Faith and Martin Scorsese

It is often felt that religion is now a residual phenomenon in our society, which is increasingly secularized and secularized. We also have an example in these Easter days, dominated in common feeling more by the desire for a holiday than by the rites of Holy Week. Signs of the changing times, one might say, so much so that a certain astonishment is caused by the fact that a person, even a famous one, decides to talk about religion and his own faith. Even more: share your reflections and ideas with a priest and put them down in black and white in a book.

This is what the great Italian-American director Martin Scorsese did in the recent “Dialogues with faith” (La nave di Teseo, 2024, pp. 160, also e-book), a volume resulting from long discussions with the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro.

We say long discussions because it all began several years ago, in March 2016, when Spadaro, then director of the magazine "La civiliza Cattolica", met Scorsese for the first time for an interview on Silence, the film that the director had dedicated to the persecutions suffered by the Jesuits in Japan in the 17th century. That interview kicked off a series of dialogues on profound themes: the soul, faith, God's work in the world, the evil and good that characterize human events. These dialogues converged in the book in the form of a long story in which Scorsese retraces his life starting from his childhood and youth in New York, a childhood and youth that for the first time the director tells openly, without the filter of press office statements.

And always without filters, he talks about his own choices and how his meditations on the themes of faith, justice, forgiveness and divine grace have influenced his art and his films. The convictions of an adult believer emerge, shaped by years of internal reflections and capable of expressing heterodox awareness: «Am I a practicing Catholic? If by that you mean 'Are you a regular churchgoer?', the answer is no. However, since I was a boy I have been convinced that the practice is not something that only happens in a consecrated building and during certain rites at a certain time of day. Practice is something that happens outside, always. Practicing, really, is doing whatever you do, good or bad, and reflecting on it. This is the challenge."

An awareness, that of the daily life of faith and of the concreteness that must permeate religiosity, which Scorsese traces back to his childhood experiences, to the hard life of Italian-Americans: «In the neighborhood there were a lot of really desperate people. There was a man who was known as a first-class thief, and you always saw him parading in the procession of San Rocco. He went there to pray for the strength to steal more. It seems like a funny story when you tell it. But the protagonist was a man so desperate that he prayed to God to help him do evil. He felt like he had no choice. How can we judge it? So for me transubstantiation (the real presence of Christ in communion, ed.) must happen outside the church, so that going to church can become something more than paying weekly installments of an ethical insurance policy, so to speak. And it is very important that lay people participate in this way, find their way to incorporate God into their hearts. You know, it strikes me that we constantly see and hear the words “justice and mercy, justice and mercy.” And I wonder: shouldn't mercy come first? Because justice can easily, so easily become a cry for blood, for punishment, and more and more and more, on and on until the end of the world. And at some point, it has to stop."

Clear, sharp words that seem to come directly from the mouth of Robert De Niro in "Goodfellas" or in "Casino".