Category: Third Sunday of Easter

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

April 19th, 2026

Director: Ridley Scott
Length: 2 hours 24 minutes

Six-Sentence Synopsis

Kingdom of Heaven (2005) follows Balian, a grieving French blacksmith who, after the death of his wife and the arrival of a Crusader knight who reveals himself to be his father, travels to the Holy Land in search of spiritual redemption and a sense of purpose he has lost entirely. Arriving in Jerusalem, Balian is drawn into the complex and volatile world of the Crusader kingdom, where the ailing leper king Baldwin IV holds together a fragile peace between Christian and Muslim forces through a combination of political skill, personal courage, and sheer force of will. When Baldwin dies and power passes to the reckless and fanatical Guy de Lusignan and his ally Reynald de Chatillon, whose unprovoked massacre of a Muslim caravan shatters the truce, the kingdom is left dangerously exposed to the forces of Saladin, the formidable and honourable sultan who has been waiting for precisely such a pretext to march on Jerusalem. Balian, despite being a man of no great title or military experience, assumes command of the city’s defence after its knights are annihilated at the catastrophic Battle of Hattin, organising the remaining population for a siege he knows cannot ultimately be won but which he refuses to abandon without a fight. After a fierce and costly defence, Balian negotiates directly with Saladin, securing the safe passage of Jerusalem’s Christian inhabitants in exchange for the surrender of the city – a resolution that honours both men’s shared commitment to the lives of the innocent over the demands of ideology or pride. The film closes with Balian returned to France, back at his forge, having found in the Holy Land not the spiritual certainty he sought but something harder and more durable – a code of personal honour and human decency that owes more to conscience than to creed.

Doctrinal Dissection – ‘Just War’

The Catholic Church’s teaching on just war represents one of the most carefully developed and morally serious bodies of doctrine in the entire tradition, emerging from the recognition that while the Gospel calls Christians to peace, the realities of a fallen world may sometimes place the innocent in circumstances where violence is the only remaining means of their protection. The framework was given its foundational shape by Saint Augustine, who argued in The City of God that war could be morally permissible when waged not out of hatred or desire for domination but out of love for the neighbour whose life is under threat, establishing the crucial distinction between the act of killing and the interior disposition from which it proceeds. Saint Thomas Aquinas refined and systematised this inheritance in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, Q.40), setting out three conditions that must be simultaneously satisfied for a war to be just: it must be declared by a legitimate authority, it must be waged for a just cause, and it must be animated by a right intention – meaning that even a just cause is corrupted the moment it becomes a vehicle for revenge, greed, or the desire for domination. The Catechism (§2309) develops this further by adding the conditions of proportionality and last resort, insisting that the damage inflicted must not be greater than the evil to be eliminated, and that all peaceful alternatives must have been genuinely exhausted before arms are taken up. Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus (1991) added a further note of caution, warning that even wars fought under just conditions carry within them the seeds of further violence and that the Church must always resist the temptation to baptise military force with the language of sacred obligation, a temptation the Crusading movement had historically demonstrated in its most catastrophic form. It is precisely this temptation – the corruption of a morally serious doctrine into a theological blank cheque for violence – that Kingdom of Heaven places at the centre of its dramatic and ethical concerns, staging the collision between just war properly understood and holy war as its perversion, and asking with uncomfortable directness which of the two the Crusades actually represented.

Scott establishes the film’s central moral framework in the figure of Baldwin IV, the leper king, whose carefully maintained truce with Saladin represents just war doctrine’s most demanding requirement in sustained dramatic form: the insistence that peace, not victory, must always be the governing intention of any legitimate use of force. Baldwin understands that his kingdom’s military position is precarious, that Saladin is the superior general, and that the continued survival of Jerusalem’s Christian population depends not on conquest but on the maintenance of a balance that benefits both sides – a position that requires him to resist the constant pressure of his own barons, who mistake aggression for strength and provocation for piety. Scott shoots Baldwin’s scenes with a stillness and deliberateness that sets them apart from the film’s more kinetic sequences, visually encoding the idea that the restraint of violence is itself a form of moral and political mastery. When Baldwin rides out to confront Reynald after the latter’s massacre of a Muslim caravan, forcing him to his knees at swordpoint and delivering a warning that frames the protection of the innocent as the first duty of Christian kingship, Scott presents it as the most authentically just act in the entire film – not a military campaign but the threat of one, deployed precisely to prevent war rather than to prosecute it. The scene is a dramatisation of Aquinas’s condition of right intention in its purest form: force made credible in the service of peace, wielded by a man whose every action is directed toward the protection of those in his care rather than toward glory, vengeance, or the expansion of his own power.

