Charity in La Veuve de Saint-Pierre

La Veuve de Saint-Pierre ("The Widow of Saint-Pierre"), a 2000 French film directed by Patrice Leconte, is a fine exploration of the problem of charity and a beautiful period piece. The setting is 1849 in a French colony of islands off Newfoundland. Two assailants brutally murder a man and one, Nell, is condemned to die by guillotine ("veuve" is also the slang term for guillotine and offers a double-entendre for the title). His accomplice is killed by a mob on the way to prison. The colony must wait for the apparatus and find an executioner, a matter of months.

Captain Jean has custody of the prisoner. Meanwhile, his wife, called Madame La, takes on the prisoner as her protégé. She is determined in her plans to rehabilitate him, which includes gardening, helping with community projects, and learning to read. Her husband is wholly devoted to her to the neglect of his duties. The townspeople befriend the condemned, and all but the island's intransigent governors are content. By the time the ship arrives with the guillotine after a long winter and a hapless refugee recruited as executioner, the city is up in arms.

Two men in the story will see a larger picture in the conflict, which is a charity that is connected to destiny and not simply a willful project. Such charity is ultimately impossible without sacrifice.

To Kill for Love

Chris is taking his friend and former colleague Larry on a duck-hunting trip. Larry will need some assistance, because the former college history professor has multiple sclerosis and less than a year to live. They once hunted together often, but this will be their last time, if Chris has his way.

Chris is divorced and in love with Larry's wife, Rachel. Larry, after losing his job, his body and periodically his mind to the illness, has expressed the wish to die. Chris plans to oblige him. This much you know practically from the first chapter of Jon Hassler's book The Love Hunter. Hassler, a Minnesota novelist, died last March of a Parkinson's-like illness.

Chris, a school psychologist, is not a criminal type by any ordinary standard. He can be careless: he nearly shot off his friend's head during their first hunting expedition. He was responsible for his ex-wife's dog getting killed in traffic, though he has a good explanation for it.

Rachel (for the most part) and their son Bruce are devoted to Larry in his illness. Her relationship with Larry's best friend is complicated. Larry needs Chris, but Chris' attentions toward Rachel strain Larry's already fragile mental state. Rachel, an actress, keeps Chris guessing. He figures once Larry is out of the way the problem will be solved.

The book is a dialogue on love, and Chris and Rachel have different theories. Rachel sees a continuity between what her husband was and what he is by now with love as the constant. Chris, who admits to his emptiness, sees love as a blind attraction.

Love, according to Chris, was that heedless dash toward what we believe is the source of our happiness, never mind if the source proves, when we get there, to be nothing but a squawk box.

The details of the story are precious. This is a messy illness, and Larry's grief is harrowing. Chris wants to keep things in hand, but events never go according to plan. And life itself will intervene in a very satisfying manner.

Damien of Molokai

I watched the 1999 film based on Father Damien's life the other day in proximity to a provocative post of Deacon Scott's, "The Last Judgment- the decisive image of hope, not terror". It is a reflection on Spe Salvi, and I will just quote his quote from the Pope's most recent encyclical (43), though the entire post is worth reading and thinking over:

God has given himself an 'image': in Christ who was made man. In him who was crucified, the denial of false images of God is taken to an extreme. God now reveals his true face in the figure of the sufferer who shares man's God-forsaken condition by taking it upon himself. This innocent sufferer has attained the certitude of hope: there is a God, and God can create justice in a way that we cannot conceive, yet we can begin to grasp it through faith. Yes, there is a resurrection of the flesh. There is justice. There is an 'undoing' of past suffering, a reparation that sets things aright. For this reason, faith in the Last Judgement is first and foremost hope—the need for which was made abundantly clear in the upheavals of recent centuries. I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favour of faith in eternal life. The purely individual need for a fulfilment that is denied to us in this life, for an everlasting love that we await, is certainly an important motive for believing that man was made for eternity; but only in connection with the impossibility that the injustice of history should be the final word does the necessity for Christ's return and for new life become fully convincing.

The thirst for justice is evident in the life of someone like Father Damien. He volunteered to go to the island of Molokai, a desperate place where the sick were consigned for the remainder of their lives, without adequate housing and medical care. To be sent there was a death sentence, since the residents were put on permanent quarantine. Not only leprosy, but typhoid and smallpox had scourged the Hawaiian Islands, and up to 20% of the population contracted these life-threatening illnesses.

Once Father Damien arrived and saw the conditions, he spent the rest of his life ministering to his flock of some thousand inhabitants. He tended the sick, built hospitals and constructed coffins with his own hands. He contended with the rogues in the place who stole and kidnapped girls. The priest was able to avail of connections in Europe to get the story out of the needs of these people and was able to persuade the royalty of Hawaii to have compassion on them.

The hardest part to understand is the injustice with which Damien was treated by his own superiors, even more than the local thugs or indifferent government bureaucrats. The Lord promised persecutions, and Damien received these from his own brothers. This didn't stop him from insisting that he needed sisters to take care of the orphans, who lived there like feral cats, practically out of contact with caring adults. He begged for a means to have confession for himself, when he wasn't allowed to return to the mainland, and the film shows him confessing in French from a boat to his bishop. When he became ill with leprosy himself, he asked for a replacement. For all these things he continually prayed, at times thinking he wasn't heard. Most egregiously, he was accused of impropriety with the native women, since some still believed that leprosy was a stage of syphilis. It was Robert Louis Stevenson who came to his defense when some pastors spread accusations against the priest.

The motivations of the superiors can be difficult to fathom, as in the film The Mission. It may be simply jealousy for what one cannot do oneself. A young doctor who visited Molokai admitted to Father Damien that he could not stay and work because he was getting married. But he promised to return, and he did so often. His humility about his capacity allowed him to be a friend rather than a hindrance to the priest's work.

The wheat and tares grow up together; without this, there would be no freedom. Even if a saint can spend his or her life bringing a bit of justice and love to others through adhesion to the suffering Christ, then the promise has to be much greater than this for all those who did not receive good in their lifetimes. This hope points to a complete answer to all the need of humanity.

Odd Holocaust Thriller

The 2006 Dutch film Zwartboek, or The Black Book, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is exciting but disturbing for its amoral plot. The tagline is: "To fight the enemy, she must become one of them," wholly appropriate for a spy movie. As with the best portrayals of human nature, the lines blur between the good guys and the bad. But even given that, the moral faultline never settles. The press was divided on the film in the Netherlands.

The strange depiction of Christians cannot go unnoted. They are, without exception, bigoted and cruel. A Christian resistance fighter will not shoot to save friends, but only when the enemy blasphemes. A family sheltering a young Jewish woman forces her to memorize Gospel verses in order to receive a meal. After the war, a "Christian" mob abuses those who cooperated with the enemy. This is a strange and suspiciously ideological treatment of Christians as violent fundamentalists, given the country's rescue of some 5000 Jews from the Nazis.

More Dutch have been honored by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, as `righteous gentiles' than from any other country" (Survival and Resistance: The Netherlands Under Nazi Assault).

Carice van Houten who plays Rachel is a winning heroine who is quick-witted and able to subdue her natural feelings to take up the task at hand. Sebastian Koch is sympathetic as the German official Ludwig Müntze with a tragic story of his own.

It is no surprise that the Resistance may also be infiltated by spies, and so-called friends may profit from the plight of the Jews. Then too enemies can turn out to be the only true friends. Still, overall the plot is capricious in its contortions as bitter betrayals are counteracted by surprising alliances. No one appears to act from principle, but only for personal motives. In the end, only individual survival and revenge prevail.