#317: No Strings Attached

EXCERPT:
The Oscars are coming, and as usual they provoke both banal celebrity-mongering and provocative public controversy. This year's controversy is discreetly hidden in plain sight in the nominations for "Best Picture in a Foreign Language." And beneath that controversy lurks a malicious misconception about the place of the Catholic Church in global society.

On January 23 New York Times "Awards Season Blog" ran a story headlined "French Fury Over Academy Short List" detailing public outrage that the Motion Picture Academy had failed to nominate France's "Of Gods And Men" while simultaneously selecting Algeria's (French-produced) "Outside The Law." Both films portray violent martyrdom in Algeria: The first is about Trappist monks beheaded by Islamic terrorists in 1996; the latter depicts the massacre of Algerian citizens by French colonial troops. The French are outraged that, while these films show two sides of France's history in Algeria, the Academy selected only one side -- the negative side -- and snubbed the other.

I have not seen "Outside The Law," but I know the director’s previous work; he might be considered France's Oliver Stone, a master of historical propaganda aimed at revising history (in his view, correcting its oversights). His earlier film about Muslim soldiers fighting for France in World War II (“Les Indigenes”) won wide praise, and I expect his new film’s comparison of anti-colonial Algerian terrorists to World War II resistance fighters is as powerful as it is provocative.

But I have seen of “Of Gods and Men," and I fervently recommend it to my readers. Its Oscars exclusion is both disappointing and curious: the film has already received the Grand Prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival and the "Best Foreign-Language Film" award by the National Board Of Review. The Oscars snub leaves one wondering if there is anti-religious bias at work.

This notion came to me when Stephen Erlanger (in a January 5 New York Times article) called "Of Gods And Men" "idyllic and bizarrely apolitical." Oddly, he did not mean that the film is neutral about the struggle between extremist Islam terrorists and Algeria's secular rulers. Nor is he referring to France's recent troubles, being targeted by terrorists for supporting Algeria's government. Instead by "apolitical" Erlanger means the film fails to pass judgment on the missionary role of the Catholic Church:

It [the film] seems strangely ignorant of the colonial implantation that the monastery represents, so many years after Algeria won its independence, and that a proselytizing Roman Catholicism itself represents. It is an odd obliviousness in a poor, divided country where jihad is on the rise as the political response of the very peasantry among whom the monks live so blissfully, and apparently blindly.

If Erlanger is right, we Catholics have a big problem. First, we belong to a Church which sprung from the Middle East but flourished especially in Mediterranean Europe (including North Africa and Spain before Islam arrived). Second, our Church does have strong historic links with European colonialism (in this case, French colonialism), since colonizers generally brought missionaries with them. Third, the Church has been accused (and often been guilty) of cultural imperialism, employing missionary zeal to impose Western European culture and a European faith. If this is still true, our presence may do more harm than good.

But Erlanger is not right. The truth is our missionary presence is different from our past...

What we do see in this remarkable film is something entirely different. We see a young girl asking a monk advice about her love life, and the monk offering empathetic and prudent council rooted in common sense rather than Catholic doctrine. We see the monks joining the villagers to celebrate a young boy’s coming of age, acting as full and joyful participants in an event that is African and Muslim, not European and Christian. We see monks sitting with local elders discussing the terror threat to the village, where they are clearly regarded as peers and neighbors, not as foreign intruders. We see monks who have made themselves at home with the local population, live in solidarity with them, and refuse to abandon them.

We see in short, no strings attached. No "proselytizing Catholicism" at all. If the terrorists see them as such a threat, it is because they (unlike the villagers) cling to an outmoded notion of the Church's presence in their land.