Faithful Citizenship in Pa's 1st Congressional District and the Central Garden State: Jay & Silent Bob, Thomas More, and John the Baptist

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Jay & Silent Bob, Thomas More, and John the Baptist

Nativity of St. John the Baptist (Ain Karem)

Jersey Shore native and film director Kevin Smith is known for comedies featuring "Jay and Silent Bob," including the generally stupid and irreverent "Dogma." Somehow, this piece of apparent junk cinema features incredible words from the fallen angel Bartleby to the fallen angel Loki:

"in the beginning, it was just us and Him - angels and God. Then, He created humans....He gave them a choice. They choose to acknowledge God, or choose to ignore Him....These humans have besmirched [what] He's bestowed on them. They were given paradise - they threw it away. They were given this planet - they destroyed it. They were favored first and best among all His endeavors, and some of them don't even believe He exists! and in spite of it all, He has shown them infinite...patience at every turn"

(Broad Street, Redbank, 6/24/18)

"WORDS, words, words. They come spilling out of 'A Man for All Seasons' in great torrents that spin and swell into rapids, a furious river of words. And Paul Scofield wraps his dour face and deep-timbred voice around Robert Bolt's dialogue with such satisfying, calculated calibration.

"Kevin Smith laughed and nodded his head. 'This language, it's so great'....

"Mr. Scofield, [was] playing the soon-to-be-martyred Sir Thomas More in Henry VIII's England....

"Mr. Smith, 30, knows he might seem an uneasy fit for the director Fred Zinnemann's dense drama of ideas and intellectual heroism. Beginning with 'Clerks' (1994), a witty and ragtag story about young men working dead-end jobs in a New Jersey strip mall, Mr. Smith has earned a reputation for a kind of cheerful, pop-infused vulgarity that snaps with self-deprecating wit. But while he stresses that he does not claim to be the equal of either Zinnemann or Bolt, he does feel a kind of kinship between their work and his quick-bantering comedies of male immaturity....

'''It's been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. The first time I saw it was when I was about 13. It would have been 1983. I watched it because I was going to a Catholic school in Jersey at the time, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had this teacher, Sister Theresa, who was great, and Thomas More was her favorite saint and she loved this movie....

'''I watched it and I just fell in love with it in general....Even though it was on television and interrupted by commercials, it knocked me out. I don't know why Sister Theresa loved it so much. I think it had something to do with the integrity of More. He wasn't one of these fanatical kind of martyrs who wanted to die on the sword. He was a lawyer and tried like mad to get out of dying but in the end found no way that didn't involve violating his faith. But for me, I loved it just because it was so well-spoken and yet incredibly spiritual at the same time. Here's a dude who held one of the highest offices in England at the time but was still able to maintain his faith'....

'''It got to the point where my parents were, like, 'C'mon, move on, watch something else....But I didn't want to. It was the language. It was the story. It was being 13 years old and admiring somebody who was able to go down for God. Maybe I even felt I could identify with Thomas More a bit. I can appreciate the way More's mind worked, how he was able to juggle the two worlds of the spiritual and the everyday. I mean, it's easy to say we don't want to sin, but it's very hard not to sin. Here's a dude who found a way to do it, to walk the line'....

"'Are there really any good men anymore?'' Mr. Smith asked. ''When you hold somebody like Thomas More up, I don't know, 9 times out of 10, maybe 9 1/2 times out of 10, people will always take the easier route. And Thomas More didn't. Partly, it was an issue of faith, but it was also an issue of character. In terms of films, there are very few characters like Thomas More anymore. Everyone is an antihero now'....

"The crisis comes when More is appointed chancellor and asked by the king to acquiesce in the separation of the English church from Rome. The king wants his first marriage declared null, largely because it has produced no male heir, but more immediately because he wants to marry Anne Boleyn. The pope has refused to grant a divorce or annul the marriage, so Henry wants to be declared the supreme authority over the church in England so he can overrule the pontiff. More's faith does not allow him to go along, even though almost everyone around him, including his best friend, the Duke of Norfolk (Nigel Davenport), and his beloved daughter, Meg (Susannah York), urge him simply to hold his nose and go along. Why not? Everyone else is. Why lose your position, your fortune and your life over such a thing?

"In the end, More devises an ingenious strategy. Under English law, he cannot be convicted of treason if he simply remains silent on the subject. In the end, the only way the king's prosecutor, Cromwell, can snare More is by having another witness, an ambitious snipe named Richard Rich (John Hurt), lie under oath that More has uttered treasonous statements. 'I am a dead man,' More tells the church [sic] tribunal. 'You have your will of me.' And he goes under the ax....

'''It's such an inaccessible movie, in one sense, for people who don't believe in God,'' he said. 'Because the whole time they're watching it, they're thinking More is an idiot. Just take the oath. Why not? But everything comes back to God with Thomas More. He could easily take the oath, but he won't because he feels it would violate his relationship to his God. His vision of himself is based on that relationship....In this day and age, try to make a movie about a guy who stands up for what he believes based on his relationship to God. I'm telling you, very few people will turn out'" (NY Times, 7/20/01)

How amazing that the above tribute came from a Hollywood film director! Saint Thomas More, like Saint John the Baptist before him, was martyred because of his support for "the true nature of marriage and the family."