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    Martin Scorsese on His Tour of Catholic Saints

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    The Fox Nation series “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” emphasizes the human struggles behind religious legends.The director Martin Scorsese’s filmography teems with troubled protagonists struggling with moral codes. With his new project, that canon now includes the canonized.“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” premiering Sunday on the Fox Nation streaming service, is hosted and narrated by the filmmaker and dramatizes the lives of eight Catholic saints.The series is premiering in two parts, with the first four episodes rolling out weekly and featuring well-known saints, including Joan of Arc and John the Baptist, as well as more obscure ones like Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who volunteered to die in place of another man at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The second part, scheduled to premiere in April, will include episodes about the Italian friar Francis of Assisi and Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus Christ, among others.The series was created by Matti Leshem, a founder of New Mandate Films, a production company that focuses on storytelling rooted in Jewish history and culture. Scorsese is an executive producer. Kent Jones, a frequent collaborator of the filmmaker’s, wrote the scripts, which were informed by lengthy discussions on theology he had with Scorsese.Catholic saints, who are people recognized by the church after death for their virtue as models for holiness, have long interested Scorsese. “I was always fascinated by the idea of a saint and what a saint could be,” he said earlier this week, recalling how he found respite in St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a child growing up in 1950s New York City.In an interview at a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Scorsese discussed the show, his relationship to Catholicism and why he thinks faith-based entertainment needs to have depth. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      This N.Y.C. Theater Was a Haven for Adventurous Art. Then the Archdiocese Intervened.

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      The Connelly Theater has suspended operations after its church landlord began more carefully scrutinizing show scripts and its general manager resigned.The Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village has for years been a shabby but warm haven for adventurous performing arts: the play “Job,” which is now wrapping up a Broadway run; Kate Berlant’s “Kate,” a one-woman show that went on to London and California after selling out downtown; and the satire “Circle Jerk,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2021.But over the past few weeks, the building’s landlord — the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York — began more intensely scrutinizing the content of shows whose producers were seeking to rent the space. At least three planned productions had to relocate.Josh Luxenberg, who has been the theater’s general manager for the past decade, submitted his resignation late Friday. And early Tuesday, the Catholic school that is the intermediary between the theater and the archdiocese said it was “suspending all operations of its theater.”Producers who have rented from the Connelly say they were aware that it was owned by the archdiocese, and that there was always a clause in their contract allowing the Roman Catholic Church to bar anything it deemed obscene, pornographic or detrimental to the church’s reputation. But only recently, they said, did the archdiocese seek to rigorously scrutinize scripts before approving rentals.New York Theater Workshop said it was told by a bishop this month that it could not stage “Becoming Eve,” which is adapted from a memoir about a rabbi who comes out as a transgender woman, at the Connelly early next year. It is now looking for another venue.“We had seen a range of really provocative, amazing, inspiriting, artistically rigorous shows there, so I was surprised this would be rejected,” said Patricia McGregor, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop. “And if in the East Village of New York City we are meeting this kind of resistance, where else might this be happening?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara’ Review: Church vs. State

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      This film, based on a true story about the kidnapping of a Jewish child in 19th-century Italy, underscores the devastating consequences of family separation.In the film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” a representative of Pope Pius IX arrives at a Jewish family’s home in Bologna, Italy, on a June night in 1858. This unsettling intrusion quickly gains force as it becomes clear the representative intends to take their 6-year-old son, Edgardo (Enea Sala).Unbeknown to Salomone and Marianna Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi), a housekeeper had their son Edgardo baptized as an infant. In the parts of Italy that were under papal rule at the time, it was illegal for Christian children to be raised in non-Christian households. The Mortara case — covered by the Italian author Daniele Scalise, whose book the film is based upon, and by David Kertzer, an American scholar and expert on the papacy and antisemitism — became an international cause for Jewish organizations in Europe as well as proponents of the unification of Italy, including the papal states, into a kingdom. Even Napoleon III, an ally of the pope, expressed concern.The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in Edgardo’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.Throughout his life, Edgardo remained faithful to the church. In the film, one gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo MortaraNot rated. In Italian and Hebrew. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Sinead O’Connor Was Ireland’s Alternative Moral Compass

