'The Nativity Story' Movie Problematic for Catholics, "Unsuitable" for Young Children

LifeSiteNews.com ^ | 12/4/2006 | John-Henry Westen

[Pyro7480]

'The Nativity Story' Movie Problematic for Catholics, "Unsuitable" for Young Children

By John-Henry Westen

NEW YORK, December 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A review of New Line Cinema's The Nativity story by Fr. Angelo Mary Geiger of the Franciscans of the Immaculate in the United States, points out that the film, which opened December 1, misinterprets scripture from a Catholic perspective.

While Fr. Geiger admits that he found the film is "in general, to be a pious and reverential presentation of the Christmas mystery." He adds however, that "not only does the movie get the Virgin Birth wrong, it thoroughly Protestantizes its portrayal of Our Lady."

In Isaiah 7:14 the Bible predicts the coming of the Messiah saying: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel." Fr. Geiger, in an video blog post, explains that the Catholic Church has taught for over 2000 years that the referenced Scripture showed that Mary would not only conceive the child miraculously, but would give birth to the child miraculously - keeping her physical virginity intact during the birth.

The film, he suggests, in portraying a natural, painful birth of Christ, thus denies the truth of the virginal and miraculous birth of Christ, which, he notes, the Fathers of the Church compared to light passing through glass without breaking it. Fr. Geiger quoted the fourth century St. Augustine on the matter saying. "That same power which brought the body of the young man through closed doors, brought the body of the infant forth from the inviolate womb of the mother."

Fr. Geiger contrasts The Nativity Story with The Passion of the Christ, noting that with the latter, Catholics and Protestants could agree to support it. He suggests, however, that the latter is "a virtual coup against Catholic Mariology".

The characterization of Mary further debases her as Fr. Geiger relates in his review. "Mary in The Nativity lacks depth and stature, and becomes the subject of a treatment on teenage psychology."

Beyond the non-miraculous birth, the biggest let-down for Catholics comes from Director Catherine Hardwicke's own words. Hardwicke explains her rationale in an interview: "We wanted her [Mary] to feel accessible to a young teenager, so she wouldn't seem so far away from their life that it had no meaning for them. I wanted them to see Mary as a girl, as a teenager at first, not perfectly pious from the very first moment. So you see Mary going through stuff with her parents where they say, 'You're going to marry this guy, and these are the rules you have to follow.' Her father is telling her that she's not to have sex with Joseph for a year-and Joseph is standing right there."

Comments Fr. Geiger, "it is rather disconcerting to see Our Blessed Mother portrayed with 'attitude;' asserting herself in a rather anachronistic rebellion against an arranged marriage, choosing her words carefully with her parents, and posing meaningful silences toward those who do not understand her."

Fr. Geiger adds that the film also contains "an overly graphic scene of St. Elizabeth giving birth," which is "just not suitable, in my opinion, for young children to view."

Despite its flaws Fr. Geiger, after viewing the film, also has some good things to say about it. "Today, one must commend any sincere attempt to put Christ back into Christmas, and this film is certainly one of them," he says. "The Nativity Story in no way compares to the masterpiece which is The Passion of the Christ, but it is at least sincere, untainted by cynicism, and a worthy effort by Hollywood to end the prejudice against Christianity in the public square."

And, in addition to a good portrait of St. Joseph, the film offers "at least one cinematic and spiritual triumph" in portraying the Visitation of Mary to St. Elizabeth. "Although the Magnificat is relegated to a kind of epilogue at the movie's end, the meeting between Mary and Elizabeth is otherwise faithful to the scriptures and quite poignant. In a separate scene, the two women experience the concurrent movement of their children in utero and share deeply in each other's joy. I can't think of another piece of celluloid that illustrates the dignity of the unborn child better than this."

See Fr. Geiger's full review here:
http://airmaria.com/

[Dr. Eckleburg]

We have faith, but it is not blind faith - for we see with our own eyes the works of God in our lives and world every day!

Exactly right. Thank God.

