As far back as he can remember, Martin Scorsese always wanted to be a priest. To him, being a priest was better than being president of the United States. The story goes something like this. Roll sound. Roll camera. Action!
The year was 1953, and the scene was the Little Italy neighbourhood in New York City. Scorsese, 11, lived in a cramped apartment with his parents and older brother. His uncle resided in the same building. His grandparents were just down the street. But outside that warm family cocoon, the world frightened Scorsese. The mean streets of the Lower East Side swarmed with tough guys, loan sharks and swindlers. They stood on street corners, keeping watch, cracking jokes, trading stories. When things got bad, they traded punches. When things got really bad, they traded bullets.
Luckily, Scorsese didn’t have to venture outside too often. Doctor’s orders: he suffered from severe asthma. “I lived a life apart,” he later said. “I felt separate from everyone else.” From his bedroom window, Scorsese looked down, committing everything he saw to memory.
His parents wanted him to get a religious education: they were Catholics from the old country. They sent him to St Patrick’s Old Cathedral down on Mulberry Street. “Go around the corner, go to school,” they told him. So he went, and found what he wanted to do in life.
At St Patrick’s, Scorsese came face to face with a priest fresh out of the seminary. Father Francis Principe expected the best from his students, but he gave them the best in return. Principe exposed him to books, to movies, to history. “You don’t have to live like this,” he said. That’s when Scorsese knew he was going to be a priest. If this were one of his films, this would be the moment when the camera pushes in on him, looking intense, before the frame freezes and over-the-top music plays, throwing us to the next scene.
Smash cut to Scorsese enrolling in the seminary a few years later. But the divine plan didn’t work out. Scorsese soon realised he wasn’t cut out to be a man of the cloth. He just didn’t have the vocation that Principe had. “I was trying to hide by becoming a priest,” he says in Scorsese on Filmmaking and Faith, a new book of interviews with the celebrated director of GoodFellas and Raging Bull. “I was trying to hide from life, and from fear – fear of being hurt, fear of hurting others.”
The book is the product of nearly a decade of dialogue between the filmmaker and the Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro, editor-in-chief of the Vatican-supervised magazine La Civiltà Cattolica and a former adviser to the late Pope Francis. Divided into seven conversations, it’s an illuminating survey of Scorsese’s filmography and inner life. Spadaro acts less like an interviewer and more like a father confessor. Through gentle, probing questions, he gets his subject to open up about his doubts and insecurities. Admirers of Scorsese will appreciate the close-up look at the maestro.
Cinephiles might be let down. Reading the book feels like listening to an extended Criterion director’s commentary – if Scorsese were addressing the College of Cardinals at the Vatican. Don’t expect revelations about what it’s like to be working with Leonardo DiCaprio, although there’s plenty about the Revelation.
Just because Scorsese left the priesthood behind as a teenager doesn’t mean he left Catholicism behind. As the book reveals, his filmmaking is impossible to separate from his faith. And Scorsese does have faith. “I believe in the tenets of Catholicism,” he tells Spadaro. “The idea of the Resurrection, the idea of the Incarnation, the powerful message of compassion and love – that’s the key.”
That’s also the key to two of Scorsese’s most personal projects: Silence and The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which explore the figure of Jesus. For obvious reasons, they get a lot of airplay in the book. Telling the story of Christ has been a lifelong crusade for Scorsese. When he was a student at New York University in the early 1960s, he dreamt up a contemporary adaptation of the New Testament set in the grimy streets of Lower Manhattan. It would be shot in 16mm black and white. The crucifixion was going to take place on the docks by the West Side Highway.
But then Pier Paolo Pasolini came out with The Gospel According to St Matthew, a biopic of Jesus. Shot in the gritty style of Italian neorealism and starring non-actors, it resembled a documentary. “The setting was period,” Scorsese says in the book, “but the style was new and immediate… there was such raw beauty and power to those images.” The budding filmmaker knew he had to go back to the drawing board. “If I ever get to make a film on Jesus,” he told himself, “I’ll have to find another way of approaching the story.”
Fast forward to 1988, and Scorsese had finally made a film about Jesus. The Last Temptation of Christ caused outrage at its release but has since been largely overlooked. It deserves re-examination. Based on a novel by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, it humanises the son of God. He’s more flesh and bones than Holy Spirit. He gets scared, he gets angry and, yes, he gets horny. And there’s more. In Scorsese’s telling, while on the Cross, Jesus succumbs to the devil’s most devious temptation. But it isn’t decadence or lust. Instead, it’s a normal life as a normal guy with a wife and kids.
“This life that the devil gives Jesus as a temptation is so beautiful that it’s almost as if God envies the life he gave us humans,” Scorsese tells Spadaro. But although Scorsese is an iconoclast, he remains at heart a good Catholic. In the film’s exhilarating climax, Jesus rejects the devil’s temptation and chooses to be transported back to the Cross to die for the sins of humanity. “It is accomplished!” he shouts in a euphoric burst. Rarely has the awe-inspiring power of faith been conveyed so viscerally on screen.
Silence, which Scorsese worked on for nearly 25 years before its release in 2016, is the mirror image of The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s about what happens when man is forced to forsake God. Set in 17th-century Japan, it follows the tribulations of two Catholic missionaries who are arrested by the authorities and given a choice: renounce their faith – or watch Japanese Christians be tortured to death.
One of the missionaries refuses and sacrifices himself. It’s the easy way out. The other, Father Rodrigues, relents. His act of apostasy is what the Japanese call fumi-e: trampling on an image of Christ. Rodrigues goes through the ordeal after hearing Jesus’s voice urging him to do it. In that moment, he puts his ego aside and chooses others over himself. Because isn’t that the Christian message? “With that action of stepping on the fumi-e, Rodrigues is basically embracing the mystery of life and death which is what Jesus is,” Scorsese says in the book. “It’s the great mystery.”
Scorsese is after the great mystery in all his pictures, not just the overtly religious ones. From Taxi Driver to Casino and the recent Killers of the Flower Moon, his whole oeuvre wrestles with the sacred and the profane. Scorsese’s cardinal obsession, permeating every page of Scorsese on Filmmaking and Faith, is how to live according to Christian principles in a wayward world. As the opening voiceover of his breakout film, Mean Streets, puts it: “You don’t make up for your sins in the Church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”
The book ends with a short film script that Scorsese wrote following Pope Francis’s call to artists to become “custodians of the beatitudes”. The script is a love letter to Christ narrated by Scorsese himself. A highlight: “Jesus contains multitudes. He is constant. He is present in every effort when we’re compelled to act from love, whether we’re successful at it or not.”
By now, it’s clear that Scorsese did fulfil his childhood dream of becoming a priest. He just isn’t practising in the Catholic Church. He administers mass not from the altar but from the silver screen, and his sermons are a hell of a lot more fun than your average Sunday homily. Like Father Principe before him, he’s telling us: “You don’t have to live like this.” Redemption is within reach.
In his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies, co-directed with Michael Henry Wilson, Scorsese argues that there are “great similarities” between a church and a cinema. “Both are places for people to come together and share a common experience,” he says. Then comes his profession of faith: “Movies answer an ancient quest for the common unconscious. They fulfil a spiritual need that people have: to share a common memory.” Amen, Father Martin.
Theo Zenou is a historian and journalist
Scorsese on Filmmaking and Faith
Martin Scorsese and Antonio Spadaro
Sceptre, 144pp, £14.99
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This article appears in the 06 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Exposed: Britain's next maternity scandal