Last night I re-watched The Mission, one of my all-time favorite movies (with screenplay written by Robert Bolt, who also wrote the screenplay of one of my other all-time faves, A Man For All Seasons). Like A Man for All Seasons, The Mission is about conscience and the way we respond to injustice.

The Mission is the true story of Jesuit missionaries in 18th century South America trying to protect the Indians to whom they’re ministering from the unscrupulous machinations of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, with the papacy stuck in the middle

Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) is an idealistic young priest who founds a mission in the high country above an enormous waterfall in a remote part of the jungle. He’s joined by his brother priests including Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert DeNiro), a reformed mercenary and slave-trader who accompanied the Jesuits to the mission as a kind of self-imposed penance for killing his brother (Aidan Quinn) in a fit of jealous rage. Mendoza ultimately has a dramatic conversion experience and becomes a Jesuit, finding a new kind of happiness among the Guaraní Indians.

The Indians are running self-sufficient communal plantations where the profits are shared and reinvested in the community, but have a somewhat precarious existence under the protection of the church. The Portuguese would like nothing better than to expropriate the Guarani’s lands and enslave them. As it happens, the missions exist in a dusputed territory recently ceded to the Portuguese by the Spanish, but this means the Guararni are at risk of being subject to Portuguese slavers unless the papal emissary,Altamirano, rules in their favor.

Unfortunately, the precarious position of the church in Europe, which would only be exacerbated by the Jesuits interfering with the secular powers, leads Altamirano to reluctantly conclude that the missions should be closed down and that all the Jesuits should leave. This, of course, means dispossession and enslavement for the Guarani unless the manage to disappear back into the jungle whence they came.

Fathers Gabriel and Mendoza both vow to stay with the Guarani, but diverge sharply over their responses to the imminent invasion of the mission by a combined Spanish-Portuguese force. While Gabriel insists that fidelty to their vocations requires Christ-like non-resistance, Mendoza reverts to his military ways, organizing the Guarani for an armed response against the invaders.

When Mendoza comes to Gabriel to renounce his vows as a priest, Gabriel counters with the theological rationale for not fighting:

Gabriel: What do you want, captain, an honorable death?

Mendoza: They want to live, Father. They say that God has left them,
he’s deserted them. Has he?

Gabriel: You shouldn’t have become a priest.

Mendoza: But I am, and they need me.

Gabriel: Then help them as a priest! If you die with blood on your hands, you betray everything we’ve done. You promised your life to God. And God is love!

Later, when Mendoza comes to Gabriel asking him to bless his fight, Gabriel responds:

If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don’t have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.

Ultimately (SPOILER) both Mendoza and Gabriel meet their deaths at the hands of the invaders, the former felled in battle, the latter killed while leading his flock in a Eucharistic Procession. Those Guarani who aren’t killed or captured disappear back into the jungle.

It takes no great leap of insight to recognize that Gabriel and Rodrigo represent two divergent and contrasting Christian approaches to the problem of violence. Gabriel represents Christian pacifism: because God is love, as shown in the example of Christ, Christians can’t shed blood even in what may be a just cause. Rodrigo represents the “just war” ethos: force can be used to defend the innocent when their rights are being aggressed against. There’s no question that the Guarani are innocent and well within their rights, as far as natural justice is concerned, in defending themselves against the European invaders.

Of course, neither one of these approaches prevails in any concrete historical sense. The armed uprising is crushed and the pacifist priest is slaughtered. Force doesn’t stop the invaders and love doesn’t change their hearts (though there is one scene where even the hardened conquistadors hesitate momentarily before setting fire to a church full of men, women, and children).

You could say that Rodrigo ignores a cardinal tenet of just war theory: that war should only be waged when there is a reasonable likelihood of success. Unlike the pagan ideal of a noble death, the Christian just war tradition finds no virtue in fighting for a lost cause (Being martyred, of course, is another matter). The ragtag band of Indians, accompanied by three renegade priests, hardly seems likely to fend off a combined invasion by two of the world’s superpowers.

And yet, at least as the movie portrays it, Rodrigo’s response is understandable, if not justifiable. He sees massive injustice about to be inflicted on the people he loves and wants to fight back and to defend them. And this ideal is hardly unknown in Christendom. Rodrigo could be seen as a kind of knight-errant who, after repenting of his evil ways as a mercenary, uses his skills to champion the cause of the poor and oppressed.

But the movie’s heart seems to be with Gabriel and his Christ-like non-resistance. The image of him, dressed in white surplice, bearing the monstrance with the Host, leading his flock into the hail of gunfire has a special kind of power. It suggests, at least, that there is a power that love has when it refuses to hate, even if it is trampled underfoot by the world. Rodrigo gives in to the temptation to use violence, and fails anyway. Gabriel refuses to hate or strike back and that does seem to give him a kind of victory. It’s not some sentimental notion that you can love your enemy into loving you back, but that precisely by refusing to hate, love overcomes the powers of this world.

Bonus trivia: The radical priest Daniel Berrigan has a cameo as Sebastian, one of the priests at the missoin.