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Claudel wrote:

I am genuinely puzzled by all the positive attention this film has been receiving from commenters here, especially those who, with or without good reason, regard themselves as tough-minded.

I bought the book Catholics upon its first release here in the States about forty years ago. It was, if I recall, a Book of the Month Club selection—a very big deal back then, when reading a book was not something people did to take a break from cruising the Internet for predigested information and instant knowledgeability.

Brian Moore, the author, was a most accomplished writer and a very graceful one, too. What's more, his having a good ear for speech in general and for the jargon of conciliarist publicists and propagandists (whether then or now) in particular lends a tone of instant recognizability to the debate that the novel enshrines. The problem is that the debate concerns not whether conciliarism or the old faith better represents God's truth or even whether any continuity remains between the new and the old faith but rather whether the psychological needs of people at large are better met by what the Irish American papal legate or the old abbot is plugging—put bluntly, which option has the more utility for the public: still more kumbaya or a return to smells and bells?

My recollection of the movie (actually a British teleplay) is pretty dim—I watched it just the once, when it was shown for the first time on US television—but what I do quite vividly recall about it is less any departure from the style or focus of the novel (there wasn't any) than the impact that brilliant acting (Trevor Howard's) can make when it engages with laughably bad acting (Martin Sheen's). I suppose I can see why one would wish to think of Howard's abbot as defending the substance of the true faith, not simply its accidents—who in his right mind, after all, would ever want to associate himself with anything uttered by such a rotten representation of a transparent phony as Sheen's Kinsella?—but the abbot doesn't defend that substance because he's lost belief in it.

A reader of the book would have a much harder time tugging the wool over his own eyes, there being on the printed page no ruggedly gorgeous scenery, no fancy camera work, no comforting Gregorian noises on the soundtrack playing in the background, and no classy acting by the guys togged out as monks. Even with all these distractions, surely one or two other commenters should have noticed that, to draw an analogy from political science, they were looking at a teleplay that amounted to a debate between an archliberal and a neocon: while they agree that Divine Truth is nonexistent and Christian belief is delusional, the former contends that all, for their own good, must be compelled to see the emptiness of their illusions/delusions, and the latter argues that a world without illusions is unlivable for the great mass of men and women. (Paging Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss! Professor Strauss, call your office.)

To return, again and finally, to the book, which interests me infinitely more than a silly TV program, I repeat that it is a very fine thing of its kind, perhaps even a minor masterpiece within the genre of short fiction. But it is a work descriptive of a conflict in which neither the protagonist nor his principal antagonist stands for anything Traditional Catholics claim to believe in. That is, Brian Moore's Catholics is a fictional treatment of a subject about as relevant to the desire for the reconversion of Rome to the Faith as the matter of the latest entry in the X-men or Star Trek or Spider-Man franchise.

My advice to Trad parents who think this is a good movie to show to their kids is as follows: learn to think otherwise!