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      In any society, she would have been radical for a pop star. But in Ireland, she was revolutionary.On March 9, Sinead O’Connor stood onstage at the Vicar Street concert venue in Dublin. Her presence was greeted by a prolonged standing ovation. O’Connor was at the RTE Choice Music Prize, an evening celebrating the best Irish albums of the past year. A new award had been invented for the occasion: classic Irish album, and O’Connor was there to accept it for her 1990 record, “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got.”It was the day after my 40th birthday. Untethered by this life landmark, I felt strangely grounded by her presence: Sinéad is here, all is well in the world. Soaking in the noise of the audience cheering her on, she smiled, almost bashful, before dedicating the award to refugees in Ireland.O’Connor had a tendency to show up at necessary moments. This time, her reappearance was a relief, because everyone in the crowd was worried about her. Her son, Shane, took his own life in 2022. He was 17. She was no stranger to articulating her personal struggles: the abuse she suffered as a child, the impact of a news media that sometimes hounded her, a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and PTSD.And now, here she was, onstage in Dublin, a strange sort of lighthouse, beaming again. “How is she?” I asked one of the stage crew. “Flying form,” came the answer.O’Connor receiving the Classic Irish Album award at the RTE Choice Music Prize, in Dublin, in March.Kieran Frost/Redferns, via Getty ImagesAt the time, there was something of an O’Connor renaissance occurring. Her 2021 memoir, “Rememberings,” was critically lauded, and she posted the positive reviews excitedly on social media. The 2022 documentary “Nothing Compares,” directed by Kathryn Ferguson, correctly positioned her as an alternative moral compass in Ireland, driven by integrity and authenticity, not shame.When I was a child, Ireland felt like a phony place, yet I had no way to conceptualize its inauthenticity. I was raised Catholic, and made to navigate the weirdness of First Holy Communion, novenas and trips to the shrine at Knock. The idea of defying this was incomprehensible. The dominance of the church was simply a given.I was 9 when television news bulletins framed O’Connor destroying a photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” as blasphemous, missing the serious statement behind the act. As far as Irish society was concerned, he was a living saint. The incident rattled the country, and it also rattled me. You could do that?There was no MTV in my house, but for some odd reason, my grandmother’s television set, on the other side of the country, in Galway, provided this magic portal. I would stay up late when visiting her, and O’Connor would drop in. “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her open, searching gaze. The tear. You could do that, too? You could shave your head? Dye Public Enemy’s logo on the side of your head? Be an Irish woman wearing ripped denim on television? Go on an Irish chat show dressed as a priest? Come out as lesbian, and later declare you were “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”?In any society at the time, this stuff was radical. But in Ireland, it was revolutionary.O’Connor at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1990.DMI/The Life Picture Collection, via ShutterstockAnd Ireland was in her songs. “Dublin in a rainstorm” was the setting for one of her finest, “Troy.” Her voice was pure and strong, and Anita Baker described it as “cavernous.” She traversed alt-rock and pop, reggae and traditional Irish music. She covered Prince, Nirvana and John Grant. On “8 Good Reasons” (a title that referred to the eyes of her four children, she explained), she sang, “You know I love to make music, but my head got wrecked by the business.”When I first interviewed O’Connor, in 2007, backstage at the Oxegen music festival, in Kildare, she seemed a little shaky, but utterly cool, friendly and fun. In 2014, I sat listening to her talk about her latest album, “I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss,” as she chain-smoked in a Dublin recording studio, her face tattoos faded by laser removal treatment.Although I only knew her from afar, the sense of connection she created, both through the music and what she stood for, was profound. Her loss has instigated a deep collective grief across Ireland. She was a symbol of hope as much as defiance, an artist and thinker who always stood on the horizon, urging others to catch up.When I heard the news, I felt the gut-punch of loss. It was as though something elemental had departed the world, and some essential tributary had run dry within me.My wife stood up from the couch, walked to the fireplace, and lit a candle, the traditional gesture of Irish grief and remembrance. The national broadcaster’s main radio station played song after song. We remembered that night in March, when the roar and applause of the audience in Dublin seemed to say: thank you, we love you, you were right. More

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      The Night Sinead O’Connor Took on the Pope on ‘SNL’

