Stigmata are the wounds to the wrists, ankles, and side suffered by Christ on the cross. What about bleeding feet?? You can be damn sure people tossed broken shards of glass and pottery, thorns, puddles of vinegar, and wire spikes in Christ’s path en route to Calvary Hill.
The Church is only for poor, ignorant, stupid people who think God is thick red dye pouring out from the eye sockets of a solid stone statue.
Modern, sophisticated, suave Americans who live in big, dirty, crime-infested cities where women throw their infant children under the bus (abortion?) and young ladies sleep with a rock star one night, a female coworker the next, and a fallen priest the next — we’re better than that.
It’s way cool to hit on a priest. Kudos if you actually seduce him and get him into your bed. The whole subtext of the film was, are they going to have sex?
The moral theme of the film is “the closer you are to God, the more open you are to Satan.” The entirety of the Bible and two thousand years of philosophy boiled down into that one paradox.
The characters may say this often enough, but they always imply the opposite: The closer you are to Satan the further you are from the moral quagmire, the painful empathy, the humanity that is God. Good grief, give me Satan any day of the week.
Personally, I think we’re supposed to use our whole body to get rid of stress. If you are a devout believer and focus all the stress on the stigmata points; well, your total stress capacity is greatly diminished. Nor was there any mention of the common link between delusions and schizophrenia and false stigmata. I suppose we’re meant to assume that all religious people are just plain crazy.
Not one Church member shown in the film is the least bit spiritual. They are all greedy, afraid, egotistical, intellectual to the extreme, or excommunicated for sins unknown but implied.
You see absolutely no humility, dignity, compassion, empathy, or love — except maybe in the female lead, a street urchin who pimps herself to the highest bidder. It’s the Church who has much to learn from the unwashed masses, not vice-versa.
Thank God the poor girl is blessed at the end, to finally be rid of that horrible, nagging affliction called faith.
Now she can go back to her pointless life in the big, ugly city, to dream of the priest who might have been her — confessor???
