Mark Batey introduces his screenplay about the life of Fr John Gerard.
Cancel culture, thought police, identity politics. These may sound like modern concepts. Yet across cent- uries and continents examples of radical social engineering abound, with the airbrushing of history and purging of tradition. Top-down cultural revolution, by a totalitarian state or a powerful supranational lobby, requires psychological manipulation, intimidation, threats, fines and even brute force. The imposition of sweeping new ideologies and the overturning of established ways of thinking and behaving generate predictable societal chaos and trauma, and often unanticipated resistance.
In England, we’ve been here before. The dissolution of the monasteries, for centuries an integral part of local communities, was just a beginning. As the 16th century proceeded religious persecution became more targeted, more personal. The safe spaces of the Tudor age were created not to keep people from being offended, but from being killed. St Nicholas Owen’s handiwork in Catholic houses managed to conceal clergy from frequent raids by agents of the regime, saving them from arrest, imprisonment and likely execution.
In June 1962, the influential Jesuit Philip Caraman received a visit from award-winning film director Fred Zinnemann. Caraman was engaged in promoting the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Zinnemann asked him “about subjects with a religious interest … with a view to making a film”. It was not religion per se that interested Zinnemann – whenever his films did touch on religious themes, they did so from a some-what sceptical, rationalist perspective. Rather, it was an individual’s integrity to self that animated Zinnemann’s work. His best films feature characters forced to confront their conscience and undergo tests of moral courage. They face – and face down – public and private pressures of all types, from the social pressure of the group to the ultimatums of absolutist authority.
Caraman suggested two names; one was Rupert Mayer, a Jesuit priest and leading figure of the Catholic resist- ance to Nazism in Munich, who was beatified in 1987. Zinnemann opted instead for Thomas More, and made A Man for all Seasons. What would Zinnemann have made of Caraman’s other recommendation, the Jesuit John Gerard? Born in 1564, Gerard was one of the clergy whom Owen’s craft helped keep alive during his under-cover work as a missionary priest in England. Later, at the direction of his superiors, he wrote up the story of his life. Caraman had translated Gerard’s autobiography from the original Latin. It is a vivid account of a remarkably brave and resourceful man.
At a spiritual level, Gerard’s mission is the salvation of the souls of his fell- ow countrymen. At an existential lev- el, Gerard’s fight – and that of the community he covertly ministered to, including many heroic women – is against the destruction of common heritage, memory and identity. At heart is the question of truth: who owns it? What level of sacrifice is justified in defending it? His story pre- sents parallels with attacks on freed- om of thought and conscience in many countries today, including England. What happens when state security, or the enforced ideology of a privileged minority, are at odds with individual conscience? How should people resp- ond when an increasingly intolerant regime or powerful lobby seeks to har-ass and bully them into compliance?
The reactions of the Catholic community of Elizabethan England were paradigmatic. Would a director today find Gerard’s story worthy of being brought to life in film? I hope so, and have written a screenplay to that end. The script has been enhanced and endorsed by one of the UK’s leading, Oscar-winning screen writers; it is a swashbuckling adventure film with daring escapes, secret messages, ingenious priest hides, costly betrayals, interrogation, torture and execution. Yet, in today’s world a film about a priest is a tough sell. Many production houses simply “don’t do religion”, particularly Christianity – even if the Christian in question is a man engaged in a life-or-death struggle for something he believes in.
This habitual resistance to faith-based films makes it difficult to get a screenplay read, let alone financed and produced. That the script has received a more favourable reading from the two reviewers who are Catholic is per- haps predictable. But the film has to appeal to a non-Catholic, indeed non- faith audience to succeed. Appreciat-ing the film should not be conditional on understanding the Catholic and his- torical references; naturally, though, that helps. Gerard’s faith-filled hero-ism did not resonate with the script reader for a UK director.
Notwithstanding the aversion to religion in the film industry, hope springs eternal. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ became the highest-grossing religious movie ever. If there is “properly no history, only biography”, then the positively countercultural story of a missionary priest during the British penal era needs telling, and soon.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.