Sister Aloysius: “Did you hear that wind last night?”
Flynn: “I certainly did. Imagine what it must’ve been like in the frontier days when a man alone in the woods sat by a fire in his buckskins and listened to a sound like that. Imagine the loneliness! The immense darkness pressing in! How frightening it must’ve been!”
Sister Aloysius: “If one lacked faith in God’s protection, I suppose it would be frightening.”1
I can think of no English play in the last twenty years that’s created more buzz than John Patrick Shanley’s 2004 Doubt, a drama about the battle of wills fought by Father Flynn, a pastor at St. Nicholas parish, and Sister Aloysius, principal of the church’s school. Four years after its stage premier, Shanley wrote and directed an Oscar nominated film version of his play. Over the past two decades, Doubt has been staged in dozens of theaters and generated scores of reviews and articles. Just this year, a production of it returned to Broadway.2
Widening the Intepretive Lens
On the surface, Doubt is about whether Father Flynn is grooming Donald Mullen, the only black and hence emotionally vulnerable kid in St. Nicholas’ otherwise Irish-Italian student body. The play debuted only two years after the Boston Globe shocked the nation with its exposé of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. With memory of the scandal still raw, nearly everyone at the time, critics and audiences alike, assumed that Shanley’s play was all about clerical misconduct. Even today, this continues to be the standard interpretation.3
I don’t for a moment want either to minimize the horror of priestly abuse or deny that it’s a theme in Shanley’s play. But I worry that our cultural fixation on the scandal has hijacked Doubt. It’s not at all clear to me that the play is exclusively or even primarily about sexual predation in the Church.4 The fact that Shanley leaves the question of Father Flynn’s guilt or innocence unanswered suggests he wants to fry a bigger sort of fish.
The play’s subtitle is A Parable. That’s significant, because a parable isn’t just any old story. It has a very specific meaning. Derived from the Greek parabolē, “a casting beside,” a parable draws on a conventional image or action to gesture at a deeper meaning. The two are “cast” alongside one another, making parables essentially multivalent. Take Jesus’s parable of the sower in the Gospel of Matthew. It uses a common agricultural act, sowing grain, as a vehicle to make a deeper point about spiritual receptivity, and in doing so retains both meanings, the quotidian as well as the profound. One can interpret the parable simply as a lesson in agriculture, but doing so really misses its point.
In Shanley’s parable, I believe that Sister Aloysius’ suspicion of Father Flynn is a vehicle for the playwright’s more fundamental exploration of the complex nexus of fear, doubt, and certainty. The two themes are cast side-by-side. Just as we miss the point of Jesus’ parable if we interpret it as nothing more than a gardening guide, so we deflate Doubt if we see it only as a riff on the Catholic sex abuse scandal. It’s much more than that.
The Wind Bloweth …
Doubt is set in 1964,5 a time when political and cultural tremors are beginning to be felt even in traditional Bronx enclaves like St. Nicholas parish. A number of events have converged to shake things up, creating an atmosphere of uneasiness—of uncertainty.
The country has been traumatized by JFK’s assassination just months earlier. As Father Flynn says in the sermon that opens the play, “Last year when President Kennedy was assassinated, who among us did not experience the most profound disorientation. Despair. ‘What now? Which way? What do I say to my kids? What do I tell myself?’”6 Moreover, although only gestured at through the character of Donald Mullen, the Civil Rights movement has been roiling the nation for nearly a decade, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And in that same year, the Gulf of Tonkin incident off the coast of Vietnam dramatically increases U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia, an ominous prelude to the bloody and futile conflict that will rip America apart over the next decade.
Shanley uses wind to symbolize all the changes beginning to sweep across the nation in 1964. At the end of the scene in which Sister Aloysius tells her young colleague Sister James that she suspects Father Flynn of impropriety, the stage direction is “The sound of wind. Sister Aloysius pulls her shawl tightly about her.”7 That night, a terrific windstorm rips off a tree limb in the church courtyard, prompting the exchange between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn quoted at the beginning of this essay.
In the film version of Doubt, the wind plays an even more prominent part. While complaining to Sister James about the loosening of academic standards at St. Nicholas, Sister Aloysius irritably shuts a window through which the wind has scattered papers across a classroom. During her climactic confrontation with Father Flynn, she again slams a window shut, angrily demanding, “Who keeps opening my window?!” In the second of his two sermons in the play,8 Father Flynn, indirectly responding to Sister Aloysius’ suspicions of him, warns that accusatory rumors are like feathers scattered by the wind: impossible to take back or control.