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      Tearing up a photo was the moment nobody forgot. The performance that preceded it was just as powerful.What people remember about Sinead O’Connor’s Oct. 3, 1992, appearance on “Saturday Night Live” is this: At the end of her second performance of the show, a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” O’Connor intoned gravely, “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.” As she held tight to the word, stretching it like a castigation, she grabbed a photo of Pope John Paul II and held it up to camera. When she let the word go, she punctuated her exhale by tearing the photo three times, followed by an exhortation to “fight the real enemy.” She tossed the fragments to the ground, removed her in-ears, and stepped off the stage into culture-war infamy.Throughout her career, O’Connor — whose death, at 56, was announced on Wednesday — was a fervent moralist, an uncompromised voice of social progress and someone who found stardom, and its sandpapered and glossed boundaries, to be a kind of sickness. She was also a singer of ferocious gifts, able to channel anxious passion with vivacious power and move through a lyric with nimble acuity. She was something grander than a simple pop star — she became a stand-in for a sociopolitical discomfort that was beginning to take hold in the early 1990s, a rejection of the enthusiastic sheen and power-at-all-costs culture of the 1980s.And so, in an era where late-night television performances could still prompt monocultural mood shifts, her gesture was a volcanic eruption. She became a target instantly — of the religious right, of other celebrities, and, as she reported many years later in her memoir, of a couple of egg-tossing young men, as she exited the studio that same night.But none of that extinguished the power of her protest. And she was a savvy radical — reportedly she had done something slightly different in rehearsal, and saved the pope photo for the actual show. (The photo itself had hung on the bedroom wall of O’Connor’s mother, who O’Connor later said had physically and sexually abused her as a child.) Also, she was on live television, holding court for three minutes on the miseries of discrimination and abuses of power, under the guise of being a pop star performing a song. She was daring the cameras, and the viewers, to look away; no one did.The recriminations O’Connor faced recall the bankrupt culture wars of a different era — she was “banned” from appearing on “Saturday Night Live” again, and the show mocked her on subsequent episodes. The following week’s host, Joe Pesci, took direct aim at her. “I’ll tell you one thing: She’s very lucky it wasn’t my show. ’Cause if it was my show, I woulda gave her such a smack.” Cue laughing and clapping from the audience. He continued, “I woulda grabbed her by her … eyebrows.” More laughter. At one point, he triumphantly held up the taped-together pope photo, like a feckless politician stirring up his base. (Tellingly, footage of Pesci’s monologue is available on the official YouTube channel of “Saturday Night Live”; footage of O’Connor’s performance is not, though it can be found in various unofficial locations online.)Joe Pesci on “Saturday Night Live” the week after Sinead O’Connor’s performance, holding up the taped-together photo of Pope John Paul II that O’Connor had ripped.NBCOf course, she was correct — the scale of sexual abuse perpetrated within the Roman Catholic Church that came to light in later years was staggering. By then, O’Connor’s protest felt distant, but the damage it did to her career was permanent.At the time, O’Connor was only a couple of years past her American breakthrough — her piercing cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written by Prince (and originally performed by his side project the Family). Subsequent to “S.N.L.,” she had a handful of hits, but mostly retreated from the pop spotlight. Or maybe the way to think about it is that she right-sized her career, away from the silly and grim expectations of complaisance that come with universal acclaim and toward a more earnest plane.Whichever the case, the pope brouhaha obscured something perhaps just as extraordinarily powerful — the song that O’Connor had been performing. Her “War” cover had lyrics slightly modified to allude to the abuses in the Catholic Church that she was protesting. (She also performed “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home” that night.)She’s performing “War” a cappella, staring hard at a camera off to her left.Less singing than declaiming, she renders the song with a forceful clarity, landing every line with nervy syllables held just a microsecond past comfort, as if reminding the viewer of the need to gulp them down whole. Marley’s original — the lyrics are drawn from a speech given by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963 — moves with a sly breeze. O’Connor’s, with its silence, turns the original plaint into a jolt.Her performance is anthemic, invigorating, a call to arms for the dispossessed and an elegant dissection of the authoritarian powers who hold them down. Her vocal is level and determined, but her howl is spiritual and undeniable:Until the ignoble and unhappy regimeWhich holds all of us throughChild abuse, yeah, child abuse, yeah,Subhuman bondage has been toppledUtterly destroyedEverywhere is warIf there is a moment of true singing here, it’s right before the grand gesture at the end. “Childrennnn! Childrennnn!” O’Connor sweetly chants, calling everyone to attention. Then, with everyone’s ears perked, she nods her head forcefully and jabs out a quick, urgent instruction: “Fight.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis’ Review: Serene Demeanor, Bracing Message