"The mighty God, even the LORD, hath spoken, and called the earth from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof.

Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined." -- Psalms 50:1-2

[TAdams8591]

"I find the threads edifying. It makes you stop and think about WHY you believe what you believe, rather than just believing it blindly."

Frankly, I have/had parents, teachers (including nuns and priests), family and friends for that, long, long before FR was a glint in JimRob's eye. We were not raised to believe ANYTHING blindly.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

In order to be pure enough to carry and birth Jesus, Mary had to be born without original sin.

Why? There's nothing in Scripture that says a sinless nature is a prerequisite for giving birth to Jesus Christ.

Instead, that is part of the miracle -- that God became man and was born of a woman; a woman graced by God, but nonetheless a fallen human being in need of a savior, just like the rest of us.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

As much as you would like to deny it, Marian devotion is not an end of itself, but draws a soul closer to Christ.

I realize Roman Catholics sincerely believe this, but I do not think it is accurate. Any time spent praying to Mary is time lost praying to Jesus Christ.

"For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" -- 1 Timothy 2:5

[TAdams8591]

Our interpretation of sripture says otherwise.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

What Scripture would that be?

[TAdams8591]

There is more than one interpretation of scripture, is there not?

[Blogger]

You can answer or not answer. You never clarified your prior two statements which seemed to contradict one another. You also did not back down from your accusation that I denied Jesus' divinity - which I guess makes you pretty stubborn (not that there's anything wrong with that).


The incarnation is Illogical (at least according to Man's logic - God's logic is another matter). How can someone be 100% God and 100% Man without mixture of natures, yet unified, and in 1 person? Answer: He's God, we're not. It happened and we don't have a clue how He did it, but He did. Next subject.


Second issue: How can God be a trinity, three persons, yet one God - unchanging and indivisible; and yet it be claimed that one of these indivisible persons has a mother while the other two do not? The truth is it is a paradox. God has no mother, though the person Mary carried in her womb was indeed God. God the Son was eternally preexistent. He had no beginning, therefore He had no mother - as GOD. The key is defining mother. A mother in this instance is the one whom gives you life. Life begins at conception in a mother's womb. Prior to this, there is no life.


Since the beginning of this planet, there have been two ways that people have come into this world. 1)Supernatural creation from the clay or human side (only applicable to Adam and Eve and the creatures created by God in the beginning) 2)Through the egg of a woman known as the biological mother (issues such as surrogacy, adoption, etc., do not apply in this case as we are discussing how one comes into the world.


Since the second person of the Trinity existed eternally prior to the Holy Spirit's union with Mary, Mary did not give him his beginning as God. Divinity entered Mary's womb, but not due to her biological functioning. She did give Him his beginning as a human man (in cooperation with the Holy Spirit). Therefore, calling her Mother of Jesus, as Scripture says, properly puts Mary in her rightful place as mother of Jesus while still preserving Jesus's eternal preexistence and unchangeable nature as God. It also lets one base one's Christology on who the person of Jesus IS rather than who Mary was - as it should be.

[Blogger]

You are absolutely correct. The word translated "full of Grace" in Catholic Bibles and "highly favored" in many other Bibles is Charitou. It is found one other place in Scripture: Eph 1:6 To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.

Where it is found is not in the glory of His grace; rather in our being made accepted.

Mary was made accepted by God. She was just like us, but as part of the miracle of the Incarnation, God made her accepted to conceive, carry, and birth Jesus.

[TAdams8591]

Go here to begin to understand Catholic reasoning and the scriptural basis for believing Mary was born without original sin

[Dr. Eckleburg]

New Advent offers precisely four Scriptural "proofs" for believing Mary was born without original sin.

Proverbs 8 and Ecclesiasticus 24 which do not speak to the subject whatsoever; Genesis 3:15, which offers even less substance for the belief; and finally, (and singularly) Luke 1:28 about which New Advent writes...

