Last evening I watched the 1936 movie, San Francisco starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jeanette McDonald (no relationship, I don’t think). It is a musical/drama/disaster picture and for the time, the disaster scenes of the 1906 earthquake are extremely well produced special effects and without computer technology.
Spencer Tracy plays a priest and Clark Gable a very worldly, shall we say promiscuous, rich capitalist. The two are best friends. Gable is an atheist. They box together and it is clear in the movie that there is a platonic love and affection between the two.
The priest never interferes in the life of Gable. They are, nonetheless, friends. (Tracy’s only interference is when he sees Gable trying to sexually exploit his girlfriend, Jeanette McDonald). Because of that, Gable socks his friend in the face, knocking the priest out and giving him a bloody lip. Gable is clearly conflicted about what he has done to his friend in a fit of anger, but later he sees that his best friend holds no grudges against him, another example of Christian love and humility.
Gable also calls the priest by his first name, never uses “Father.” I think this might have been controversial in 1936 and seen as disrespectful, but one knows that Gable respects his best friend and the priest respects Gable. Perhaps both live vicariously through the other. Gable longs for faith, although he mocks it, but the priest’s example and the faith of others in the movie, especially during the disaster scenes, move the atheist to faith and prayer, repentance brought about by conversion where the only preaching is the kindness and example of others including his best friend the priest.
It really is a marvelous movie with deep religious themes but also licentiousness and sin.
The rigid priests I have known, could never be like the Tracy character in the movie. (In fact, Tracy as a priest works in a poor parish which takes care of the poor and homeless and he physically cares for injured and dying people after the earthquake disaster scenes.)
Tracy is the kind of priest that Pope Francis wants. Tracy wears a cassock, tights for the boxing scene with Gable who is wearing a 1936 version of a speedo. Tracy also wears a clerical suit.
Tracy isn’t just about liturgy and liturgical accouterments and clerical finery or a church mouse, praying constantly. He seems to have a well rounded life.
I think we need to make a distinction between introversion and extraversion compared to rigidity or flexibility. I think what Pope Francis wants is human priests, not liturgical machines.
Tracy is a pre-Vatican II ideal priest depicted as such in a 1936 movie.
2 comments:
But back then priests could be both spiritual and manly.
Note how much respect the Church garnered even in Hollywood before Vatican Disaster II?
Just like another myth that all nuns were mean (they were a tiny minority) most pre-Vatican II prietss were fun guys having grown up in households with large families that knew how to relate to people. Very few fit the rigid mold that is being peddled by the left today.
TJM:
Agreed. The priests I knew as a boy were a different breed altogether. With no disrespect to the blog owner, the vast majority of priests we encounter today can't fill their shoes. In some cases, they couldn't even shine their shoes.
Then again, the preconciliar Church wanted MEN. The preconciliar Church had SALVATION as a priority. The preconciliar Church would have taken any bishop or priest publicly advocating for LGBT nonsense and knocked him on his _ss--then drummed him out of the priesthood.
As a Church, we're choking to death on our tolerance.
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