Brides of Christ

Clip 1: The possibility of divorce and remarriage

Taken from the TV program Brides of Christ (1991)

Original title classification M – this clip chosen to be PG

Curator’s clip description

Frances’ parents are separated and her mother has found a new partner whom she loves and wants to marry. Frances (Naomi Watts) is worried that her mother’s optimism that the church will accept the divorce and her remarriage might be misplaced so she tries to ask Sister Agnes (Brenda Fricker) during the divinity class for the Church’s opinion on divorce, with disastrous results.

Curator’s notes

Even outside the Catholic Church, divorce was still a social stigma until well into the 1970s in Australia. These days, people who are divorced can expect to remarry in a church, unless they are Catholics.

The ‘60s, when this miniseries was set, was a time when many nuns and priests began to rethink their place in the Church and to find the Church wanting in its humanity to ordinary couples. Penny Chapman, who conceived the series and was herself a Catholic child of the ‘60s and ‘70s and then an ex-Catholic, comments that ‘all great drama is about contradictions’, and having lived through this era and having come out of it with her faith in tatters, she instinctively knew that this would be the stuff of great drama.

Directed by one of Australia’s best known television directors, Ken Cameron, the clip beautifully captures the reality of a strict Catholic school of the ‘60s. It is simply but elegantly shot, with no ‘mood’ music to clutter the scene, so the performances from the girls stand out, and Sister Agnes is terrifying.

Janet Bell, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows a class at the fictitious Santo Spirito Convent School where the Catholic church’s position on divorce and remarriage is being examined. A nervous Frances (Naomi Watts) asks her teacher Sister Agnes (Brenda Fricker) about the Roman Catholic stance on divorce and remarriage and is then interrogated about the circumstances of her question. This is followed by exchanges between Sister Agnes and other students about mortal sin and the signs of a good confession, interspersed with Sister Agnes talking about hell.

Educational value points

The script of this clip from the Brides of Christ and Brenda Fricker’s performance as Sister Agnes provide a masterly portrayal of psychological intimidation. Frances is nervous to begin with and is further unsettled by Sister Agnes forcing her to rephrase the question and to remain standing, pinned in the spotlight. Fricker’s modulation of volume and tone, especially when she speaks of the nature of hell, adds to the sense of menace she projects.

The role of Frances was an early one for Naomi Watts, but her understanding of the actor’s craft in interpreting the script was already well developed. For example, Watts portrays Frances’s tentativeness when asking a personally difficult question, her courage in persisting with follow-up questions and her distress at her exposed position by the use of body language, gestures and dry swallowing, and by the way she uses her voice to indicate Frances’s state of mind.

Skilful cinematography and editing build suspense in the clip as the viewer waits to see how far Sister Agnes will go. Reverse-angle shots and extreme close-ups reveal Frances’s obvious distress and Sister Agnes’s tenacity in carrying out what she would see as her duty to instruct the girls according to the beliefs of the Roman Catholic church. Medium-angle shots are used to emphasise Frances’s isolation within the class.

Sister Agnes’s statement of the position of the Catholic church that divorce and remarriage are mortal sins does not include the possibility that has always existed in the church that the first marriage might be declared not to be a true marriage. Such annulments leave the persons involved free to marry in the church because the first marriage is considered never to have existed sacramentally.

The concept of mortal sin, framed in the clip by one of the students answering that the consequence of dying in mortal sin is to go to hell, is clearly distressing for Frances. However, in Roman Catholic theology there is more to mortal sin than that. The sin must be a grave matter. It must be committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent. Mortal sins are said to kill the spiritual life of the soul and deprive a person of salvation, unless there is repentance.

Set in the 1960s, the Brides of Christ miniseries shows the effect of changes in society and of the upheaval in the Roman Catholic church brought about by the Second Vatican Council. Produced by Sue Masters and Penny Chapman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, its six episodes traced changes in the lives of the girls attending the convent school and the nuns running it. Brides of Christ was one of the great successes of Australian television in the 1990s.