The salutation of the angel Gabriel -- chaire kecharitomene, Hail, full of grace (Luke 1:28) indicates a unique abundance of grace, a supernatural, godlike state of soul, which finds its explanation only in the Immaculate Conception of Mary."

"Full of grace" is not "unique." Thereare countelss people in the Old Testament who received God's "grace" or in whom "grace" was found.

And as for Mary's "godlike state of soul," that's bordering on blasphemy.

Again, there is nothing in Scripture which says Mary was born without original sin. Nada. Zilch.

[P-Marlowe]

Go here to begin to understand Catholic reasoning and the scriptural basis for believing Mary was born without original sin

That particular method of scriptural interpretation is called eisegesis.

IOW, you declare a doctrine and then after you have declared your doctrine, you go and look for scripture verses that can be stretched and twisted to fit your particular doctrine.

There is no scriptural basis for the contention that Mary was born without original sin. There are plenty of verses to the contrary.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

Mary was made accepted by God. She was just like us, but as part of the miracle of the Incarnation, God made her accepted to conceive, carry, and birth Jesus.

Amen. You said it much better than I did.

And just as God made Mary accepted, so does the righteousness of Jesus Christ make all of us accepted to God, by His grace alone.

[Blogger]

Accepted, justified, sanctified, purified- just like Mary was; and not of ourselves, as it was not of herself. Given grace- not an abstract power, but God's Mercy at Christ's expense. Faith in that wonderful God's atoning power allows us to call Him, "Savior" - just like Mary did.

Goodnight my friend.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

There are plenty of verses to the contrary.

Amen.

"Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name Jesus." -- Matthew 1:24-25

"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him." -- Mark 6:3

"I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my mother's children. For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me." -- Psalms 69:8-9

"For neither did his brethren believe in him." -- John 7:5

"But ther of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother." -- Galatians 1:19

[Dr. Eckleburg]

And good night to you guys.

"Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true."

Tennyson

[HarleyD]

Surely you are not suggesting that the Gospel of +John is not inspired are you?

No. But what you are suggesting, or it appears so, is that +Ignatius' writings are just as inspired as the Gospel of +John.

The early church distinguished between what was inspired and what wasn't long after Ignatius left. Ignatius' writings were never classified as inspired according to the early fathers.

[HarleyD]

"I knew the Protestants left the Church...

According to my calendar, the Orthodox walked out on Rome approximately 500 years before the Protestants.

[Rhadaghast]

Jude 1, says it is written to Jame
the brother of Jesus also.

Thanks for your great clarity and defense of the faith on this site.

[Kolokotronis]

"By faith in God. He promised to preserve His Word in Scripture. By faith, I believe He has done just that."

Where did God promise to preserve the canon of the NT as we have it today (any version; you pick)?

"God preserved His Canon, not in a centralized organization in Rome, but through his universal church of all believers."

Why are you Protestants so Rome centric? There is today and has been since Pentecost, far more to The Church than the Church of Rome. As a matter of historical fact, the Church of Rome played only a part, and a relatively small one at that, in the establishment of the canon. My God, Rome is like a bogeyman to you people!

"All of God's local bodies of believers copied and passed the letters back and forth to one another and God preserved that which he wished to be preserved. In the end, a grouping of representatives from throughout all of the Christian realm gathered together and after prayer wrote down which books were canonical. By faith, I believe that they were inspired by God when doing so."