Scott constructs the character of Reynald de Chatillon as the film’s most sustained and theologically precise portrait of just war doctrine comprehensively violated, a man who embodies every condition the tradition identifies as the corruption of legitimate force into criminal violence. Reynald’s attack on the Muslim caravan is not a military act in any meaningful sense – it is motivated by personal hatred, conducted without legitimate authority, directed against non-combatants, and calculated not to protect the innocent but to provoke a war that serves his own political ambitions and his contempt for any peace that does not end in Christian dominion. Scott is careful to ensure that Reynald is not presented as a simple villain but as a man who has absorbed a theology of holy war so completely that he no longer experiences his actions as violations of any norm – he genuinely believes that killing Muslims is pleasing to God regardless of circumstance, proportion, or consequence, and that the Church’s endorsement of the Crusading ideal covers whatever he chooses to do beneath its banner. This is precisely the danger that Augustine identified at the very origin of just war thinking: that the language of righteous violence, once loosed, is extraordinarily difficult to contain, and that those who take up the sword in God’s name tend to see in every subsequent act of violence a further instalment of divine will. The Bishop of Jerusalem’s enthusiastic endorsement of Reynald’s actions – his blessing of a campaign that any honest application of the tradition’s own criteria would immediately identify as unjust – implicates the institutional Church directly in the corruption, suggesting that the failure is not merely personal but systemic, a collapse of the Church’s responsibility to apply its own moral teaching with rigour and courage rather than using it as a flag of convenience for the powerful.

Scott places the doctrine’s requirement of proportionality and the protection of non-combatants under its most direct and searching examination in the film’s central siege sequence, where Balian must defend Jerusalem with a depleted force against an army that cannot be defeated, confronting the question of what just war demands of a commander when the military situation is hopeless and the lives at stake are overwhelmingly civilian. Balian’s decision to knight the common people of Jerusalem before the siege is not merely a gesture of solidarity but a theologically loaded act – a recognition that the defence of the innocent is not the exclusive preserve of those with noble blood, and that the obligation to protect the vulnerable falls on whoever has the capacity to do so, regardless of rank or credential, an instinct that resonates with the Catechism‘s insistence that the just war is at its foundation an act of love for the neighbour rather than an assertion of power. Scott then stages the film’s most morally complex moment when Balian negotiates the surrender of the city rather than fighting to the last man, a decision that exposes the tension between the crusading ideal of dying for the holy city and the just war tradition’s insistence that no military or religious objective can justify the disproportionate sacrifice of civilian life. The exchange with Saladin – in which both men acknowledge that Jerusalem is worth nothing and everything simultaneously – is the film’s theological centre of gravity, a scene in which the earthly city is finally stripped of the sacred obligation that has been used to justify its rivers of blood, and the protection of living human beings is restored to its proper place as the first and non-negotiable claim on any commander’s conscience. Scott frames Balian’s willingness to surrender not as a failure of Christian military virtue but as its highest expression – the recognition that the just war tradition exists not to sanctify the fight but to discipline it, and that a commander who chooses the lives of the innocent over the symbolic possession of a city has understood something about the doctrine that its most zealous advocates have entirely missed.
The Nun’s Story (1959)