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      The Pontiff travels well. Gianfranco Rosi’s new documentary chronicles his visits to Catholic communities the world over, and he never seems to tire.There’s a sense of quietude one may slip into while viewing this documentary made by Gianfranco Rosi. Perhaps it has to do with the serene demeanor of its subject, Pope Francis, the leader and international voice of the Roman Catholic Church. In most documentaries depicting what musicians and entertainers call road work, the person putting in the hours can get irritable. In his first nine years as Pope (he was elected in 2013), Francis made 37 trips from the Vatican, and visited almost 60 countries. “In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis,” assembled from footage shot over those years, never betrays a jet-lagged pontiff.Rosi made his name with the urgent 2016 documentary “Fire at Sea,” about Italy’s — and Europe’s — migrant crisis. Some dire imagery and sound reminiscent of that picture turns up here: radio antennas spinning as audio of S.O.S. messages play on the soundtrack, shots of overturned passenger boats. After one mass drowning, Pope Francis spoke on the island of Lampedusa, where he bemoaned “the globalization of indifference.” The speech, which Rosi shot, is moving, its message bracing even as the Pope avoids a strident tone.But as the movie goes on, without narration or any talking-head interviews, a pattern emerges. The Pope suits up, shows up, says the right thing, and the world just keeps getting worse. There is one instance where he doesn’t say the right thing: Speaking offhand to his followers in Chile, he appears dismissive of abuse charges against a bishop there, one who subsequently resigned. The tact with which Francis walks back his words is impressive. So, too, is the way he manages to appear well-informed on the variety of injustices he speaks against as he tries to build bridges in places like the United Arab Emirates. But beyond that, a repetitious feel begins to take over. For some viewers, quietude may yield to boredom.In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope FrancisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      in Movies

      Vatican Pledges to Look Into Emanuela Orlandi Disappearance

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      Vatican officials said they would reopen a cold case that has gripped Italians, spawned countless theories and been the subject of a Netflix documentary series.ROME — Four decades after the daughter of a Vatican employee vanished from a street in Rome while walking home from a music lesson, a case that has spawned endless theories by a transfixed Italian public is getting a fresh look, a prosecutor said Tuesday.The Vatican’s top prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, said his office would try to “give answers” to the family of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, who was last seen on June 22, 1983.Although Emanuela’s survivors have pressed the Vatican for years for information, the prosecutor’s sudden decision to look into one of Italy’s most famous cold cases took them by surprise.“You have to explain why the case was reopened now,” a lawyer for the family, Laura Sgro, said Tuesday. “We hope that the prosecutor’s will is effectively real and will come to something soon.”Her last filing on the case, Ms. Sgro noted, was 2019. Then in late 2021, she followed up with a letter written to Pope Francis telling the pontiff that new information had emerged that the family hoped to share with the Vatican.Francis urged her to contact the Vatican prosecutor “in the spirit of full cooperation,” but when she reached out to Mr. Diddi a year ago, she got no response, Ms. Sgro said.Over the decades, the family’s quest to discover what happened to the teenager has taken many tortuous twists. Reports have variously linked her fate to the Sicilian Mafia, Bulgarian agents, a notorious Roman crime gang and the assassination attempt on John Paul II, by way of an American archbishop involved in a major Italian banking scandal.Previous investigations led nowhere. One involved the exhumation of bones from a crypt in a church in Rome, and another a search for evidence in a Vatican cemetery, which the Vatican allowed.A photograph released by Vatican Media showing the opening of the ossuary at the Teutonic Cemetery in the Vatican as part of an inquiry into the case of Emanuela Orlandi in 2019.Vatican Media, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUntil this week, the Vatican has never formally investigated the case itself, saying that the disappearance took place on Italian soil. Mr. Diddi said that after becoming chief Vatican prosecutor three months ago, he began reviewing the requests made to it over the years by the Orlandi family. “We are putting in order all the things that have been presented to us,” he said.Though dozens of books and documentaries have focused on the case in Italy, it received greater exposure after the release on Netflix last October of a four-part series titled “Vatican Girl,” which explores the various theories that have emerged about her disappearance. The series also took the Vatican to task for not carrying out its own investigation and not doing more to help Italian authorities over the decades.“It was the first time the story was told internationally,” said Chiara Messineo, the producer of the series, and it engaged audiences with “the story of a family that lost a daughter and a sister, that is very much also the story of a small pawn caught up” in a global chessboard.Ms. Messineo, speaking from her home in London, said she believed the popularity of the series had increased the pressure on the Vatican “so that they had to do something.”An undated picture of Emanuela Orlandi.via Associated PressMs. Sgro, the lawyer, said a request made by lawmakers last month to establish a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the girl’s disappearance, along with two other cold cases, may have also prompted the Vatican to finally act.“There is evidence that the Vatican knows much more than it has let on,” Senator Carlo Calenda told reporters at a news conference at which the proposal was presented in December.The proposal for a parliamentary commission must be approved by both chambers of Parliament to get off the ground.“We are a great secular nation that treats the Vatican with respect,” Mr. Calenda said, “but certainly cannot consider this case closed in the way it’s been closed.”The Vatican, too, has an interest in solving the mystery of Emanuela’s fate, he said, because the truth “always comes out in the end.” More