All sorts of letters were copied and handed around the Churches. There were the Letters of +Clement to the Corinthians, the letters of +Ignatius of Antioch, of +Polycarp, the Gospel of Barnabas, The Shepherd, various letters attributed to the Apostles and certain Gnostic Gospels and none of them were placed in the canon, though a number were suggested as teaching tools. Bishops and Patriarchs regularly sent teaching letters to their local churches from the very beginning. The letters of +Ignatius may actually be older than Revelations. They may be roughly contemporary with +John's Gospel. Now as a matter of fact, a group of "representatives" of the worldwide Church did not gather together and determine the canon. It was a process of councils and commentaries by Greek speaking bishops and patriarchs of The Church (well, there were a few who spoke Latin) which eventually resulted, in the late 4th century in the canon The Church uses today (with the exception of most Protestants who use one more or less developed in the 16th century)except for Revelations which wasn't universally accepted until many centuries later. The Holy Spirit didn't come down and hand them the canon and say "These only and no others!" They made their various determinations based on what they perceived to be The Faith of The Church. Different prelates perceived different scriptures to be in accord with that Faith, but they all applied The Faith of The Church to a piece of scripture when determining if it was worthy to be placed in the canon. The Faith of The Church came first, then the canon, not the other way around. The only real reason to establish the canon at all was to assure a uniformity of scripture based teaching within The Church. The canon which those Greek bishops developed was and is absolutely in accord with what The Church believed and taught prior to its establishment. You must remember that while perhaps even a majority of the Faithful in the East could read, there were few if any books as such in circulation. The Faith was spread by preaching, not black leather bond collections of scripture read at home and individually interpreted.

The rub for Protestants who reject Holy Tradition (the various Marian doctrines for example but there are all sorts of Traditions) is this, that what we Orthodox hold as Holy Tradition is the exact same Holy Tradition that The Church of the bishops who established the canon did. The Liturgy I will attend in a couple of hours dates back to the 4th or 5th century. The oldest extant Liturgy, the Liturgy of +James, which is still used in Jerusalem and some monasteries and upon which our usual Sunday Liturgy is based, dates in its basics to before 200 AD. Orthodox Liturgies are so ancient in form that rabbis often remark how like Jewish Temple ceremonies they are.

There is a maxim in The Church, Lex orandi, lex credendi; that law of prayer is the law of belief. In other words, if you want to see what we believe, look at how we pray and what we say when we pray. The Liturgies of The Church, the various Western Liturgies (and there were and in fact are a number of them) and especially and oldest, the Eastern Christian Liturgies demonstrate, to a great extent, what those bishops of the 4th century believed. To be fair, you'd really have to read, or even better, experience, an entire Liturgical year of liturgies and devotions to get a full understanding, but simply reading the Liturgies will go a long way towards showing you what those bishops and priests and lay people of the first 4 centuries of The Church believed. Try reading the Divine Liturgies of +James, +Basil the Great, +John Chrysostom, the Sarum Liturgy, the Ambrosian Liturgy and the pre Trent Roman Liturgy. They are all available online. If the whole Roman thing bothers you, leave out the last two (though you really should read them). Once you've done that, you'll have an idea of where those bishops were coming from. And then remember that they believed in 7 sacraments, the Real Presence, the Assumption of Mary after her death, the Apostolic Succession, all sorts of things which Protestantism, in an effort to "not be Roman" threw out and argued that scripture didn't support those beliefs, despite the fact that those beliefs were among those upon which our scripture was measured.

"These human beings, can fail. They can err. They can distort. We've seen throughout history various church leaders who were not leaning upon the Lord for guidance but rather were there because of personal ambition or because they were the second sons of European Aristocracy.

When the various local bodies of believers which make up the universal Church are led by people who speak that which is contrary to Scripture, I reject that leadership. Again, even Paul commended the Bereans for checking what he said in comparison to Scripture - so there is a precedent set."

See, you're being "not Roman" again. Orthodoxy fully recognizes that hierarchs, even The Fathers, can and do err. Some of the most dangerous heretics of the early Church were Eastern Patriarchs. As +John Chrysostomos tells us, the floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops! The Church is not simply the hierarchy, though in the West that notion, for better or worse reasons, has arisen. The guarantee that The Church is not heretical is the fact that The Church is the bishops, the clergy and the laity working together in the original "checks and balances" system. Whole councils of the early Church preached heresy, but The Church corrected these things and returned, very quickly actually, to orthodoxy. God promised that hell itself couldn't prevail against The Church and it hasn't. One need only look to the Orthodox Church and hundreds of years under Mohammedan oppression and terror to see that.