“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.”
—Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese is one of the most revered and influential filmmakers in cinematic history. His oeuvre encompasses the sacred and profane totality of human experience, from gangsters on New York’s mean streets to pious priests in seventeenth-century Japan. His work often confronts the deepest parts of our collective psyche, asking questions and seeking redemption, often in the unlikeliest characters and places. Scorsese’s contemporary Steven Spielberg said, “Lots of directors can make movies that make you feel things, easily, temporarily. Marty’s movies can change you, and they cling to your heart forever.” I would like to share with you some insights into Martin Scorsese’s biography and cinematic legacy through the prism of his personal journey with the Catholic faith.
Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese was born on November 17, 1942, in New York City. He was the son of second-generation Sicilian immigrants Catherine Cappa and Charles Scorsese, who lived in the Little Italy neighborhood on the Lower East Side. Scorsese’s older brother Frank described Little Italy at that time: “The neighborhood was very violent, the gangs, the fights. . . . You lived by the sword, you died by the sword.” The young Martin suffered severely from asthma, which led him to the cinema:
During the first five or six years of my life, I was mainly in the movie theater. I had asthma as a child and was not able to participate in children’s games or sports of any kind, so my parents took me to the movies. My brother did too. It became a place to dream, fantasize, to feel at home.
He developed an early love for John Ford, Orson Welles, Powell and Pressburger, Alfred Hitchcock, along with the greats of Italian Neorealism, like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, who collectively laid the foundations for his future directorial vision. Scorsese’s other great childhood love was the Catholic Church. He attended St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral parish and elementary school, where he was taught by the Sisters of Mercy. He looked back fondly on his early Catholic formation:
I became enamored of the Church when I was seven. We had Italian priests and Irish nuns. I went to Catholic school and the nuns taught us that this terrific thing happens: at 10:30 every morning, God comes down to the altar, and it’s great. Also, I had to survive, so religion became a kind of way of survival. . . . I became an altar boy because I loved the ritual, the chance to be close to that special moment when God came down to the altar.
The local parish priest Fr. Principe had an enduring and elemental influence on the young Scorsese. They would often chat about the latest films and the young priest would offer a Catholic perspective, imbuing cinema with the potential for a deeper sense of meaning, which remained a hallmark of Scorsese’s profound cinematic analysis. In many respects, Fr. Principe was Scorsese’s local hero and the primary inspiration for his early desire to become a Catholic priest, as Scorsese recounted: “A young priest in our parish, Father Principe, was a strong influence on me. . . . I talked to him about a lot of things. Especially after I decided to become a priest . . . I wanted to be like Father Principe.”
The priest recalled the role of the Church in Little Italy and gave a profound insight into the character and faith of the young Scorsese:
In those days you identified yourself by your parish. . . . It was a way of life. The boys of St Pat’s wanted me to talk to them about religion . . . and I mean speculation, not just morality. Marty Scorsese was very intelligent and intense, and with a very, very good sense of humour. He was incarnational in his approach to religion; he was able to find God in things. To him, as most Italians, religion is incarnational, earthy. The worst sins are not the sins of the flesh but rather superba, or pride. The sins of the flesh are signs of human weakness. But pride, putting man in God’s place, that was very serious because it’s a direct rejection of God. I used to ask the boys to consider fundamental questions: Why am I here? How ought I to act? What can I hope for? I would tell them they had to become aware of these questions, to face them. Of course, the kids accepted the Real Presence as a mystery, a truth too deep to understand. I used to tell them there is a difference between a problem and a mystery. With a mystery, the answer does not exhaust the question. Two plus two is a problem. Four is the answer. But love, compassion, beauty, those are mysteries. . . . Christianity is full of paradoxes, apparent contradictions. I have found my answers in my faith, in Catholicism. Maybe they wouldn’t; I wasn’t going to force them. But they had to ask the questions.
Scorsese entered the Archdiocese of New York’s minor seminary for a year and planned on entering the order of priests after graduation from Cardinal Hayes High School. He had difficulty learning Latin and realized that wanting to be like someone is not the same as having a vocation: “Many are called, but few are chosen. You don’t dedicate your life to Jesus in the sense of being a cleric unless you really have the calling. . . . It isn’t to be like someone else; it has to come from you. It’s a very serious and very sacred calling.”
After his departure from the seminary, he fell more deeply into his love of cinema. He enrolled at New York University’s Washington Square campus and earned a bachelor’s degree in English. By his second year at NYU, he was making short films. Scorsese began with the shorts What’s A Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This? (1963) and It’s Not Just You, Murray! (1964), which won him the Producers Guild Award for best student film. He entered the master’s program at NYU and filmed Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (1967), marking the first appearance of Scorsese’s alter ego, J.R./Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel. The film depicts the relationship between J.R. and a girl played by Zina Bethune and is filled with Catholic imagery. The battle of the spirit and the flesh embodied by J.R. personified the struggle of many pre- and post-Vatican II Catholics coming to age during the sexual tumult of the 1960s. The film also laid the groundwork for many of Scorsese’s thematic and artistic preoccupations throughout his career.
