Corpus Christi

Here another carpenter grows into a saviour. Daniel is an undefined criminal in a Polish detention center for juveniles.  There he catches the Christian spirit and aspires to holy orders. But as the prison priest re-affirms, no seminary would accept someone with his record.

Clearly the Church hasn’t caught the allegoric implications of the film’s first line: “Use the whole saw. Cut at right angles.” That is, everyone should be admissible to divine service, whatever the person’s past and limitations; everyone can be turned to rectitude, to stand aright.  

As proof, here sinner Daniel is paroled to a remote village sawmill. Instead he drifts into the role of priest. The vicar’s salutary absence puts him into full-time service, as Father Tomasz. With his devotion, humility and his hunger to serve God and man unbroken by the usual formal training, he proves a most effective village priest.    

Daniel brings a worldly earthiness and honesty to his engagement with the congregation and the village outsiders. In particular, he exorcises their grief over the five teenagers killed in a traffic accident. The head-on collision was caused by a man whose wife has since been ostracized and vilified in a most unChristian manner. Father Tomasz confronts them with their viciousness and directs the poor man’s postponed burial.     

When another ex-prisoner spots the fake priest, he tries to blackmail him. Daniel resists the temptation to use the money he raised for that funeral. Betrayed, Daniel is returned to the detention center lions’ den, where he’s set up for a vicious beating by Bonus, the prison’s largest brute. That’s his calvary.

Earlier Daniel was the watch for another victim’s sadistic assault. In defending himself now he turns into the warrior saviour. Our last view is of him bloodied and bowed, but with his destiny unclear. Will he be charged with murder? Will he beat the rap? 

We don’t know because we’re not told because it doesn’t matter. Here a sinner grabbed his fleeting chance to serve  God in the Christian spirit and he did it right. He instinctively grew into his office. After that height, no nadir he falls to can diminish him.  
     Imprisoned himself, before and after, he has liberated the villagers, including the young woman who lost a brother to the accident and her mother to unforgiving bitterness and now seeks a new life. The “priest” freed her to love and to sing.