Stories From the Silver Screen: The Diary of a Country Priest

In a letter written to a friend in 1935, Georges Bernanos—France’s foremost Catholic writer, whose essays and stories are filled with the most searing and prophetic insight into God and the things of God—announced his intention to write a novel about an obscure country priest who, he declared, “will have served God in exact proportion to his belief that he has served Him badly” but, in his childlike innocence, will triumph, allowing him “to die peacefully of a cancer.”  

Three years later, the novel appears precisely along those lines, bearing the title The Diary of a Country Priest, soon becoming the most-widely acclaimed of all his writings. Three years following Bernanos’ death in 1948, a film adaptation is made under the direction of Robert Bresson, which has garnered no end of praise for its many excellences, not the least being the hidden yet heroic sanctity of its main character, who, dying alone and seemingly without hope, cries out at the very end, “Does it matter? Grace is everywhere.”

Perhaps that should instead read, “All is grace,” the former being a mistranslation from the original, which Bernanos himself had intended. Thus will the dying priest replicate exactly the words spoken by a certain Carmelite nun as she lay dying at the end of the 19th century—who has since been canonized as among the most beloved of all the saints in the Church. And yet, her last request that she be given the holy Viaticum before returning to God was refused on the grounds that she was far too ill for nourishment of any kind, including the Eucharist. Obedient to the end, the young Thérèse of Lisieux quietly accepted this final privation; for that, too, was a kind of grace. “Tout est grace” (“All is grace”).

How beautifully does the Bernanos film capture this deeply Christic dimension, pointing us to the very horizon of grace, the sheer boundlessness of God’s love for the world shown in the sending of His Son to suffer and die. “It is,” as the late David Schindler put it in an interview some years ago, in which he described the continuing importance of Bernanos’ witness, “the sense of being at the heart of the world while remaining at the center of the Church.” In reading him, he tells us, “You get this sense of entering into the world in all of its ambiguity and brokenness and loving it, not in a relativistic fashion; but neither in a moralistic fashion; entering in and penetrating”—all the way down to the very bottom of its Christic being, which shines with the radiance of divine grace, however hidden in the dark night of sin and suffering. 

Despite what people will often and quite glibly say about the life of faith, it does not so much do away with tragedy as it succeeds in fulfilling and redeeming it. Christ does not cosmetically remove our suffering, sanitizing everything in a cheap and superficial way. It is not magic that Christ applies to our brokenness but mercy, which He dispenses by entering ever more deeply into our shattered lives, leaving nothing untouched by His love. 

One hasn’t a clue about Christianity, as image upon image from the movie shows, until one sees, as Professor Schindler insists, “that the radicality of Christ’s love was such that he was no longer concerned to separate himself from the sinners, the guilty.” But what Christ aims for, most particularly in this great cinematic drama, is an identification with our pain and loss so intimate and complete as to take ownership of it and thus bear it all away in the fire of His consuming love.

In other words, the moralism that causes the strangled cry in the sinner who cannot live up to the standard laid down in the Law and the Prophets, has all been blessedly smashed to bits by a God whose judgments are always preceded and accompanied by love, a love which became concretely incarnate in a person who bears a unique name, Jesus the Christ. There are no thunderbolts hurled from above, blowing up the poor sinner unable to follow the learning curve of virtue; but rather, judgment is always preceded by the love which enters and understands the sinner, even as it will not compromise with his sin. “A harsh and dreadful love,” to recall a line from Dostoevsky, “and not any sort of counterfeit love full of soft soap and sentimentality.” 

How powerfully evocative all this becomes in the film, so ably and sensitively handled thanks to the directorial genius of Monsieur Bresson! This is seen most especially in the scene with Madame la Comtesse, whose bitterness over the death of her young son has kept her for so long unable either to love or to be loved. The priest tells her that he, too, knows what it is to suffer. Indeed, as alter Christus, his entire priestly ministry requires that he not be a spectator to others’ suffering but that he enter into it as deeply as Jesus Himself did—remaining as vulnerable and exposed to the dark side of sin and suffering as Christ Himself, the action of whose grace the poet Eliot has so movingly described in Four Quartets:  

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

And in his priestly role as one “Whose constant care is not to please / But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse, / And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse,” his job is to speak only what is true, to reveal what is really there. “I try to understand it,” he tells her. 

A priest can’t shrink from sores any more than a doctor. He must be able to look at pus and wounds and gangrene. All the wounds of the soul give out pus, madame.

And we ourselves must often and at no little cost be made to see them, lest we, too, go to our deaths not knowing the full extent of their hidden malice. Like Madame, we will all be forced to face our own stinking selves. “God will break you,” he tells her. “Break me!” she cries out in bitter protest. “God’s broken me already. What more can He do? He’s taken my son. I no longer fear him.”  

Yes, the young priest agrees, God has taken him. “But your hard heart may keep you from him for all eternity.”

“Is my son to hate me, then?” she asks. “The son I bore, and nursed at my breast!”

“You won’t hate,” he answers, “you’ll cease to know one another.” Which is, he tells her, the awful condition of the damned. “Hell is not to love anymore, madame. Not to love anymore!”

It is to force a man out into a state of aloneness no human being was ever created to have to endure. “If you want to love,” he tells her, summoning all the urgency Christ Himself must have felt when even the least sinner threatened to hurl himself down into the abyss, “don’t place yourself beyond love’s reach…

You must resign yourself to—to God. Open your heart to Him…God is not to be bargained with. We must give ourselves up to Him unconditionally. Give Him everything. He will give you back even more.

“Do you take God for an executioner?” he asks. “God wants us to be merciful with ourselves. And besides, our sorrows are not our own. He takes them on Himself, into His heart.” And here the tension builds to an almost unbearable climax, Heaven and Hell hanging in the balance. 

Which of the two will she choose? If you see the show, then you will know…