Word: priestly
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...priests, who seek to exorcise the demons, represent the Polish communists, at once dogmatic and anti-humanistic. In her greatest moment, Mother Joan screams at the priest that she likes her demons; that she will not be made just like thousands of others, who pray to gods all together, who eat their beans every day. This is precisely the plea of Poland, afraid that it is being engulfed by the faceless hordes of the East. Poles frequently identify the mass nature of the Russian Orthodox Church with the mass nature of Soviet communism...
Confused by his failure to "purify" Mother Joan and the rest of the passion-crazed nuns, the priest seeks the advice of an old rabbi, played by the same actor. To the Poles, Judaism is something dark and mysterious, and so in answer to the priest's wish to make everyone angels, the rabbi answers that we are all devils, that Satan created the world. The only force strong enough to change anything, capable of threatening the priests' droning ritual and the nunnery's newly-constructed wall, is the violent explosion of passion. The story begins because a former priest...
...Even the priest becomes infected by Joan's passion--and it turns him into a horrifying criminal. Similarly the Polish man of action, corrupted to the point of insanity by the moral sickness of communism, chops his country to pieces. Afterward he can, like the priest, only shrug and murmur "I did it for your good...
...first to play no role in its affairs, only commenting on it irreverently and making merry. They answer all serious problems with a "Well, let's eat!" These commoners represent the masses of Poles, who are less tormented than the Polish intellectual, but even they are destroyed by the priests. The first scene in which they join in prayer is the last scene in which we see them alive. The camera shows them upside down, as it always shows the priest at his devotions...
...course. Unlike the retreat, which emphasizes individual meditation and passive attention to sermons, the Cursillo requires active, cooperative participation by all candidates. Thus each course includes one or two "auxiliaries" -veteran Cursillistas who pretend to be there for the first time. They keep discussions going, alert the rector and priest if someone is not entering into the right spirit of the course...