The follow-up Mean Streets (1973) was a breakthrough for Scorsese, Keitel, and the newly recruited Robert De Niro. The influential film critic Pauline Kael remarked, “Mean Streets is a true original of our time, a triumph of personal filmmaking.” The film expounded on the themes explored in Who’s That Knocking, like masculinity, violence, New York street/crime culture, and Catholicism, perfectly summed up in the opening lines: “You don’t make up for your sins in Church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bull**** and you know it.”
This line or sentiment could’ve come from many of Scorsese’s later characters and goes to the heart of the man and his work, as Scorsese reflected, “I grew up with a lot of tough guys. . . . I was raised with gangsters and the priests. . . . I wanted to be a cleric. I guess the passion I had for religion wound up mixed with film, and now, as an artist, in a way, I’m both gangster and priest.”
The commercial and critical success of Mean Streets led Scorsese to his first major studio production: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), starring Ellen Burstyn, who won an Academy Award for Best Actress in the film. He followed it up with Taxi Driver (1976), written by Paul Schrader, which told the story of a Marine veteran/taxi driver plagued by loneliness and existential nihilism. The film was inspired by Schrader’s own life, Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864), and Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). The audience is taken into the mind of “God’s lonely man” as he roams the nightmarish streets of late-night New York City. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) meets underage prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster), whom he “saves” from the pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) in a climax of extreme violence. Scorsese many years later reflected on the violence in his films: “Violence is a part of the human condition, to deny it will only prolong a bad reckoning with violence, to deny it—you must face it.” Through De Niro’s realistic portrayal of Travis, the audience is taken to the margins of modern civilization and into the darkest regions of our collective psyche, where we are confronted with our shared shadow talking in the mirror. Scorsese’s camera doesn’t overtly judge the moral actions of his characters but rather portrays their complex, contradictory, human, and perhaps misguided path toward redemption.
Through the following masterpieces Raging Bull (1980) and King of Comedy (1983), Scorsese and De Niro continued to explore the battle between spirit and flesh and the existential dread of modern man. It was during this time that Scorsese embarked on one of his most ambitious and controversial films, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). The film is based on the 1955 book by author Nikos Kazantzakis and is a fictional account of Jesus’ life in human rather than divine terms. Kazantzakis explained,
This book was written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death—because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered. Christ suffered pain, and since then pain is sanctified. Temptation fought until the very last moment to lead him astray and temptation was defeated. Christ died on the cross, and at that instant, death was vanquished forever.
Scorsese had wanted to make a film about the life of Christ since age ten and had been given the book by Barbara Hershey on the set of Boxcar Bertha (1972). Scorsese recruited Paul Schrader, whom he had previously worked with on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and began filming in Morocco in late 1987. Upon its release in 1988, the film courted worldwide protests for its perceived blasphemy, turning a low-budget film into a box office sensation. The outrage stemmed from the depiction of Jesus as a man riddled with doubt and contradiction who, at the crucifixion, is tempted by Satan (disguised as an angelic young girl) in a dream sequence to come down from the cross and live the life of an ordinary man with a wife and children. After this life is lived out on screen, Jesus is returned to the cross and exclaims, “It is accomplished!” as bells ring and the film transcends into light.
The Last Temptation of Christ is a very complex and paradoxical film, and I would argue it says more about Scorsese, Schrader, and Kazantzakis and their personal struggles with faith, fear, and doubt than it does about the nature and story of Jesus of Nazareth. Scorsese had noble objectives with the film and didn’t intend to court controversy:
It’s not Gospel—it’s fiction. It’s an idea, a book made to set off discussion . . . to get people to take Jesus seriously. If you take him seriously, then you take his ideas seriously—the ideas of love, loving God, and loving your neighbour as yourself. . . . I do believe in the Resurrection. . . . I believe Jesus is divine. But Jesus’ last temptation is very human. . . . He resists that temptation because . . . He had to die to give us hope. . . . He had to become one of us by dying for our sins. . . . It’s the idea that God understands exactly what his creatures go through.
Scorsese felt by delving deeply into the humanity of Jesus that he would help make Christ more relatable to the outsiders on the fringes of modern society. Ultimately, Scorsese wanted to depict a Jesus who would reach the litany of broken characters he depicts in his films:
I wanted to make a film for those who say—I’m a drunk, I’m a drug addict, I’m a prostitute, I’m mean, I have no heart, I have nothing in my life. I don’t deserve to be loved. That’s the Jesus I wanted in Last Temptation.
