Martin Scorsese’s journey with saints, a journey that finds him talking enthusiastically about Sts. Francis, Joan of Arc, Maximillian Kolbe and Moses the Black in a posh hotel in Midtown Manhattan, began almost 80 years ago when he was an altar boy at old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street.
It was there that you could once find a statue of San Gandolfo, the patron saint of the town of Polizzi Generosa in Sicily. Mr. Scorsese’s grandfather hailed from Polizzi Generosa, and every year the Sicilians who lived in his neighborhood held a street festival in the saint’s honor.
“He had a major feast on Elizabeth Street, which was a block and a half long,” Mr. Scorsese recalls. “As opposed to the Neapolitans—they had San Gennaro. They had seven blocks!”
“All right, six blocks,” he adds with a smile. “I’m exaggerating.”
The former altar boy now finds himself at the helm of one of the most elaborate projects devoted to the saints in recent memory. “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” begins streaming this Sunday on Fox Nation with the story of Joan of Arc. Advertisements for the show are plastered around Manhattan, and Fox has built an ad hoc chapel on West 48 Street, outside their Midtown headquarters, with faux candles and a photo station where you can take your picture in stained glass.
As it happens, the “chapel” is also across the street from America Media, and I took my picture there before heading uptown to meet with Mr. Scorsese on a recent evening. I had to show him my likeness (he was bemused), but we quickly transitioned to discussing his favorite saint, St. Francis, who intrigues him “because of his rejection of the material world.”
“I’ve been very interested in St. Francis,” he says, “and not because of the sentimental business of him speaking to birds, right? But the journey he went through, through the wars, through the fevers, robbing his father’s house to pay for the church to be fixed up, to be restored. His father getting angry at him, understandably, all of this, and then just saying, ‘I’ll give you everything back. We’re going to live and you know, deal with life in God’s love.’ How does that act itself out? How does that manifest itself? I found that interesting.”
This is how Mr. Scorsese speaks when he becomes passionate, the words and the images tumbling out until he settles back on his first love: the movies. He reminds me that his first major film, “Mean Streets,” mentions St. Francis. Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, cites the great Umbrian saint while arguing with his girlfriend Teresa. “St. Francis had it all down,” Charlie says. He knew how to take care of people, and Charlie was in some way trying to emulate him by taking care of Teresa and her cousin, Johnny.
“What are you talking about?” Teresa blurts out, incredulous at her gangster boyfriend. “St. Francis didn’t run numbers.”
Saints and brigands
Mr. Scorsese would be the first to point out that the saints weren’t always, well, saints. Take Moses the Black, the subject of one of the eight episodes streaming on Fox Nation (four will stream this fall, and four in the spring). I had never heard of the saint from Ethiopia, but Mr. Scorsese quickly brought me up to speed.
“He was a terrible brigand,” he says, using a word he must have first learned watching black-and-white movies as a kid. “I mean, he was, he was the most feared man. He had a band of cutthroats, and he would just kill and rape and kill and rape.”
“At one point, suddenly in the middle of a battle, in the middle of attacking a caravan or whatever, killing people—at one point, he just stopped, and he got up and walked away. And he walked and walked and walked, and he came upon what we now call a monastery, but at that time, these monasteries were like little huts and little congregations, so to speak, of men who were holy, men who wanted to stay holy and wanted to get out of Alexandria, where there were so many fights going on between different dogmatic issues and heresies. And they just want to get away from that, from the chaos of all that. ‘Leave us alone. We’re going to the desert. We’re going to build a hut, and then maybe they’ll be mud brick or whatever….’
“This particular monastery was headed by a man named Isidore, and that was destroyed later on by different brigands that came in. But Moses found his way there, and he decided to stay with Isidore. And he’s interesting because he thought for all his sins and how horrible he was, he had to live a life of self-mortification. And he did it for a number of years, where he hurt himself and he gave himself the hardest tasks, all that. And Isidore and the others were wondering, looking at him, and finally at one point Isidore tells him, ‘You know, God doesn’t want that from you.’”
It sounds like a Scorsese film, a gangster who tries to find his way to God’s love—but not before going through hell first.
