Now streaming on Fox Nation, Martin Scorsese’s The Saints finds the veteran Catholic filmmaker teaming with a Jewish producer to tell eight stories about saints … and I’ve seen two of them.
So, Is Martin Scorsese’s The Saints Worth Watching?
Based on watching the episodes on Joan of Arc and Maximilian Kolbe, I’d say, yes.
They’re scripted dramas, handsomely produced, fair, reasonably accurate (from what I could tell from some Googling), and realistic while still being reverent.
Scorsese is host, narrator and executive producer of the series.
Joan of Arc
Much of the Joan of Arc episode focuses on Joan’s trials, which were apparently recorded in great detail, so we know much of what was actually said.
The episode also goes into the various political machinations of the time (including how the very French king Joan sacrificed to see crowned ultimately abandoned her).
But it doesn’t avoid the more metaphysical and supernatural aspects of the story, including how Joan’s heart alone was not reduced to ashes in the fire that killed her.
Maximilian Kolbe
Shot in black-and-white, the Maximilian Kolbe episode doesn’t pull punches about the Franciscan priest’s early condemnation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Widely believed at the time (including in Kolbe’s native Poland) to be an authentic Jewish document, it was later proved to be a Russian forgery.
But as this EWTN article, and the episode, show, this is definitely not the whole story.
It’s also equally unsparing about Kolbe’s time in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp, where he offered his life in place of a man with a family.
Parents should be aware that there is full frontal male nudity in the depiction of Kolbe and his fellow prisoners being herded into a starvation cell.
The Full Lineup …
Joan of Arc premiered Nov. 17, to be followed by John the Baptist (Nov. 24), Sebastian (Dec. 1) and Kolbe (Dec. 8). The final four, featuring Francis of Assisi, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene and Moses the Black, run in April-May 2025.
Considering the nudity in the Kolbe episode, it would be wise for parents of younger children to pre-screen the installments, in case there is other adult-oriented material.
However …
Each episode ends with Scorsese having a short conversation with three Catholic “friends” and consultants: Father James Martin, S.J., whose reputation precedes him; Paul Elie, Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University; and poet and memoirist Mary Karr, a feminist Catholic convert from agnosticism, who describes herself as a “cafeteria Catholic” and is pro-abortion.
All that being said, in the two conversations I heard, aside from a feminist comment from Karr, all the participants colored within Catholic lines and didn’t say anything that I found particularly controversial or heterodox.
Also, the roundtables are at the end of the episode, so viewers are free to skip them.
About That Jewish Producer …
Martin Scorsese’s The Saints is the creation of Matti Leshem, an Israeli-born Hollywood filmmaker, who developed it with Lionsgate Alternative Television.
He said to Deadline.com:
“I got to tell you, most people don’t think that a proud Jew like myself is going to come up with this idea about the Saints,” Leshem said. “My dad was an Israeli ambassador. Like many of his generation who survived the Holocaust, he was a s staunch atheist, which really helped me because he didn’t care where I went to school.
“So I went to Ramaz in New York, which was a yeshiva, and then when we moved to Denmark, the best school was a Catholic school and he was like, great, go there.
“And so he sent me to this Catholic school, and, while I was actually exempt from the catechism classes, I went anyway, and I found that I liked the stories. I’ve always been interested in how people connect faith.
“And it’s complicated because many times religion gets in the way of faith. But these stories of these saints that I heard as a kid of about seven, they really stuck with me.”
Hearing From Scorsese
In interviews conducted by Fox Nation, Scorsese addressed several subjects.
Introduction to the Saints
I must have been about seven or eight years old. And I think it was in St Patrick’s Old Cathedral [in Lower Manhattan] that I would be in. I was in St. Patrick’s elementary school.
We would spend a lot of time in the cathedral. It is still there on Mott Street. It’s now a Basilica.
And what was fascinating to me was certainly the statues of these people, the men and the women. And somehow the stories that these statues implied or suggested, whether it was a statue of Santa Lucia, with the eyes on the plate that she had, or Saint Rocco with his finger pointing to his wound on his leg and a little dog at his feet.
San Gandolfo from Polizzi Generosa, who was a monk, Franciscan monk, who was patron Saint of Polizzi Generosa, which was from Sicily, at the town in Sicily where my grandfather came from, the Scorseses.
So, these were things that we were living with, these saints. These statues were almost became like people. And I wanted to know their stories.
His Own Faith … and Doubt
For me, faith or the question of faith has always been something that’s very central in my life. And exactly is the question of faith? For me, faith is a question.
It is a question. It’s a question that I don’t think is ever answered on many levels. First of all, on the most basic level, what we believe in will never be verified, so to speak.
So, the way we can, you know, verify an artifact that’s found on an archaeological dig, we can verify that. So, in a way, we are dealing with what we can’t, really can’t ever know in the usual sense.
So second, there’s us, living beings, living with ourselves as beings with so much awareness of everything, except how we got here.
Now we can know a lot, of course, science takes us very, very far back to say the least. But no matter how far back we’re gonna go, we can’t ever measure everything. We can never really know, I think, ultimately, you know, who or what we are, hence faith.
So, we come to faith. And faith is accompanied by doubt. And ultimately, I come to understand that, you know, we have to live with this doubt.
I come to understand that faith and doubt are inseparable. Things become the same thing. It’s the constant response to this incredible mystery that we’re living. The mystery of just being.
And Christianity
You mention Christianity to many people today and they’re shocked. They look at me and they say, you believe in that stuff?
Now anybody can make fun of Christianity today and it’s OK. But you can’t do with other religions, and you’d be pilloried if you do.
I had the impression that many people are trying to find religion outside of religion.
Some people mix and match, you know, take something from here and there. The mix and match aspects of this or that spiritual tradition, there’s a journey for that. Some may invest their energy in politics, and injustice.
…
So, I think the message is, we walked through the door of Christianity and [saw] radical love and radical redemption and radical acceptance. I used the term radical because these things are always revelatory. You really are to love and to accept and to allow redemption.
In order to do that, you have to expose yourself. You have to risk failure and embarrassment and rejection, all of this, at any given moment. But that’s what gives you a way of possibly seeing more widely and deeply… beyond that which is the material.
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Image: Scene from the Joan of Arc episode of Martin Scorsese’s The Saints/Fox Nation
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