Midnight Mass, Resurrection, and the Cults of Personality Around Abusive Pastors
CN: Spoilers for Midnight Mass and for my story “The Lost Year;” ableism; sex abuse mention
I watched Netflix’s limited series Midnight Mass this weekend and enjoyed its take on vampires. I found the pilot dull but gave the show one more chance and enjoyed the rest. I knew it was setting up the characters and story, but it explained Catholicism at length. I’m from Massachusetts and grew up Catholic, so, to someone unfamiliar with New England or Catholicism, the first episode might not be quite so dull. I found it odd that the new priest, Father Paul Hill, harped on Riley’s choice not to take Communion. It’s a very personal decision people make for various reasons. Of course, this is actually an early red flag that something is wrong, and that St. Patrick’s Catholic Church is actually a vampire coven, with “Communion” gradually turning congregants into vampires. Midnight Mass’ vampire congregation dramatizes the danger of a cult of personality around an evil but charismatic priest.
If you know me or my work, you might understand why I enjoyed this show. It uses supernatural horror to ask and exaggerate similar questions to those I ask — albeit in a purely realistic way — in my own literary fiction and criticism. In college in 2011, I wrote most of my story “The Lost Year,” set circa 2000–02. Kaleidoscope published it in 2017 (archived here on page 20 of the magazine). My story is fictional and set at an ableist, inaccessible, old-fashioned Catholic parish school. Near the end, news breaks about decades of child sexual abuse in the Church. The protagonist, Talitha, who has transferred out of the school because of ableist bullying from both kids and adults, learns that the pastor was allegedly a sexual predator. I chose not to depict sexual abuse, only to allude to it as a historical event. I always saw my fictional parish, St. Agnes, as a cult of personality enabling and protecting a predatory priest character, Father James Duggan, for decades.
Midnight Mass uses the vampire myth to literalize and exaggerate a dynamic I’ve observed in real life and attempted in fiction: a toxic, corrupt congregation as a cult of personality around an evil priest. Of course, Midnight Mass’ vampire parish is what makes the supernatural horror story. However, because priests have so much power and authority in the Church hierarchy, the idea of a demonic Church leader resonates. In my story, after Talitha observes how ableist and egotistical the pastor is, she watches a horror movie and has a nightmare about the congregation worshipping him instead of Jesus:
“After Father’s dramatic sermons, even Communion seemed anticlimactic. He rushed through the prayers of the Consecration. He’d shifted the focus of the Mass off of Jesus and onto himself. The altar was his stage, and we were his audience. Late one night, when I was watching TV, I saw a few minutes of Rosemary’s Baby. I had a nightmare about a strange cult with bizarre rituals, like a backwards version of the Mass. Father Duggan was their leader. I couldn’t tell whether they were Satanists or worshipped him instead of God (23).”
The idea of an abusive priest as an evil cult leader is not unique to me or to Mike Flanagan, of course, but we can interpret it in different, very personal ways. Religious abuse is a unique abuse of power and trust.
Before Midnight Mass’ parishioners realize that “Father Paul” is actually a younger, resurrected version of their beloved Msgr. John Pruitt, they’re not welcoming to him. They want Msgr. John back and have exclusive loyalty to him, with memories going back to their childhoods. Catholicism teaches that the Mass is always the same, regardless of the priest performing it or his personality. Technically, that’s true, but parishioners often feel fiercely loyal to a particular pastor — especially in isolated places like the show’s Crockett Island. There’s often a fine, uncomfortable line between a charismatic priest inspiring loyalty and a dangerous cult of personality.
In my real life, one of the several priests who inspired Father Duggan’s speaking style in “The Lost Year” gave a sermon saying we can’t conceptualize eternity. Father Paul gives a very similar sermon in Midnight Mass. A priest also gives a similar sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Many other works with Catholic influences draw on these themes, and many people have heard similar sermons, but Midnight Mass brings them together in an inventive way.
In the final episode, Paul/John yells at Beverly Keane that his priesthood was “not supposed to be about me. It was supposed to be about GOD!” This is a lesson he learns way too late, but Bev remains a true believer in the vampire cult.
Many priests or other leaders have a “Bev Keane.” If you’ve spent time in religious spaces, you may have met someone who fit this character type. Or Beverly may seem like an evil inversion of nice people from church. In my story “The Lost Year,” this character is the principal. That is, she’s an enabler, often very hypocritical and pedantic in a sanctimonious way. Enablers often cover for, defend, or control access to, their chosen leader. Beverly’s conviction that she’s always right, proselytizing, and anti-Islamic and racist bigotry towards Sheriff Hassan and Ali, all go together.
