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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4775 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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I'm surprised, too. The last two movies were all over social media I consume, but this one? Not a peep about it. I was very surprised to learn a third movie had been made.

Again, just going off the synopsis, but it made me go "Yeah, this is a movie written by a Protestant" and that seems to be correct:

Johnson also drew from his own religious upbringing in Evangelicalism, with Blanc reflecting his own mixed feelings on organized religion. However, he chose to have the film focus on Catholicism for aesthetic reasons, admitting the churches he grew up in "kind of looked like Pottery Barns" and hence served as a poor visual basis for the film.

The church structure etc. as per the synopsis of the movie makes no sense in Catholicism. Where is the bishop in all this? Who is "Reverend Prentice Wicks, Jefferson's grandfather"? Does this mean his grandfather was a Protestant minister (if he has a daughter) and the daughter then had her illegitimate son who... became a Catholic priest????

Oh well, I guess we should be glad that we're still the movie face of religion, because when you need to show the church, you show the Catholics!

I believe they specified his grandfather had a daughter, his wife then died, and THEN he became a priest

In the past, this might have been accepted in some places(notoriously Tolkien was raised by a Catholic priest) but today having a child is generally disqualifying from the priesthood absent exceptions for married priests, and allowing priests to be guardians is incredibly rare(there is literally a single case in the entire US where a priest is allowed to be a guardian of a minor child- and in that case, the mom abandoned her baby when the parish was offering free babysitting so she could work an unusual shift, then got arrested, and they weren't able to track down the grandma for something like a year, at which point she testified that the kid should remain with the priest).

The adult children of former Anglican-now Catholic priests and of Eastern rite priests are very different people, is all I can say.

My memory is fuzzy about which priest this was, but I've definitely had a parish priest mention their son in several of their sermons. Actually, it might have been teo separate priests with two separate sons. Either way, I thought it was reasonable common and unexceptional. I'm surprised to find out otherwise. (For reference, the sermons were post 2010, but the son was almost certainly an adult by the time I heard them.)

In the Anglosphere it’s not that unusual to find a married, Latin rite priest who converted from Anglicanism or Lutheranism. Priests who were ordained after widowhood is not a thing in the USA, however- although it’s theoretically allowed to ordain widowers, those with dependent children are right out(and dependent is interpreted very broadly indeed). And theres typically also an age cutoff- priests must begin their nine year formation process before a certain age.

Again, my memory is fuzzy, but I have high confidence that they mentioned adoption and never mentioned a spouse. One of the two priests it could have been was raised in a different denomination, but I think they mentioned converting at a young age.

Prentice Wicks would've lived a long time ago given the age of Monsignor Wicks.

Protestantism is either Catholic light, indistinguishable from surrounding society, or aniconic when it comes to the visual language. Orthodoxy is too foreign. Tridentine Catholicism- or a hybridized version with the novus ordo- is what filmmakers like shooting, because it shows up well on camera, it's distinctive, and it looks cool.

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