The Anchoress
Have any of you folks been watching The Confession, on Hulu? I saw the first three chapters and found the confession scenes just riveting:
When a cold-blooded hitman bursts into a hotel room to execute someone, the intended victim does something unexpected: he asks the hitman for a moment to make his peace with God. The hitman lowers his gun as the victim takes a chain with a crucifix from around his neck, holds it tightly in his hands, kneels down with eyes closed, and begins moving his lips in silent prayer. Now peaceful and resigned to his fate, the victim opens his eyes, looks at the hitman, and says, “I forgive you.” The hitman hesitates, looking confused and even regretfully at a peace he’s never seen before, but then pulls the trigger anyway.
That’s the incident that propels the story in the new online web series on Hulu.com called The Confession. Shot partially in the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in New York City, the series stars Kiefer Sutherland as the hitman, and John Hurt as the priest to whom he contentiously goes to gain an understanding of what he witnessed.
Sutherland’s character is definitely complex. He enters the confessional and speaks words from a bygone era of his childhood: “Bless me Father for I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed. I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father. It’s been thirty-five years since my last confession.”
When the priest asks if he’s sorry for his sins, he says, “No,” and goes on to explain he killed a man last night. The hitman isn’t there for forgiveness, but rather to understand the peace he witnessed come over his victim the night before.
Tony Rossi has more, here.
Interesting to watch how TV is evolving, isn’t it? Even as we’re buying big screens for the walls, television programming is moving away from appointment-viewing, and our computers are becoming the broadcast medium for original shows. Speaking of which, Mary’s Aggies takes a look at the agendas behind some of those shows
Moving on, the investigation into accusations made against Fr. John Corapi apparently hasn’t even begun yet, and the story hasn’t moved an inch, but for anyone interested, the National Catholic Register speaks with a representative from the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity.
As I say, it doesn’t move the story at all, but it provides a little clarification on the society, itself, about which there was some confusion. The Register also takes a look at the “knowns and unknowns of the case.
Also, Mark Shea, whose sentiments I pretty much share, thinks piping down is a good thing
In surprising news: Next year religion will be studied in all Russian schools! Amazing. On a related note, Heather King muses on the Russian religious spirit:
. . . I may not know what’s going on now, but I totally knew [Russians] were in big, big trouble before. In fact, a few years ago I read a whole slew of amazing books by people who’d been in the prison camps: The Arctic Death Camps by Robert Conquest, Richard Würmbrand’s Christ in the Communist Prisons, The Accused by Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski, Kolyma, and perhaps my favorite: The Woman Who Could Not Die by Julia de Beausobre. Upon learning that her husband Nicolay, imprisoned in another camp, had been shot, Beausobre wrote:
Look down right into the depths of your heart and tell me—Is it not right for you to be kind to [your torturers] Even to them? Particularly to them, perhaps? Is it not right that those men who have no kindness within them should get a surplus of it flowing towards them from without?
Whoa.
Some Catholic must-reads for the day:
Lisa Mladinich on Life and Calling; Teens and Vocational Discernment – some very good advice on how to help the teens around grow in their ability to consider what they were born for, and to hear the “small still voice.”
Relative to that, Get Religion on why fewer children mean fewer nuns (and priests, I’m sure.)
Julie Davis: Remember how I always bug you to read In This House of Brede? Well, Julie wants you to read Story of a Soul, too!
Pat Gohn goes to the Catechism and finds, believe it or not, a route away from resentment!
Thoughts on Geraldine Ferraro as she is laid to rest, today
Something just beautiful: Beauty, beauty, beauty
More interesting stuff:
Deacon Greg: Bishop to Gays; The Church is Your Home
Pat McNamara: on Dorothy Day
Finally – It’s OPENING DAY! Baseball, baseball — how long I have waited for baseball, and longed for it in the deep mid-winter!
Here is Jason M. Morgan on Baseball and the Soul:
. . .baseball will heal you. Bring a box of tangled wire, a ball of knotted twine, a heap of broken heart, a clutter of twisted misery to the baseball diamond and spend enough time listening to the thump of the ball in the glove, the sound of the wind on the dust, and looking at the blue salute of the indivisible sky, and baseball will make you whole again. Bring your defeated soul to baseball, and baseball will, by the unchangeable truth of its geometry and the eternal vectors of its freedoms, speak to you, call you by name, and—not teach—but allow you to remember who you have always been.
And this thanks to our good Joseph Susanka – That’s Baseball!
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