If Hollywood is for us, who can be against? What makes a movie 'Catholic'

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 5, 2004 by Angelo Stagnaro

The team has been sent to sabotage a group of Nazis who are acting under Hitler's orders to summon up demons to help destroy the Allies. Understanding the evil they are about to face, Bruttenholm urges the commandos to accept his presents of rosaries,

The reincarnated Grigori Rasputin (Karl Roden), Hitler's necromancer, secretly intends to use the summoned infant demon to help bring about the Apocalypse and establish a hellish kingdom on Earth. The American soldiers thwart his plans, and little Hellboy is raised a traditionalist Catholic by the kindly Dr. Bruttenholm (John Hurt), who teaches him to fight for right, justice and the American way of life. When he grows up, he files down his horns to fit better into his new life among humans--as if everyone would forget he is a 7-foot red demon with a prehensile tail and an enormous stone forearm.

Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a cocky, gruff, Red Bull-swilling, Baby Ruth-eating, kitten-loving, fire-resistant, cigar-chomping, 1950s blue-collar longshoreman, of a superhero with a heart as big as all outdoors and a tree-trunk-size fist to wallop evildoers. He sports a massive gun he names "Samaritan" and only kills in the name of good. The gun shoots bullets containing a mixture of holy water, garlic, clove leaf, white oak and silver shavings, all mythological ingredients said to destroy evil.

Evil minion Rasputin even quotes Revelation 20:1 ("Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the abyss and a heavy chain") while taunting Hellboy to abandon God in order to raise himself up as a god in the ordo novo of hell on earth. It's as if the screenwriter had created a theatrical rendition of Matthew 4:8-10, in which the Devil took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world.

The film's denouement comes when the despairing hero sides temporarily with evil in the hope of saving his girlfriend's recently departed soul. But when confronted by the blazing stigmata of a cross on his palm that burns his erstwhile impervious skin, he remembers the values that his surrogate father taught him, denounces evil and tells the Devil to go to hell. A protracted fight scene, replete with a cruciform sword, allows the hero to vanquish evil permanently a la St. Michael and the dragon.

Some might balk at the use of rosaries, crosses, holy water and other sacramentals as little more than talismans. But there are more than a fair number of everyday Catholics who treat such objects with equal theological confusion. Other Catholic viewers might get caught up in the seemingly occult symbolism throughout the movie. To them, remember: It's a movie, not a theological treatise. For the theological hair-splitters among us who would insist that demons are irredeemably damned fallen angels, Mike Mignola, the originator (if the Hellboy comic book character, explains that his creature is actually only haft-demon and theoretically capable of redemption.

The movie thus portrays a quintessential and remarkably Catholic Christian message: There is redemption even for the ostensibly irredeemable. It is the same theme portrayed by St. Matthew, the reformed tax collector; St. Thomas the doubter; St. Peter the abandoner; St. Dismas the good thief; the adulterous woman; and St. Mary Magdalene, the demoniac.