Leaning into the Wind
For Sister Aloysius, the wind of change blowing through her world is a disorienting threat to be resisted. She fights it on all fronts, aggressively leaning into it to do battle. As principal of St. Nicholas school, she discourages any innovation, curricular or otherwise. Art education and dance instruction are a “waste of time.”9 Newfangled ballpoint pens are anathema. “I’m sorry I allowed even cartridge pens into the school,” she complains. “The student really should only be learning script with true fountain pens. Altways the easy way out these days. What does that teach? Every easy choice today will have its consequences tomorrow. Mark my words.”10 Sister Aloysius’ unswerving position is that students should fear teachers rather than like or relate to them. By the same token, teachers, she instructs Sister James, should distrust students, serving not as their mentors but as “fierce moral guardian[s]” charged with keeping unruly youngsters on the straight and narrow. “You stand at the door, Sister. You are the gate-keeper.”11
Almost immediately upon his arrival at the parish, Sister Aloysius senses that Father Flynn is another adversary to be reckoned with. He’s too chummy with the students; he wears his fingernails offensively long (“cut your nails,” she barks at him at one point12); he wants to liven up the stodgy Christmas pagent with a few secular carols (“‘Frosty the Snowman’ espouses a pagan belief in magic,” objects Sister Aloysius. “It should be banned from the airwaves.”13); and when Father Flynn accuses her of harboring “a fundamental mistrust” of him even before the accusation of sexual misconduct, she readily agrees. Why? Because “I know people!”14
But “knowing people” isn’t much of an explanation, much less a justification, for Sister Aloysius’ increasingly obsessive campaign against Father Flynn. Even she admits she has no solid evidence that he abused Donald Mullen. “You have not the slightest proof of anything,” Flynn angrily says to her. “But,” Sister responds, “I have my certanty!”15 Once again, she “knows” people. And she sized Father Flynn up from the moment he walked through the door.
Stale Air vs Cleansing Wind
There’s yet another change in the air in 1964: the great ecumenical gathering known as the Second Vatican Council, or Vatican II, is in its second year. Although it’s referred to only once in Shanley’s parable, I think the Council plays a huge role.
Vatican II was an aggiornamento or reformist updating of the Roman Catholic Church. Centuries of liturgical tradition were modified by the Council’s decree that Masses could be celebrated in the vernacular instead of Latin. Parishioners were encouraged to accept heftier roles in worship. Emphasis was placed on study of scripture by laypersons. The value of non-Christian faith traditions (and even, horror of horrors, Protestant denominations!) was affirmed.16 Although it’s not clear that he actually said it, Pope (now Saint) John XXIII, convener of the Council, remarked that it was time to open the Church’s windows and let fresh air blow through what was becoming a dusty museum.17 Whether or not the quote is authentic, it perfectly expresses the élan of Vatican II: let the Spirit of God, the divine wind, breath, pneuma, ruach, blow away the cobwebs and reinvigorate the Church.
But that’s not how Sister Aloysius sees things. For her, the Vatican II wind is destructive rather than restorative. It chills her, so she wraps herself protectively in her shawl. She wants the window John XXIII threw open to stay tightly closed. “Who keeps opening my window?!” The changes in the Church are too much for her to handle; they risk upsetting her personal equilibrium, her values, her vocation, her faith—her certainty. In her eyes, Father Flynn, a priest clearly sympathetic with the aggiornamento launched by the Council, represents in embodied and up-close form the changes she fears.
In the showdown between them about the Christmas pageant, the differences in their views of the Church become clear.
Flynn: “I think a message of the Second Ecumenical Council was that the Church needs to take on a more familiar face. Reflect the local community. We should sing a song from the radio now and then. Take the kids out for ice cream.”
Sister Aloysius: “Ice cream.”
Flynn: “Maybe take the boys on a camping trip. We should be friendlier. The children and the parents should see us as members of their family rather than emissaries from Rome. I think the pageant should be charming, like a community theatre doing a show.”
Sister Aloysius: “But we are not members of their family. We’re different.”
Flynn: “Why? Because of our vows?”
