The people who look for traitors — like Catholics who liked “Cabrini”
They hated each other with the heat of a thousand suns. The two tiny groups set up their tables on different corners of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, drawn there probably by the hardleft bookstore a couple blocks away. I saw them sometimes, going to the bookstore with a friend who was much more involved in that world than I was.
They argued constantly, yelling across the four-lane street over the traffic, about tiny tiny points of marxist doctrine. I asked one something like (it’s been decades), “How are you going to overthrow the capitalist system and create a new society if you can’t get along with the eleven other people in the city who agree with you?” and got in response a firm statement of the need for revolutionary forces to be absolutely clear and correct.
She saw marxist heretics as a bigger danger to the Revolution than the Fortune 500. They should spend every waking moment plotting to bring down the capitalists. Yet they spent their time trying to destroy their closest allies in the world.
This seemed to me severely mistaken, in a way hard to understand. What is it with people who believe something, something radical, possibly world-changing, and use their time and energy to name and shame and drive away their own allies?
Everyone does it
And not just theory-laden marxists. Probably everyone has these people. Some Catholics, some of them influencers, seem to love pointing to other Catholics who have allegedly compromised with the world. (Many others, wellmeaning, draw the lines tighter than they should and rule out too much too suspiciously, but that’s a milder problem, though not a minor one.)
The latest reason for their finger - pointing is the new movie “Cabrini,” because it is not an overtly Catholic movie. It’s not “The Song of St. Bernadette” or “A Man for All Seasons.” There’s little obvious piety and no heart-warming devotion, no indirect preaching, no scenes of anyone rapt in prayer, no obvious miracles.
Just a saint who loved God and man being shown giving her life loving the people God created and man abused. I’d think that would be enough, but no.
I loved the movie, but I will say it is flawed in several ways. Three conversations of hers were much more modern American than late 19th century Italian peasant nun, for example — but the picture of the saint it gives overcomes the flaws. (It is playing now in at least six theaters in the Pittsburgh area.)
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini was an amazing woman who did amazing things with her life. In late 19th century Italy, she founded an order of nuns and an orphanage and then fought through the Vatican bureaucracy to speak to the pope himself, because she cared so much about orphans and others that she wanted to serve them all over the world.
Pope Leo XIII let her and her order go abroad, though she wanted to go to China and he sent them to serve the impoverished and mistreated Italian immigrants in New York City instead. There she overcame the opposition of the pimps and criminals of the slum into which they moved, the bigoted well to do people of the city — poor Italians were treated as barely above animals — the Archbishop of New York, and New York’s political establishment.
She eventually won, and built the orphanages and hospitals she wanted. Her order eventually built orphanages and hospitals all over the world, creating the greatest empire of charity ever. As Mother Cabrini told the pope at the beginning she wanted to do. The world is different because of this one woman.
Much of the criticism was just silly, and though I’d like to criticize it, I don’t have the room. Typical were lines like “It didn’t emphasize that they were nuns/Catholic.”
You have this woman who negotiates with the pope and argues with the archbishop of New York, who with her companions walks around New York City in these black habits and funny hats, with big crosses around their necks, who is publicly abused for being a nun, who’s seen praying in Latin and ... SHE’S NOT OBVIOUSLY A CATHOLIC NUN?
How to live in the world
Everyone with a definite belief, from Amish to Catholic to Muslim to Jain, from libertarian to marxist, from wiccan to new atheist, knows they live at an angle to their society. It won’t be what they want it to be and other people will not be what they want them to be.
Everyone has two options: To retreat behind the walls, lock the gates, and (this is crucial) live ever hyper-vigilant for traitors within, ’cause you know they’re there, or to try to speak to everyone else, to find what everyone has in common, to share your life in ways that might make sense to them.
Like a movie about a saintly nun that points to her works and not her teaching.