‘Knives Out’ Movie Highlights a Divide in Our Church

One of the joys of my Christmas holiday season was watching (twice) the latest installment of cinema’s Knives Out franchise. Each of the movies (three in total) is structured like an Agatha Christie whodunit: a murder (at least one) happens, and a small assemblage of people connected to the victim each becomes a suspect because each has a motive to want to remove the person from the world.

In the first installment, the setting was a large manor house, the usual place for such a story to unfold.  In the second installment, subtitled Glass Onion, setting is a remote private island, inhabited only by the victim and the suspects, another typical location for such mysteries.

Fr. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is confronted by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) in ‘Wake Up Dead Man’

The third installment, entitled Wake Up Dead Man, takes place in a less usual setting: a country Catholic parish. The community is led by a tyrannical and charismatic pastor, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), whose vitriolic culture war sermons have resulted in greatly diminishing church attendance.  The bishop sends a young curate, Fr. Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a compassionate, understanding, and welcoming priest, to breathe new life into the parish.  The predictable clash of personalities and ideologies erupts.  I won’t go into the murder plot here because I don’t want to spoil anything for folks who have not seen the film.  And besides, what I found really intriguing was how well the movie captured ideas about Catholic pastoral life, which is what I’d like to explore in this post.

At the beginning of the movie, Fr. Jud, a former professional boxer, impulsively clocks a deacon who makes an offensive comment,  resulting in the young priest required to attend a probationary hearing with the bishop and two clerics. An exchange happens at this meeting which I found very simple and very profound. One of the bishop’s assistants converses with Fr. Jud about his ability to fight:

Priest:  We need fighters today, but to fight the world, not ourselves. A priest is a shepherd, the world is a wolf.

Fr. Jud: No. I don’t believe that, Father, respectfully. You start fighting wolves, before you know it, everyone you don’t understand is a wolf. . . . Christ came to heal the world, not fight it.  I believe that. . . . I just want to be a good priest. Show people like me the forgiveness and love of Christ. The world needs that so bad.”

So much wisdom in Fr. Jud’s response, especially in the second sentence about how everyone you don’t understand becomes a “wolf.”  To me, that line encapsulates why prejudice against LGBTQ+ people exists–indeed, why prejudice against so many groups exists.  The problem isn’t because of the person who appears unusual to us.  It’s because of an instinct inside ourselves to fight anything that we don’t understand.

I’m reminded of an interview with a Mormon mother of a gay son which is part of the documentary film Anyone and Everyone.  The woman explains that when her mother explained the mechanics of human reproduction to her, she was repulsed by this information, thinking the activity to be a “grotesque” endeavor.  However, after she went through puberty and developed sexual feelings, she realized how such activity could be desired and enjoyable.  The lesson she took from comparing those two viewpoints is that, for the most part, if a person does not have the desire to engage in a sexual activity that another person finds desirable, that activity can appear grotesque. In other words, since the person does not understand the desire, the other person becomes a “wolf.”

Even if we take desire out of the world of the physical, the same dynamic happens when we cannot understand why a friend or relative has fallen in love with someone that we detest.  We simply don’t understand their emotional attraction and attraction. It appears bizarre to us.

Sexuality–physical, emotional, spiritual–is such a highly personalized experience, it is challenging for people to respect someone else’s desires when these are so different from our own.

The other bit of wisdom in that quotation is Fr. Jud’s third sentence: “Christ came to heal the world, not fight it.” To me, that is the essence of the late Pope Francis’ ministry who saw that the church, indeed the Catholic faith, was not a fortress that needed to be defended. It should be the opposite: an open space with many wide entrances.

Fr. Jud also rightly frames a profound ministry dichotomy: “heal” or “fight.”  This dichotomy is a fork in the road.  Whichever path we choose greatly affects all our future choices. Each choice leads you down a path very different from the other. It’s a choice that church ministers have to make.

And it also a choice that LGBTQ+ people involved in renewing our church have to make.  Is our basic approach to others in the church one of healing or fighting?

The good news is that the choice is not determinative for all time. We always have the option to re-orient.  Just as Fr. Jud, who begins the movie with a punch, ends the movie with a tenderly compassionate embrace.

—Francis DeBernardo, New Ways Ministry, January 27, 2026

Editor’s Note: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is available on Netflix.