The Postmodern Catholic Club

MPAA Rating: PG-13
Reel Rating: 2.5 out of 5 reels

(Disclaimer: Contains Spoilers!)

St. Paul wasn’t mincing words when he said, “If Christ was not raised, our faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). Our faith is one of miracles—and not in the postmodern sense in which everything is a miracle. God has created this world with a splendid array of natural laws and given man the intellect to understand and use them for his needs. Yet God, as the supernatural Author of natural laws, is not bound by them. He will – on rare occasions – allow things to pass that cannot be explained through the normal language of reality.

The women who make up The Miracle Club seek this kind of miracle, though none will find it. They will, however, on their journey, find peace, forgiveness, and a new perspective. This is fine and good, but it isn’t a miracle, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for one.

It must be said from the outset that that this cast is among the highest caliber possible and never disappoint. Oscar winners Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith play Eileen and Lily, who, with their friend Dolly (Agnes O’Casey), make up a small group of Irish performers in the late 1960s. They want to win first prize at a local singing competition: free tickets for an all-expense paid trip to Lourdes. They win second prize (a giant ham), but the kind child who wins lets them have the tickets anyway.

They had a fourth member, but she recently passed away. When Chrissie (Laura Linney), the late woman’s daughter shows up for the funeral, they all seem surprised. Chrissie has been away for decades but agrees to take her mother’s spot on the trip.

All these Dublin women are devout Catholics who pilgrimage to Lourdes, not just hoping for a miracle but expecting one. Eileen has a mysterious lump on her breast, which she worries is cancerous; meanwhile, Dolly’s young son has never spoken a word despite entering his sixth year of life. Lily, well into her eighties, has trouble walking after years of suffering from anisomelia, but doesn’t seem intent on a miracle for herself. “I’ve been doing it for so long,” she mutters, “If cured, I wouldn’t know what to do; I’d probably lose my balance.”

Instead, she seems to be saving her divine gift for her son who drowned forty years prior. Chrissie has lost her accent and faith while abroad in America, yet it gradually becomes clear that she too needs healing of a different sort.

The filmmakers’ treatment of miracles represents well the clash of cultures going on in Ireland (and the Church throughout the West) at the time. For the older women, miracles are supernatural acts of God’s intervention, like being instantaneously healed of a serious disability. Chrissie and Fr. Dermant (Mark O’Haloren), the young, hip priest of the parish, interpret miracles in a more worldly context as spiritual development. A miracle, for them, is a child in poverty going to bed with a full stomach or reconciliation between estranged siblings.

When told there have been sixty-two confirmed miracles at Lourdes, Lily seems oddly unimpressed. “Sixty-two since 1858?” she says astonished. “That’s not very many.” In her mind, that’s well under one miracle a year, so her odds aren’t good. Meanwhile, Chrissie is also unfazed. Even one genuine miracle should convince anyone, but sixty-two doesn’t move her faith one iota. Neither really gets the point.

The bigger difficulty that simmers underneath the surface is the pain that all have experienced from a shared past trauma. In this holy place, far from Dublin, each character’s role is uncovered. Without spoiling too much, it eventually leads to the deaths of two people and shatters the lives of everyone else.

At first, Chrissie joins the trip out of pure spite but soon becomes Lily’s reluctant caretaker. They share a cramped hotel room and constant jabs until the veil gives; they begin to share their hearts. “Can you forgive me?” the old woman finally asks. Chrissie hesitates, then nods. She even agrees to take Eileen to see the doctor after the lump doesn’t disappear after being washed in  the holy spring.

In the last scene, there’s a faint glimmer that perhaps a real miracle occurred, but it is easily explained away. The actual purpose of the pilgrimage was a journey into the hearts of these women and – more broadly – into the soul of Ireland herself.

After decades of secularization and the revelations of sex abuse and coverups, the modern Irish generation seems intent on abandoning its past, including the Catholic Faith and Church. Director Thaddeus O’Sullivan is now in his mid-70s and has seen the transformation of this once vibrant daughter of the Church. Gently, but firmly, he is asking his people not to leave their heritage behind but to recover it, cancerous lumps and all.

It’s a beautiful and poignant story, but it could have benefited from a real miracle and a deeper faith.