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Answers to questions you may have been afraid to ask!

An opportunity to explore the spiritual in a manner that all may come together and share.

 

Jun 25, 2011

Of all of the movies I have seen, "The Rite" is perhaps the most special.  Anthony Hopkins plays a key role in getting across a lesson we all need repeating.  And if we can learn and be entertained at the same time, why not?

The subject, if you insist on there being one, is exorcism.  But, do not think of it in terms of such movies as "The Exorcist."  That movie, in my opinion, was made to entertain people with a spectacle.  While some parts of "The Rite" have spectacle enough, there's something in this movie which everyone will do well to understand.

If you remember "The Exorcist," you will remember that the younger one of the two priests was Father Damien Karras, a psychiatrist.  He became a Jesuit, and the Jesuit order sent him to medical school.  And he had come to the point where he was very much a psychiatrist and wasn't bothering to much about his priesthood.  And if you read into things enough, you'll learn that he used the priesthood as a way out of the poverty of his boyhood.  Instead in The Rite, you have a young man who goes to seminary as a way of getting away from what's left of his family, and getting away from the family mortuary business.  And there the comparison ends.

Remember what I've said that ordination actually is?  We see my point here in this movie when he does something that supposedly it wasn't time for him to do yet, but he does - and well.

And at the end, the real main point will stare you in the face.  It is that which has transformed many of us.

And I'm going to see it again.  I think this will be another one of the rare ones which offers something new each time I see it.

Blessed Be!