Martin Scorsese’s Lives of the Saints

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Renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese has had a lifelong fascination with Christianity. Early on, he was even drawn to the priesthood and attended a Catholic seminary before finding his calling in film. But he returned to his spiritual fascination in such films as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) with Willem Dafoe as a Jesus struggling with his humanity, and Silence (2016) starring Liam Neeson in a tale of Jesuit missionaries struggling against persecution in 17^th century Japan.

Scorsese pursued other projects in the same vein that never made it to the finish line. Over twenty years ago I was working with a film producer who told me Scorsese was contemplating a project about Jesus’ apostles, so he asked me to prepare for the director a breakdown of the biographical highlights of the apostles’ lives, which I did. The project never materialized, however.

Earlier this year, it was revealed he had completed a screenplay for a film about Jesus, based on a book by Shusaku Endo, the author of the novel on which Silence was based, but filming has been postponed.

Scorsese reportedly also considered, as far back as the 1980s, shooting a series of television documentaries on the lives of different saints, but that project too never materialized – until now.

The Fox Nation streaming service has premiered Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints, a series of docudramas that profile eight Christian holy men and women. The first season is available for viewing now (with a subscription to Fox Nation). It features the 15^th century warrior maiden Joan of Arc, early Christian martyr Sebastian, John the Baptist, and Holocaust victim Maximilian Kolbe. The concluding set of four saints – Mary Magdalene, 4^th century Egyptian monk Moses the Black, Francis of Assisi, and murdered Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket will premiere in May 2025. Scorsese produced, directed, and narrates the episodes.

“I’ve lived with the stories of the saints for most of my life,” the 81-year-old filmmaker has said,

thinking about their words and actions, imagining the worlds they inhabited, the choices they faced, the examples they set. These are stories of eight very different men and women, each of them living through vastly different periods of history and struggling to follow the way of love revealed to them and to us by Jesus’ words in the Gospels.

These stories “gradually became legend – that is, the realm where historical truth gives way to a spiritual truth,” Scorsese narrates.

The first episode features Joan of Arc, the French teen who claimed to receive divine visions commanding her to free France from English rule during the Hundred Years’ War. Ultimately condemned for heresy and burned at the stake, she was canonized 500 years later as the patron saint of soldiers.

Episode number two focuses on John the Baptist, who, while living under Roman oppression in first century Judea, baptized followers in preparation for the Messiah’s arrival, including Jesus. His denunciation of King Herod Antipas’ unlawful marriage eventually led to his beheading — demanded by Herodias’ daughter Salome.

The third episode presents Sebastian, a member of the Praetorian Guard in 3rd-century Rome who defied Emperor Diocletian’s decrees against Christianity. Sebastian covertly spread Christian teachings until his faith was exposed. Sentenced to death, Sebastian survived an execution by arrows and still confronted Diocletian with a final plea to accept Christianity.

Season one draws to a close with the story of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan monk who sacrificed his life in Auschwitz during World War II. Kolbe volunteered to take the place of a Jewish stranger condemned to die in by forced starvation. His final days were marked by unfailing hope, culminating in his death by lethal injection.

Each episode consists of about a half hour of dramatization that is a serious cut above the usual kinds of History Channel-quality re-creations you get with most docudramas. (It’s Martin Scorsese, after all, so you would expect him to raise the bar a good bit). Then each episode wraps up with a studio conversation among Scorsese and a few “experts,” who include: prominent Jesuit Fr. James Martin; Mary Karr, “Professor, Poet, Memoirist”; and Paul Elie, author and Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. All lean Left, especially Martin, who is a controversial LGBT activist, and Karr, a self-described “cafeteria Catholic,” is an abortion-supporting feminist. But so far in their discussions, their political worldview has barely reared its ugly head, at least overtly (Scorsese does complain briefly, in a short video commentary, about the Church’s treatment of the LGBT community).

These conversational segments, unfortunately, are disappointing – less than stimulating intellectually. I don’t recall any real insights into the saints’ lives or stories that added significantly to the dramatizations. The series and the saints themselves might have been better served by expanding upon the dramatizations and dropping the post-game analysis – or perhaps by swapping out Scorsese’s experts with more scholarly thinkers (in all fairness, the lives of the saints and the history of Christianity are all familiar territory for me; perhaps these conversations might be a good starting point for the more casual, less critical viewer).

The first season of Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints is definitely worth a watch, and kudos to Hollywood icon Scorsese for being willing to buck his secular industry to bring these stories of Christian heroes to the screen (even if they have been relegated to a conservative outlet, Fox Nation, rather than a broader audience). As Scorsese himself noted, “You mention Christianity to many people today and they’re shocked. They look at me and they say, ‘You believe in that stuff?’”

He does. “I believe in the tenets of Catholicism,” Scorsese has said:

I’m not a doctor of the church. I’m not a theologian who could argue the Trinity. I’m certainly not interested in the politics of the institution. But the idea of the Resurrection, the idea of the Incarnation, the powerful message of compassion and love — that’s the key. The sacraments, if you are allowed to take them, to experience them, help you stay close to God.

Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints can be seen here with a free trial of Fox Nation.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior