‘The desire to confess is overwhelming’: The theology of Mafia movies

Catholic Herald, 13 February 2020

The genius of the Mafia genre is that, amid brutal criminality, it always pointed toward something more.

It was definitely not your godfather’s Oscars. The grand finale of Mafia films, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half hour epic, The Irishman, garnered 10 Oscar nominations, including for best picture and best director. Yet The Irishman won no awards. The Mafia genre – once ground-breaking in the early 1970s – has now concluded.

Oscar didn’t reward The Irishman.

The nominations were a nod of respect for a proud tradition of Mafia films, and its leading lights – Scorsese, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci. The whole gang got together for one last hit.

While The Irishman did not win any awards, there was as astonishing note of respect. Scorsese got a standing ovation, after losing the award for best director this time. He had won best director in 2007 for The Departed, a film about the Irish mob in Boston.

So it is worth noting how the grand 50-year saga of Mafia films ended. It ended the only way it could have ended, with the eponymous lead of The Irishman, Frank Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, going to Confession.

Like all good Mafia films, The Irishman notes the Catholic faith of its characters, observed formally and sacrilegiously, as in the famous baptism scene in The Godfather. So The Irishman must have its moments in church, when Sheeran’s children are baptised and when, after the hit on Hoffa, all the characters are at a wedding. The sacraments are part of a mob life.

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