The Jews know that telling just the right kind of story in just the right way makes that reality present. It is not fantastic at all. It is real.
The priest in the pulpit is a storyteller to be sure. It is a pity if he is a poor storyteller. At the altar he will tell another story. Not quite “in the beginning,” but “the day before He was to suffer” or “on the night He was betrayed.” The formula of absolution is a precis of the whole story of salvation.
Not every priest is a journalist, but all are storytellers. How could it be otherwise, when, in the beginning, was the Word?