Something that resonates with our contemporary context is the film’s renunciation of political means as a force for enduring change. Judas (Harvey Keitel) and the other disciples are constantly provoking Jesus (Willem Dafoe) to become a revolutionary and overthrow the Roman government. Yet Dafoe’s Jesus opposes revolution and suggests spiritual change as the benchmark of progress, liberation, and societal evolution: “If the soul within us doesn’t change, Judas, the world outside us will never change.”
Fr. Principe offered a penetrating insight into the film and Scorsese’s work more broadly:
Marty’s movies do have an Easter dimension. I remember in Taxi Driver, the young prostitute is saved, and she goes home. People forget that. In the Last Supper scene in Last Temptation, Marty gives us a sense of the Real Presence as physical, real. When the wine literally became blood, that was as strong an understanding of the Eucharist as you can imagine. . . . For me, Marty is communicating the Christian message. His is a kind of vocation and a priesthood in and of itself.
“He was incarnational in his approach to religion; he was able to find God in things.”
It was twenty-seven years until Scorsese attempted another explicitly Christian-themed film. The result was an adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s book Silence. It’s the story of seventeenth-century Jesuit priest Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) who travels to Japan to find his former mentor Ferreira (Liam Neeson) and help the brutally oppressed native Christians. At the film’s conclusion, Rodrigues is forced to make a decision between apostasy or saving his life and those of his fellow Christians. Graham Greene called the book “one of the finest novels of our time,” and the text became a passion project for Scorsese:
Silence is the story of a man who learns—so painfully—that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present . . . even in His silence. . . . It’s this painful, paradoxical passage—from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion—that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.
Silence brings to mind Fr. Principe’s imploration to the young Scorsese to “ask the questions.” Silence provokes questions about faith, doubt, betrayal, compassion, humility, power, and the very nature of Christianity itself. Scorsese suggests answers, but ultimately the viewers are left to decipher and come to their own conclusions. One of the central questions is represented by the fumi-e. The fumi-e was a likeness to Jesus that religious authorities of the Tokugawa shogunate required suspected Christians to step on to show they were not members of the outlawed religion. The question relates to whether faith transcends an image and whether it is possible to still be a Christian whilst seemingly acting in opposition or contradiction to one’s faith. The film is Scorsese at the peak of his powers, unifying all the elements of his previous films and going deeper than he ever had before into his unending personal journey to faith, truth, Jesus, and the Church. It’s the latter he spoke of in unambiguous terms during the promotion of Silence:
I believe in the tenets of Catholicism. I’m not a doctor of the church. I’m not a theologian who could argue the Trinity. I’m certainly not interested in the politics of the institution, but the idea of the Resurrection, the idea of the Incarnation, the powerful message of compassion and love— that’s the key. The sacraments . . . to experience them, help you stay close to God.
Scorsese and his legacy towers over the film world. His films, including his most recent Killers of The Flower Moon (2023), are canon in not only American but world cinematic history. He has influenced directors Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Guy Ritchie, Todd Phillips, and Bong Joon Ho, who in his acceptance speech for the 2020 Academy Award for Best Director said, “When I was young and studying cinema, there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart [from Martin Scorsese]: ‘The most personal is the most creative.’” Scorsese has received countless awards and accolades, including the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Director. Four of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and he was named the second-greatest director of all time (behind Alfred Hitchcock) by Total Film magazine (2007).
For me, Scorsese’s existential explorations into doubt and faith, violence and compassion, pride and humility, love and apathy, have been sources of understanding and inspiration throughout my life. I count Taxi Driver, Bringing Out The Dead, and No Direction Home as three of my favorite films of all time and will always admire Scorsese’s perseverance, artistic integrity, and cinematic genius. He has been a great teacher into the power, potential, history, and beauty of film through his work, interviews, documentaries, and the Film Foundation, which supports the preservation and restoration of cinema for future generations.
Scorsese has recently released an eight-part series on Fox Nation called The Saints exploring the lives of John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, Francis of Assisi, Maximilian Kolbe, Joan of Arc, Sebastian, Moses the Black, and Thomas Becket. Regarding the series, Scorsese remarked on his role as a filmmaker and the relationship between cinema and God:
Filmmaking comes from God. It comes from a gift. And that gift is also involved with an energy or a need to tell stories. As a storyteller, somehow there’s a grace that’s been given to me that’s made me obsessive about that. . . . For me, it’s not that cinema is a god. It’s the expression of God. Creativity is the expression of God. . . . For me, it’s a gift to experience and exist for that moment. So it comes through cinema. It comes through movies.