And so it is with the other saints who Mr. Scorsese profiles. Joan of Arc wins a great victory for France, but she quickly becomes a nuisance to the king and must stand trial before a court of ecclesiastical leaders, who condemn her to burn. Or Maximillian Kolbe, who was so devoted to Mary but knew from a young age that he would have to endure martyrdom, which finally comes to pass in a concentration camp.
Mr. Scorsese doesn’t shy away from the bloody battles in France or the grim conditions of Auschwitz (or Kolbe’s antisemitic writings, which receive due attention). These are complex stories, filled with some violence and real pain. Many of them are also familiar—so why revisit them now?
“I find myself thinking that this is a good time to do something serious that might reach younger people, as a good expression of example,” Mr. Scorsese says. “I’m not talking about martyrdom. I’m talking about what did Joan of Arc—what did drive her? And what about [St.] Sebastian?”
I thought this, too, as I watched the two episodes made available to the press. Here were stories I could watch with my 15-year-old daughter or show to our parish class preparing for confirmation. A generation raised on Marvel could use a dose of Butler’s.
God and the movies
Mr. Scorsese’s journey with the saints began in old St. Patrick’s Cathedral but continued in the movie theater. He ticks off his favorites, a mix of classics—Roberto Rossellini’s “Flowers of St. Francis,” “Ordet,” “Diary of a Country Priest”—and a couple I had not heard of: “Accattone” and “Europa ’51.”
“Europa 51,” also directed by Rosselini, asks the question: What would a modern saint look like? Indeed, Rosselini described the film as a retelling of his classic film about St. Francis through the eyes of a woman, played by Ingrid Bergman.
“Take a look at that film,” Mr. Scorsese advises. Check.
Another favorite: “On the Waterfront,” not a movie about saints, but one with a crusading priest front and center. (Karl Malden’s character was inspired by the Jesuit “waterfront priest” James Corridan.) Mr. Scorsese first saw it with Father Francis Principe, a young priest in his parish growing up who was a formidable influence.
“He liked movies, westerns. But we would argue, we would disagree a lot,” Mr. Scorsese recalls. “He didn’t like ‘The Searchers.’ What was that about?”
Mr. Scorsese grows more animated as he remembers his old friend and mentor, who he stayed close with over the years.
“You know, he preferred the movie ‘Marty’ [as] opposed to ‘On the Waterfront,’” he says with disbelief. He continues in this vein, Marty explaining why “Marty” really didn’t work for him.
What Mr. Scorsese looks for in a film is a sense of conflict. And the stories of the saints offer drama in spades. The cult of the saints, he says in an interview with Fox Nation, “started with people just telling stories of men and women who did extraordinary things…extraordinary people who stood up to injustice and cruelty, and risked their lives to help other people.”
Each episode of Mr. Scorsese’s new series ends with “a conversation with friends.” Mr. Scorsese is joined by the memoirist Mary Karr, the author Paul Elie and my colleague James Martin, S.J.
What can a saint like Joan of Arc—who heard voices and led battalions into battle—say to us now? What are we to make of the sins of saints like Kolbe, who lived in an antisemitic world? The panelists bat around the questions amiably, bathed in the glow of the stained glass set.
“The Jesuits have a saying that we are all loved sinners, and so were the saints!” Father Martin says, reflecting on the episode on Joan of Arc. “They weren’t divine. They did difficult things. They were human beings who sinned from time to time. You know that old saying, ‘No saint without a past, no sinner without a future.’”
“I love that,” Ms. Karr exclaims, Mr. Scorsese and friends laughing in the background. “Can I get that as a tattoo?”
A final question for Mr. Scorsese, borrowed from my colleagues at the Jesuitical podcast: If he could canonize anyone, who would it be?
“Without sounding like Nixon, my mother was pretty good,” he says, after taking a moment to reflect. Catherine Scorsese, who died in 1997, appeared in several of her son’s films.
“She had a kind of magnanimity and tolerance,” Mr. Scorsese says. He mentions her work with Spike Lee and remembers how she enjoyed Fellini’s films, even when his father found them “too risque.”
“There was something about life, a certain attitude that she had…it was great,” he adds. “She was always very positive and filled with love. That’s why I dedicated ‘Kundun’ to her. It was unconditional love.”
Read next: “The Fellini film that scandalized Catholic audiences—and the Jesuits that defended it.”