April 19th, 2026

Director: Fred Zinnemann
Length: 2 hours 32 minutes

Six-Sentence Synopsis

The Nun’s Story (1959) follows Gabrielle Van Der Mal, a strong-willed Belgian woman who enters a strict religious order in the hopes of becoming a missionary nurse in the Belgian Congo, taking the name Sister Luke as she embarks on a life of obedience, poverty, and self-abnegation. Her early years in the convent expose the gruelling demands of religious life, as she struggles to suppress her fierce intelligence and independent spirit in submission to rules she finds increasingly at odds with her sense of purpose and conscience. Assigned at last to a hospital in the Congo, Sister Luke finds her calling in medicine and forms a quietly charged professional bond with the secular and outspoken Dr. Fortunati, who openly doubts her ability to reconcile true nursing excellence with the passive obedience her vows demand. Recalled to Europe as the Second World War begins to engulf Belgium, Sister Luke is drawn into quiet acts of resistance against the Nazi occupation, finding that her sense of moral duty to her country and to human life cannot be contained within the boundaries of religious neutrality. The death of her father at the hands of the occupying forces becomes a breaking point, forcing her to confront the irreconcilable conflict between her duties as a nun and her identity as a human being with deeply felt personal convictions. In a quietly devastating final act, Sister Luke requests a formal dispensation from her vows and walks out of the convent alone and in silence, not in triumph or bitterness, but in the sober recognition that the woman she is could never fully become the nun she was asked to be.

Doctrinal Dissection – Obedience to Authority

The Catholic Church teaches that religious obedience is one of three solemn promises – alongside poverty and chastity – by which those who enter consecrated life surrender their own will to God through submission to those placed in authority over them. This is not understood as blind institutional compliance but as something far more demanding: a share in the obedience of Christ himself, who submitted entirely to the Father’s will even unto death. The Catechism (§914-916) affirms that this surrender constitutes a total gift of self, while the Second Vatican Council’s Perfectae Caritatis (1965) describes it as a transformation of the entire life of the religious into an act of living worship. Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, Q.104) is careful to note, however, that obedience derives its moral force from its orientation toward God rather than toward the superior as a person, and that this same logic identifies its one absolute limit: no superior can ever command what God forbids, since as Acts 5:29 states plainly, one must obey God rather than men. It is precisely at this boundary – where institutional obedience and personal conscience meet and refuse to agree – that the doctrine becomes most searching, and it is precisely here that The Nun’s Story takes up its position, following a woman whose conscience is too rigorously formed to permit the obedience her vocation requires, and whose tragedy is that she is too honest to pretend otherwise.

Zinnemann establishes the central problem early and with quiet precision when Sister Luke deliberately fails her psychiatric examination in order to secure a posting to the Congo rather than the psychiatric ward her results would otherwise have earned her. On the surface this reads as a minor act of self-interest, but Zinnemann frames it as something theologically more serious: a moment in which Sister Luke places her own judgement above that of her superiors and bends the process of obedience to serve her private will. What makes the scene so unsettling is that she does not experience it as a betrayal – she convinces herself that the Congo is where she is most needed, and that the greater good justifies the means. Her superiors are not deceived, however, and her punishment is the very assignment she sought to avoid, a sharp institutional lesson that obedience is not a process to be managed or outmanoeuvred but a disposition that must be held without calculation or condition.

Zinnemann sharpens the conflict considerably once Sister Luke reaches the Congo, where the secular doctor Fortunati becomes the film’s most uncomfortable voice of clarity. Blunt and godless where she is disciplined and devout, Fortunati tells her directly what she has never been able to say to herself: that she thinks too independently, cares too personally, and is too alive in her own intelligence ever to become the selfless, will-less instrument her rule demands. His words are not kind, but Zinnemann treats them as a diagnosis rather than an attack, and the film quietly invites the audience to recognise that Fortunati sees the requirements of her vocation more clearly than she does. Aquinas’s distinction between obedience that flows naturally from love and obedience that is merely sustained by willpower hangs over every scene between them, raising the slow and painful question of whether what Sister Luke has been practising for years is genuine religious surrender or simply an extraordinary feat of self-control.

Zinnemann brings the whole edifice down in the film’s final movement, when the Nazi occupation of Belgium confronts Sister Luke with a command she finds she cannot obey. Her Reverend Mother instructs her to remain neutral, to abstain from any act of resistance, and to pray for her enemies as the rule requires – and Sister Luke, whose father has been killed by the occupying forces, finds that her conscience, shaped and deepened by the very faith that drew her to religious life in the first place, will not allow her to comply. This is the limit that Aquinas identified and that Perfectae Caritatis acknowledges but cannot resolve: the point where the obedience owed to a superior and the obedience owed to God no longer point in the same direction. Zinnemann does not present her departure as a defeat or a liberation but as something quieter and more honest – the recognition that she cannot remain inside an institution whose demands she can no longer meet without betraying the conscience that institution itself helped to form.

Category: Third Sunday of Easter

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

The Nun’s Story (1959)