The face of God in Cabrini

Certainly, for a movie about a religious sister and a founder of a religious community, let alone a faith-based movie from Angel Studios (best known for The Chosen), Cabrini is strikingly bereft of religious language, ideas, and praxis. God is mentioned only a few times, and Jesus only alluded to. Prayer is implied, but directly depicted only in a brief Latin grace before meals (the familiar “Benedic, Domine, nos” or “Bless us, O Lord”). We see Mother Cabrini’s sisters teaching children, but no evidence of catechesis. And, while we learn a couple of the sisters’ names, the name of their community (the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) is never so much as mentioned.

Years ago, writing about The Seventh Chamber, a movie about Saint Edith Stein, I observed that empathy — the subject of Stein’s doctoral dissertation and a major focus of her philosophical inquiry — is never mentioned in the dialogue. Isn’t this, I wondered, like making a movie about Einstein and never mentioning relativity? If so, would a movie about the founder of a religious community consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that never mentioned Jesus be like an Einstein movie that never mentioned science?

This might be overstating the case, but not by much. It’s fair to say that cinema is a visual medium, and, in a movie with scenes set in the Vatican and other religious environments, there will be crosses, crucifixes, and other sacred images — for example, the Sacred Heart image looking down over the dining hall of the sisters’ orphanage in Five Points. It’s also fair to say that a statue of an ancient Roman soldier in an establishing shot outside Rome’s Palazzo di Giustizia is given more visual prominence and symbolic significance than any sacred image I noticed.