“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” is stylish and slippery

Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, a new docudrama streaming on FOX Nation produced by the celebrated director, features the lives of eight saints in dramatic enactments with documentary supplements. The series certainly has a fresh feel to it when it comes to film material on the saints.

But some of the ideas it brings are a little too fresh.

The series premiered with its first section on November 17 with St. Joan of Arc. It continued with St. John the Baptist on November 24, St. Sebastian on December 1, and St. Maximilian Kolbe on December 8. The second section will be released in April and May 2025, over the Easter season, with St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Becket, St. Mary Magdalene, and St. Moses the Black.

Each episode is followed by a short discussion with Martin Scorsese, poet Mary Karr, scholar Paul Elie, and the controversial Fr. James Martin, SJ. (The latter’s reputation no doubt precedes him due to his unorthodox and even scandalous advocacy of the LGBTQ movement—but more on that in a bit.)

There is a faithfulness and authentic interest pervading this series that is interesting to discover in a modern media rendition of these holy heroes. It undertakes to tell their stories seriously and to enter the mystical aspects of their lives with sincerity. There is little of the skepticism, scientism, or secularism that Catholics might immediately suspect. Martin Scorsese clearly desires to tell these stories with style and respect.

Executively produced and narrated by Scorsese, the series has a genuine and well-crafted cinematic quality, with convincing production values, dynamic and bold direction, and technical proficiency. It stumbles, however, where so many film projects do nowadays: in the writing. With weak and clunky scripts, the acting can only go so far, and there is a wooden, rushed, and out-of-place sense in the performances that hinders these pieces from approaching greatness.

It’s a missed opportunity, as the excellent cinematography and sacred subject matter lose themselves over the clunky cribbing and cramming involved in capturing historical complexity and spiritual transcendence in 45-minute slots. It is remarkable, nonetheless, to see such effort poured into the heroism of the saints, whose lives have rarely found such a stage as this with such professional treatment.

In reviewing the episodes on St. Joan of Arc and St. Maximilian Kolbe, it appears this ambitious, faith-based series will struggle with Martin Scorsese’s own struggles with the Faith. It is long known that Scorsese has a complicated and irregular relationship with Catholicism—a relationship, unfortunately, that may tend towards a rogue relativism.

Scorsese, as a young man, briefly considered a priestly vocation at a minor seminary but eventually embraced a film career. Over the decades, he has risen in fame as one of the most talented and visionary directors of all time, many of his films standing as icons of cinema. But through many of his films, as he picks through the rough rubble of humanity with good fellas and taxi drivers, he is keeping an eye open for the elusive God of his youth Whose presence, he suspects, could bring meaning to the violence and vitriol of human society.

The Departed (2006), arguably his masterpiece, grapples with the bewildering and brutal interweaving of good and evil in a morally ambiguous society filled with good guys and bad guys, monsters and men. Scorsese’s streets have always been mean streets and there is an effort to reconcile the grime and the grotesque with the goodness of God. His film Silence, about Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan, based on the 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo, is a stirring and disturbing meditation on his search for religious truth—a search that seems to conclude repeatedly in uncertainty.

Talking about his new series, Scorsese has said that “many people are trying to find religion outside of religion.” Ironically, there is an uneven messaging in The Saints that falls into (or quite close to) this very category or criticism. There are elements in the production that appear to be at odds with themselves, expressed in the incongruity between graceful and gratuitous moments. There is both a reverence for the spirituality of the saints and a graphic physicality that is jarring—ranging from a concentration on Joan’s virginity to Kolbe’s nakedness in Auschwitz. This may be intentional, but there is something in the juxtaposition that strikes an odd chord.

This discordance likely springs from a relativist leaning on the part of the director. The episodes on Joan of Arc and Maximilian Kolbe have a slant to them that present them as unorthodox outsiders, as Catholics that stood outside the boundaries of what it meant to be Catholic in their times. Though the series thankfully avoids making Joan a feminist figure or woke pioneer or “girl boss,” they do give her a bite in the manner that she insists on her visions and wearing men’s clothes to the point she is executed by the very Church she loves. Kolbe was a priest burdened with the antisemitic sentiments of his culture, as most Catholics did, but broke free from those traces in his sympathies for Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

These deviations are stressed by The Saints. While the series does not shy away from the saints’ humanity, there is a keener interest in their controversy. The controversy of Scorsese’s Joan and Kolbe is presented as an instinctive or even divine call to strike out against the accepted grain of Catholicism in their times. In other words, the quality that makes a saint is found in the courage to go beyond tradition and teaching in response to what neighbor and God seem to demand from them. Thus, their heroism and strength are given prominence together with a rebellious inclination.

In this, The Saints presents an idea about Catholicism and sainthood framed in relative terms instead of doctrinal terms. While it leaves plenty of space for the Church, the Sacraments, and even the miracles that emboldened saints like Joan of Arc and Maximilian Kolbe, these short films include a suggested invitation to consider the Faith outside the established contexts of the Catholic Church and to imagine that sanctity and salvation could come from revolutionary dedication or nonconformist piety.

Misgivings over this familiar line of questioning become more heightened with the closing feature of each episode. After the film portion, the short panel-type conversation about the saint led by Scorsese is an interesting addition, but inevitably reveal a shallowness in the overall ambitions or visions of the series. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect much from something clearly crafted for a mass audience, but slipping Fr. James Martin in there is suspicious.

Scorsese has a working relationship with Fr. Martin, who assisted him in the productions of Silence and The Irishman, but it cannot be lost on Scorsese that Martin is a controversial figure in the Church—much like the saints Scorsese is bringing to the screen. While it’s heartening to hear Fr. Martin speak well of sainthood and the spiritual life, it is impossible to dismiss the nudgings, however gentle, towards an unconventional openness regarding the Catholic life that these saints allegedly model and which we know he champions.

As an artist, Scorsese grapples with or gropes for God with a vigor that can be violent (as many of his films attest). That artistic intensity can be irresponsible, however, if it invites making demands upon the Divine, to insist on ecclesial approval for personal inclinations, or to sanctify views that contradict tradition.

Such an interest is clearly present in the blasphemous The Last Temptation of Christ, and Scorsese’s questioning comes through loud and clear in The Saints. Though they are reverential toward these characters and the magnificence of their faith, there is still a strong whiff of something that wants to edge the Catholic Faith beyond itself, to catch its heroes breaking her rules, to find a way of being religious outside of religion.

Some saints did break rules in the name of religion. But they were radicals according to the paradoxes of the Beatitudes—not progressives who refused to be hedged in by a stagnant Church. The saints were glorious risk takers, without doubt, and as an artist, Scorsese admires the risks they took to live out their faith with kindness and courage. But the riskiness of the saints was not what Scorsese might want it to be—namely, a blessing to pursue sanctity according to personal vision or conviction.

The risk of tracing the borders of Catholicism to uncover some revisionist path leading to salvation is not the risk of the saints. Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints is a handsome and, for the most part, wholesome look at holy history as far as modern media goes, but it is touched with the unholy hope to break the perceived restrictions of religion. Catholics who are up for an interesting experience would not be remiss in taking this series in, but they should be aware of the spiritual sleight of hand that is being played, however consciously, by Martin Scorsese and company.