In the show, parishioners joke about Bev embezzling or money laundering. Whether it’s financial, spiritual, sexual, or emotional, the leader often fulfills a powerful need in the enabler’s life. Although I believe it’s ableist and unnecessary to armchair-diagnose abusers as narcissists, similar concepts from pop psychology are enablers and flying monkeys. Although they can occur in secular and religious contexts, enablers like Bev are especially terrifying because they believe God is on their side.
In this article, Flanagan is quoted connecting Catholicism to vampirism.
“The vampiric connection was one Flanagan made in grade school growing up in the church, ‘always blinking out at me, to the point that I would get in trouble for bringing it up frequently,’ he says.”
Flanagan is right, in a way. Like him, I noticed the vampiric and cannibalistic overtones as a child. Drinking Christ’s blood and eating his flesh is the text, not subtext, of the Catholic Eucharist. I specify Catholic here because I grew up Catholic and because Catholicism insists upon the transubstantiation, or literal transformation, here — and that it’s not metaphorical. This is where it differs from many other Christian denominations on Communion. I think it’s more accurate to say that many European vampire myths originate from Catholicism, though, and not the other way around.
Obviously, no show is for everyone, especially one that combines graphic horror and religion. For decades, it’s been cliche for horror scores to feature original Latin, choral, or organ compositions to evoke Catholicism. Unlike these other horror shows and movies, Midnight Mass repeatedly uses real prayers, hymns, and Bible passages. To summon his demonic “angel,” Paul frantically repeats the traditional Guardian Angel prayer that I’ve never heard anyone outside of my family say until now. Like many Netflix shows, Midnight Mass has pacing issues: slow to start and too long. Viewers unfamiliar with Catholic hymns and readings may find this aspect even more repetitive than I did. Other viewers may find it irreverent or triggering of religious trauma.
I did like the show’s passing reference to Jairus’ daughter, whom my character Talitha was named after in 2011. Before I’d learned the term mansplaining, I wrote an extended scene in “The Lost Year” where Father Duggan mansplains the pronunciation and meaning of Talitha’s own name to her.
Leeza’s miracle cure
The vampiric bodies in Midnight Mass are Catholic Resurrected bodies: ideal, younger, non-disabled, and sometimes unrecognizable to friends, as Father Paul excitedly explains to Riley. My only published poem addresses the Resurrection of the Body doctrine, with vampire or uncanny overtones. The cave in which Midnight Mass’ Father Paul is resurrected “in the Holy Land” is an evil version of Christ’s tomb, from which he rose after three days.
I’m disabled and hate the ableist trope of a disabled character receiving a magical or miracle cure. I just wrote about miracle cures in some versions of The Pied Piper of Hamelin legend. I expanded on this idea and mentioned another miracle cure here, in the Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors.
Leeza Scarborough’s miracle cure scene in Midnight Mass is dramatic and may be triggering to disabled people familiar with the concepts of miracle cures and faith healing. I found it horrifying. I usually find this trope ableist, but not so much in this case, because it’s subverted. At Communion, instead of walking to her, Father Paul asks Leeza, who has been paralyzed since childhood, to walk towards him. Somehow, she can suddenly walk. Father Paul’s treatment of Leeza is ableist and humiliating, especially the way he makes her and her disability the center of attention.
Later, in their private, AA-style counseling session, Riley asks Paul: “How did you know?… What would this community think of you if you were wrong?” (That is, how did you know Leeza would be cured?)
In the last line of the show, after Father Paul/Msgr. John and all the other vampires have been destroyed, Leeza says: “I can’t feel my legs.” She’s paralyzed again. The miracle cure is reversed at the end, subverting the ableist miracle cure trope. The cure is not from medicine, God, or a miracle. It’s from an agent of evil, Father Paul, and so it is reversed when he is permanently killed.
I always hate seeing miracle cures, which are necessarily ableist cliches. I’d prefer not to have them at all, but I also appreciate this clear attempt to reverse and subvert it. I also liked how Hassan tells Ali that it would be arbitrary and unfair if God chose to cure Leeza miraculously but not cure or save other people. These are the nuanced questions many religious people ponder. Despite some repetitive and awkward moments, I liked how the show approached these issues overall.
In contemporary supernatural horror, including Midnight Mass, the undead are often created through a virus or other contagion. I agree with Susan Sontag, who criticized “illness as metaphor,” but this is typical for the entire genre. In 2020, relatives told me that local Catholic parishes had stopped offering the Eucharist in the form of wine due to concerns over coronavirus transmission. Ancient rituals like the Mass were begun long before germ theory, so the fear of spreading contagion in a close setting is totally reasonable. Adapting traditions and taking precautions to avoid disease is necessary.
I have very complex thoughts about Midnight Mass, a show that asks some serious questions and is also silly, escapist horror fun for Halloween. Like many other works by writers raised Catholic, it draws on Catholic images and themes, but with its own unique spin.