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      Janet Mead, Nun Whose Pop-Rock Hymn Reached the Top of the Charts, Dies

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      Her upbeat version of “The Lord’s Prayer” was an instant hit in Australia, reached No. 4 in the U.S. and was nominated for a Grammy (it lost to Elvis Presley).Sister Janet Mead, an Australian nun whose crystalline voice carried her to the upper reaches of the charts in the 1970s with a pop-rock version of “The Lord’s Prayer,” died on Jan. 26 in Adelaide. She was in her early 80s.Her death was confirmed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide, which provided no further information. Media reports said she had been treated for cancer.Sister Janet’s recording of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which featured her pure solo vocal over a driving drumbeat — she had a three-octave range and perfect pitch — became an instant hit in Australia, Canada and the United States. It soared to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 during Easter time in 1974, and she became one of the few Australian recording artists to have a gold record in the United States.The record sold more than three million copies worldwide, two million of them to Americans. Nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for best inspirational performance, it lost to Elvis Presley and his version of “How Great Thou Art.”Along with Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” famously covered by the Byrds in 1965, “The Lord’s Prayer” is one of the very few popular songs with lyrics taken from the Bible.Sister Janet was the second nun to have a pop hit in the United States, after Jeanine Deckers of Belgium, the guitar-strumming “Singing Nun” whose “Dominique” reached No. 1 in 1963. She died in 1985.When stardom struck Sister Janet, she was a practicing Catholic nun teaching music at St. Aloysius College in Adelaide. The video for “The Lord’s Prayer” was shot on campus.A humble novitiate who devoted herself to social justice, she donated her share of royalties for “The Lord’s Prayer” to charity. She had long helped raise money for the disadvantaged, the homeless and Aborigines and worked on their behalf.She later described the period of her record’s success as a “horrible time,” largely because of demands by the media.“It was a fairly big strain because all the time there are interviews and radio talk-backs and TV people coming and film people coming,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Shunning the spotlight, she declined most interview requests and all offers to tour the United States.She had already achieved some local notoriety by staging rock masses at St. Francis Xavier’s Cathedral, long the hub of Catholic life in Adelaide. Her goal was to make the Gospel more accessible and meaningful to young people, which she succeeded in doing by presenting religious hymns in a rock ‘n’ roll format and encouraging participants to sing like Elvis or Bill Haley. Her masses drew as many as 2,500 people and enjoyed the full support of the local bishop.Janet Mead was born in Adelaide in 1938 (the exact date is unknown). She was 17 when she joined the Sisters of Mercy and became a music teacher at local schools.She studied piano at the Adelaide Conservatorium and formed a group, which she called simply “the Rock Band,” to provide music for the weekly Mass at her local church.She was making records for her school when she was discovered by Martin Erdman, a producer at Festival Records in Sydney. The label had her record a cover of “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” which the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan had written and sung for a Franco Zeffirelli film of the same name about St. Francis of Assisi. It was released as the A-side of a 45; “The Lord’s Prayer” was the B-side.But disc jockeys in Australia much preferred “The Lord’s Prayer.” Listeners called in demanding to hear it again, and stations gave it repeated airplay. It became one of the fastest-selling singles in history.Its phenomenal success led to Sister Janet’s debut album, “With You I Am,” which hit No. 19 in Australia in July 1974. Her second album, “A Rock Mass,” was a complete recording of one of her Masses.Sister Janet later withdrew from the public eye almost entirely, and her third album, recorded in 1983, was filed away in the Festival Records vaults. The tapes, including a 1983 version of “The Lord’s Prayer” and covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Cat Stevens, were rediscovered by Mr. Erdman in 1999 and included on the album “A Time to Sing,” released that year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sister Janet’s hit single.Sister Janet explained her philosophy of using rock music to amplify religious themes in her liner notes for the album “With You I Am.”“I believe that life is a unity and therefore not divided into compartments,” she wrote. “That means that worship, music, recreation, work and all other ‘little boxes’ of our lives are really inseparable, and this is why I believe that people should be given the opportunity to worship God with the language and music that is part of their ordinary life.” More