Sister Aloysius: “Precisely.”
Flynn: “I don’t think we’re so different.”18
Every suggestion Flynn offers in this exchange—taking kids out for ice cream and camping trips, being friendlier—is a red flag for Sister Aloysius, feeding her conviction that he’s a predator and reinforcing her conviction that he has to be driven out of St. Nicholas. But what’s really eating her is the threat he/Vatican II poses to her belief structure and way of life: that’s the real predation, the fundamental danger assailing both her and, as she sees it, the school. She can’t admit as much to herself, however. To do so goes against the grain because it amounts to a questioning of the Church to which she’s dedicated her life.
So she self-protectively deflects (shawl-wrapping again) when confronted by Father Flynn’s angry insistence that he won’t let her keep “this parish in the Dark Ages.”19
Flynn: “You are single-handedly holding this school and parish back!”
Sister Aloysius: “From what?”
Flynn: “Progressive education and a welcoming church.”
Sister Aloysius: “You can’t distract me, Father Flynn. This isn’t about my behavior, it’s about yours.”20
Fear, Doubt, Certainty
The battle of wills between priest and nun culminates in Father Flynn’s departure from St. Nicholas. Sister Aloysius has triumphed. That’s why the final scene in Shanley’s play is so unexpected. It has a distraught Sister Aloysius confessing to Sister James: “Oh, Sister! I have doubts! I have such doubts!”21 The conventional interpretation is that Sister Aloysius is having second thoughts about her campaign against Father Flynn. Perhaps he was innocent after all.
But there has to be more to Sister Aloysius’ shattering confession than that. Otherwise, we’re reading the parable in a one-dimensional way, focusing on the vehicle rather than where it’s supposed to take us: the troubled relationship between fear, doubt, and certainty.
Sometimes certainty is useful: 2+2=4, water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, two solid objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time. Sometimes it’s benign: I’m now typing words on a keyboard, there’s a purple finch on the feeder outside my window. But there’s another kind of certainty that’s toxic. It’s the heels-dug-in dogmatism that fears and resists change. Almost inevitably, those of us who cling to this kind of certainty do so as a bulwark against our own doubts, typically barely articulated, about our beliefs. The more we uneasily sense those doubts, the more we defensively double down on our dogmatism. The prospect of losing our certitude, the rock on which we stand, is too unbearable. Moreover, when we encounter someone who seems to pose a threat to that certitude, thus reminding us of our own doubts, we go on the attack.
Doubt breeds fear, and fear spawns an aggressive doubling-down on certainty. That’s the algorithm that defines the toxic situation Sister Aloysius finds herself in.
Shanley insinuates that she’s had doubts about many of her core convictions—the authority of the Church, her vocation as a nun, her very faith itself—for some time. When Father Flynn sermonizes on doubt in the play’s opening scene, Sister Aloysius, doubtlessly feeling guilty about her own reservations, immediately presumes he’s talking about her. As she revealingly says to her sister nuns, “sermons come from somewhere, don’t they? Is Father Flynn in Doubt, is he concerned that someone else is in Doubt?”22 Father Flynn—him and his long fingernails and his aggiornamento nonsense!—threatens to expose the nagging chinks in her certainty that she tries so hard to hide from herself and everyone else. Of course he knows nothing about her doubts. She comes across as a Catholic Rock of Gibralter. But because her certainty is brittle, she’s always on the defensive. That’s why she’s so unbending as a principal and tightly wound as a nun, and that’s why she has to convince herself that Father Flynn is a sexual predator. Remove him, and she can once again bury her doubts. Or so she thinks. But as the play’s ending reveals, denial can stretch only so far.
Riding the Wind
There’s an alternative to the doubt-aversive and fear-born certainty of Sister Aloysius. It’s expressed by Father Flynn in his farewell sermon to St. Nicholas’ parishioners. For one last time, Shanley uses the wind metaphor that’s played such a prominent role throughout.
