Director: Otto Preminger
Length: 2 hours 55 minutes

Six-Sentence Synopsis

The Cardinal (1963) follows Stephen Fermoyle, a young Boston Irishman whose ordination as a Catholic priest marks the beginning of a decades-long rise through the ranks of the Catholic Church. The film is structured as a series of moral and spiritual trials that test Stephen’s faith, beginning with a devastating early crisis in which he must uphold Church teaching even as his sister dies in a difficult childbirth. His vocation is further shaken when he falls in love with a young woman in Vienna, leading him to temporarily abandon the priesthood before finding his way back to his calling. Returning to active ministry, Stephen confronts racism in the American South and later bears witness to the ominous rise of Nazism in Austria on the eve of World War II. The film uses Stephen’s personal journey as a lens through which to examine the Catholic Church as an institution, exploring its authority, its tensions, and its global moral responsibilities. By its conclusion, Stephen has been forged by experience into a man of deep conviction, elevated to the rank of Cardinal and sent back to America as a Prince of the Church.

Doctrinal Dissection – ‘Sanctity of Life’

The Church teaches that every human life is sacred from conception until natural death, possessing an inherent dignity that flows from being made in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei), as affirmed in Genesis 1:27 and echoed throughout Scripture in passages such as Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1:5. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2258) confirms that “human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God,” and that we are stewards, not owners, of the life entrusted to us (§2280). St. Thomas Aquinas grounded this teaching philosophically, arguing through natural law that the preservation of human life is a fundamental moral obligation knowable by reason alone, as the precondition for all other human goods. This tradition was powerfully reaffirmed by Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae (1995), which articulated a “Gospel of Life” in direct opposition to what he called a “culture of death” – a vision carried forward by Pope Francis, who extends the sanctity of life across issues from abortion to capital punishment. Taken together, these scriptural, magisterial, and philosophical foundations form a consistent Catholic conviction that no human life may ever be treated as disposable. The Cardinal (1963) illustrates the practical urgency of these principles, weaving the sanctity of life into a dramatic narrative that encompasses abortion, racism, and war.

Preminger confronts one of Catholicism’s most painful moral absolutes through a devastatingly personal scenario: Father Stephen Fermoyle, a young priest, is told that his sister Gloria can only be saved during a catastrophic labour by performing a craniotomy, a procedure that would directly kill her unborn child. Faithful to Church teaching, Stephen refuses to authorise it, and both Gloria and the baby die. The loss breaks him, precipitating a spiritual collapse that drives him from the priesthood entirely. To his credit, Preminger does not treat this as a simple indictment of Catholic doctrine. He presents the Church’s position as a serious moral conviction rooted in the inviolable sanctity of all innocent human life, showing Stephen’s refusal not as cold institutional obedience but as the agonising act of a man who genuinely believes that no good end can justify the direct taking of an innocent life. For a mainstream Hollywood film of its era, engaging this doctrine on its own terms rather than dismissing it was no small achievement. Yet from a Catholic perspective, the portrayal is not without its problems. The camera lingers so insistently on grief and devastation that the theological reasoning which underpins Stephen’s decision is never given comparable dramatic force, leaving audiences more likely to feel that the Church was wrong than to understand why it could not be otherwise. A truly balanced treatment would have allowed the film’s moral architecture to bear the weight of both sides, letting fidelity to the sanctity of life speak as powerfully as the suffering it demands.

Preminger uses the American South as the setting for a brutal confrontation with racial hatred, sending Father Stephen Fermoyle to a small Georgia town where he witnesses the violent oppression of its Black community and the active menace of the Ku Klux Klan. Stephen, unwilling to remain a passive observer, takes a stand against segregation and pays for it physically, suffering a savage beating that leaves him broken and humiliated. Significantly, the film also implicates the institutional Church, depicting local Catholic authorities as complicit in the racial order through their silence and accommodation of segregationist norms. To Preminger’s considerable credit, he frames Stephen’s resistance not as mere political liberalism but as a direct expression of the same sanctity of life principle that runs through the film’s treatment of abortion: if every human life is sacred and inviolable by virtue of its creation in the image of God, then racial hierarchy is not simply a social injustice but a theological obscenity, a denial of the divine worth of every person. The film implies that a Church which upholds the sanctity of the unborn cannot coherently remain silent before the degradation of the living, and Stephen’s willingness to suffer for that conviction gives the principle dramatic and moral credibility. However, the portrayal is not without its weaknesses from a Catholic standpoint. The institutional Church’s failure is depicted starkly but never fully interrogated, and Preminger does not explore the rich tradition of Catholic social teaching that explicitly grounds human dignity and racial equality in the sanctity of life. As with the abortion sequence, he is more powerful as a diagnostician of moral failure than as an architect of the theological vision that should have prevented it.

Preminger transports Stephen Fermoyle to Vienna on the eve of the Anschluss, placing him at the heart of one of history’s most catastrophic moral failures as the Nazi regime absorbs Austria and the Church is forced to reckon with how it will respond. The film’s portrayal of a Cardinal figure modelled loosely on the historical Cardinal Innitzer is particularly pointed: initially the institutional Church accommodates the new order, offering a compliance that Preminger presents not as villainy but as a failure of nerve, a capitulation to political reality at the expense of theological principle. Stephen, alongside the young Kurt von Hartmann, watches this accommodation with growing anguish before the film traces the Church’s painful turn toward resistance as the true nature of the regime becomes undeniable. Preminger frames Nazism not merely as a political evil but as a theological one, a system that explicitly ranks human lives by race and utility, placing it in direct and murderous opposition to the Catholic conviction that every human life bears an equal and inviolable dignity before God. To his credit, Preminger gives dramatic weight to the arc from compliance to resistance, showing that the Church’s eventual courage is born precisely from its rediscovery of the sanctity of life as a principle that cannot be politically negotiated. However, from a Catholic perspective the portrayal still stops short, giving more screen time to institutional hesitation than to the theological clarity that ultimately compelled resistance, leaving audiences with a stronger impression of the Church’s failure than of the convictions that finally overcame it.