Here you are in prison. They say you may die here. You call your friends to your side.
—
My friends, I want you to ask him this :
Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?
But John, you once called that man the Lamb of God.
The one who takes away the sin of the world.
You testified that he was God’s chosen one.
Friends, still I wrestle.
—
The wrestlings with doubt in John Patrick Shanley’s film Doubt, like those of John the Baptist in the Bible, can tangle your feet in knots. We first encounter the idea of doubt in this film in a homily given by Father Brendan Flynn, a priest at a Catholic church in the Bronx. Flynn, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman with the intelligence and sensitivity of a fox, begins by asking his parishioners, “What do you do when you’re not sure?” He goes on to highlight sickness, loneliness, and guilt as some of the dark trials that lead to doubt. Then he ends the message on a surprise note by stirring the listeners to consider a potential positive aspect of doubt : “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost, you are not alone.”
Sister Aloysius, played by Meryl Streep, is not impressed by this speech. She takes the homily as an opportunity to watch Flynn like a hawk, assuming that the words he speaks must have come from some deep, dark place within him. As she watches, she recruits Amy Adams’s Sister James to join her. Together they begin to see things that prompt them to doubt the priest’s behavior and character. Aloysius sees Flynn approaching a boy to talk during a group recess who pulls away abruptly from the priest. James sees Flynn calling an African American boy privately out of class and then later putting an undershirt back into the boy’s locker.
At the same time these doubts are arising in the nuns’ minds, Sister James begins to be tormented by another kind of doubt : maybe, just maybe, Flynn is an innocent man and the efforts to find some dirt on him are their own kind of evil. Hearing Flynn’s adamant mid-film sermon on gossip sharpens the sting of that torment for her. Sister James’s balancing act between two forms of doubt may be where the film finds its greatest power and spiritual significance. As we empathize with Sister James, we see how doubt is at the same time a tremendous source of pain for her and a gift that pushes her to search out the truth. Aloysius has doubts about the priest, yes, but her doubts have led her to an implacable certainty. Sister James, in contrast to Aloysius, is someone who is willing to question certainty rather than be tied to it hand and foot.
The film finds James in one moment of interpersonal crisis that is hard to forget. She happens to meet Father Flynn out in the church garden. He defends his protective behavior around the male school students by using the word “love”. Flynn asks James, “Have you forgotten the message of our Savior? It’s love…of people.” The movie could be asking, in this moment, the prickly question of how the Savior’s love can be expressed and carried out in real life. Sister James may wonder if the priest is excusing pedophilia with his reference to love and at the same time entangled by the fact that Sister Aloysius may herself be guilty of cruelty masquerading as love. How can we truly carry out the command to love one another when we are paralyzed by doubt about how to love and doubt about how the people around us think they are showing love? This moment is one of several in the film that grab hold of tremendously difficult thorns that adorn the road of faith.
There are some sequences in which the film questions the possibility of certainty so much that it may seem to advocate for doubt at all costs. As we know, though, we would be paralyzed with inaction if we had doubts about everything. If we had no room for certainty, we would not be able to believe in anything…even in the certainty that priests who have truly abused children must be held accountable. The film itself gets perilously close to questioning even that certainty in the scene between Sister Aloysius and the mother (played by Viola Davis) of a child who Father Flynn may or may not have molested.
The mother, heartbreakingly, seems almost willing to wave away the accusation because of the pain it would cause her son and her family if it were to be found true. The economic, social, and race-related reasons she does this are acutely observed. Those reasons just barely help the movie escape from the fact that it doesn’t quite question the mother’s lack of interest in knowing the truth about the possible evil behavior of the priest. “It’s just til June,” the mother says, and the only challenge the film has for her is the face of Streep’s brutal, wolflike Aloysius. Are we really to question certainty in this way?
Spoiler alert for the following paragraph:
“Whatever I have done,” says Father Flynn after Aloysius has dug up some unspoken wrongdoing from Flynn’s past, “I have left in the healing hands of my confessor. As have you.” Mercy for both priest and nun is in view here, but at the very same moment Flynn’s words remind us of something else. They call to mind the injustices of abuses, sexual and otherwise, that have been swept quietly under the carpet of institutions both religious and secular. Doubt and certainty are complicated things, yet a disdain for any kind of certainty could be used to support hiding sins of the past and not investigating sins of the present.
It may be, though, that the primary type of certainty being questioned here is the kind that Sister Aloysius has at the moment she first locks her jaws on the idea that Father Flynn is guilty. This is the kind of certainty that will be convinced of wrongdoing from the moment Flynn’s “suspicious” sermon (the one where he extols the mysterious virtue of collective grief/pain/doubt has ended. The kind that is convinced of wrongdoing because Father Flynn has long fingernails or takes a lot of sugar in his coffee. The kind of certainty that concerns Sister James when she finally lets go of her inhibition and opens her mouth to Sister Aloysius, “You don’t like him…you don’t like that he uses a ballpoint pen…and you are letting that convince you of something terrible, just terrible!” The kind of certainty that arises from Aloysius’s self-justifying belief that “I know people.” “What did you hear?,” Father Flynn asks the sister angrily in the final confrontation between the two of them. “What did you see that convinced you so thoroughly?” The nun’s answer chills to the bone and gets to the heart of the film’s indictment of her and of prejudice in general : “What does it matter?”
Doubt is universal among us fallen creatures. We are reminded of that in this film’s piercing final scene. In that moment we recognize that the film is not only circling doubts about whether a certain priest has or hasn’t done evil. It is a meditation on doubt and how we all deal with it. It is one that casts its net broadly, catching each of its characters in that net along with all of us who are human. Thankfully, though, the film has the mercy to play the hymn “Come Thou Redeemer of the Earth” over the end credits coming right after that reminder. Catching us into the song, the following are almost the very last words we hear before the screen fades to black:
“Thy cradle here shall glitter bright
And darkness breathe a newer light
Where endless faith shall shine serene
And twilight never intervene.”
Doubt haunts our dreams and our waking moments. It seems to swamp our faith and threaten to suck us into its undertow. Yet here in the song is a vision of a place or a time when darkness will “breathe a newer light.” In that place, as the song says, endless faith shall shine serene. We can imagine John the Baptist having a similar vision before he met his end in that prison. After all, the story we read tells us that Jesus sent John’s followers back to John to share with him what they had seen and heard. They had seen and heard Jesus heal many, and had been witness to Jesus restoring sight to the blind and mobility to the lame. Now, something else can take the place of Father Flynn’s desperate “What did you hear? What did you see?”
—
Take heart, John. We saw it with our own eyes and heard it with our ears. Soon you will wrestle no more.
Come, cradle glittering bright
Come, darkness, breathing newer light
Come, endless faith to end my doubts
Unto the surety of sound and sight
Brian Duignan (2025)
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