“There’s a wind behind every one of us that takes us through our lives. We never see it. We can’t command it. We don’t even know its purpose. I would’ve stayed among you longer, but that wind is taking me away …. But I’m content that the power that propels me does so with superior knowledge as to what is best. And that is my faith.”23
What Flynn is referring to here is trust. It allows for the inevitability of the unknown and unexpected in our lives and faith journeys—God, after all, is a God of surprises—but strengthens us to face them with the confidence that Spirit, the Wind of holy and revitalizing change, is always at our backs, gently nudging and at the same time supporting us. This is not at all Sister Aloysius’ brittle certainty, her tremulous refusal to trustfully follow the wind where it bloweth even when she no longer quite believes what she so desperately clings to. As she says midway through the play, fear of change comes if “one lack[s] faith in God’s protection.” Father Flynn agrees; without that trust, certainty can be lonely, dark, and frightening.24 The tragedy is that Sister doesn’t realize this is precisely the situation she’s in. Shanley’s implication is that she’s not the only one: perhaps many of us are right there with her.
Such, I think, is the deep meaning that accompanies the overt did-he-or-didn’t-he drama of Shanley’s parable. It’s one worth remembering.
###
John Patrick Shanley, Doubt: A Parable (New York: Theater Communications Group, 2005), pp. 25-26.
Staged productions of Doubt have four characters: Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius, Sister James, and Mrs. Muller. The cinematic version added a few characters and scenes and (rather inexplicably) changed Muller’s name to Miller. In the original 2004 production, Brian O’Byrne played Flynn, Cherry Jones played Sister Aloysius, Heather Goldenhersh was Sister James, and Adriane Lenox was Mrs. Muller. The 2008 film cast Philip Seymour Hoffman as Flynn, Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, Amy Adams as Sister James, and Viola Davis as Mrs. Miller. In Doubt’s 2024 Broadway revival, Liev Schrieber is Flynn, Amy Ryan is Sister Aloysius, Zoe Kazan is Sister James, and Quincy Tyler Bernstein is Mrs. Muller.
In addition to practically every newspaper review of the play/movie, see also Elizabeth Cunningford, “Evil, Sin, or Doubt? The Dramas of Clerical Child Abuse.” Theater Journal 62/2 (May 2010): 245-263.
A handful of other critics likewise have come to this conclusion. In her “A Church of One’s Own: John Patrick Shanley’s Woolfian Project.” The Cresset: A Review of Literature, the Arts, and Public Policy LXXVII/5 (Trinity 2013): 6-17, Martha Green Eads fascinatingly argues that the play is actually about the Church’s institutional oppression of nuns. In “Uncertain Sympathies: John Patrick Shanley's ‘Doubt.’” America: The Jesuit Review (15 Dec 2018), Michael Tueth sees the play as a psychodrama about the struggle between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius. In his “John Patrick Shanley Wrestles with God and Destiny.” The New Yorker (11 March 2024), Vinson Cunningham argues that the play’s real point is the conflict between Sister Aloysius’ dedication to ecclesial “formality” and Father Flynn’s looser progressivism.
Shanley himself seems to be of two minds about what he wants to say in the play. On the one hand, he sees it as a denunciation of hierarchical power, including it in his “Church and State” trilogy which also includes Storefront Church (2004) and Defiance (2006), focused respectively on military authority and big business influence. On the other hand, he wants the play, as he writes in his Preface to Doubt (pp. ix-x), to be a defense of the importance of moral and epistemological doubt: “We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word. That’s the silence under the chatter of our time.” The two interpretations are, I suspect, interlinked by Shanley’s conviction that doubt is the solvent of all varieties of dogmatic certainty/authority.
Judging from the vestments Father Shanley wears, the play’s action occurs in the final days of Ordinary Time and ends during Advent.
Shanley, Doubt, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 24.
Flynn delivers a third one, his farewell sermon, in the movie version.
Shanley, Doubt, pp. 7, 13.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., pp. 51-52.
Ibid., p. 54.
Readers who may not be familiar with the reforms of Vatican II might be interested in consulting a five-part series on the Council on my YouTube channel, Holy Spirit Moments.
Part 1: Fire Melts Ice
Part 2: Worship and Revelation
Part 3: Communion of Love
Part 4: Christian Humanism
Part 5: Into the Future
In a good piece of sleuthing, Sharon Kabel tries to track the authenticity of John’s alleged statement. The evidence is largely hearsay.
Shanley, Doubt, p. 30.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 51.
Ibid., p. 58. In the play’s film version, Streep’s delivery of this closing line is truly masterful.
Ibid., p. 14.
This is an additional scene Shanley wrote for the play’s film adaptation.
Shanley, Doubt, p. 26.