BENEDETTA MOVIE IS A PARABLE THAT GIVES US WARNINGS ABOUT FAITH
The controversial lesbian nun romance movie Benedetta was viewed in cinemas in 2022. It is packed with implicit warnings about faith, or at least the specific kind of faith endorsed by Christianity.
The sequence where Benedetta is pleasured by her partner with a statue of Mary converted into a dildo will go down in film history. Benedetta suffers from internalised religious based homophobia and she makes her suffer by putting her hand in a boiling pot.
Set in the time of the bubonic plague, the movie is based on a true story.
Benedetta is subject to visions of Jesus. In one vision he threatens her with rape after saving her violently from a gang rape. He decapitates them from a horse.
The demonic male voice of Jesus speaks through her. This is done in a fashion that is clearly paranormal. Jesus is sure his voice incites evil. The evil of Jesus bothers nobody for the gospel is about the glory of suffering and how it purifies the soul and how the body must be conquered with its help.
She produces stigmata, hands and feet and side. They appear during a vision where a naked Jesus invites her to touch him and where she experiences an agony that seems to be an orgasm type experience as well.
Whatever the source of the stigmata, Jesus wants her mutilated and wounded.
The stigmata of course lead to a huge stir and she is regarded as a saint. But then the abbess complains that as there are no crown of thorn signs on her the stigmata is dubious. Then after realising that this could be against her, Benedetta does dutifully start bleeding from marks on her forehead.
Benedetta is accused of heresy and other crimes and is sentenced to be burned at the stake. She is rescued from the flames but a sharp shard of pottery is found by her lover in the wood stained with blood indicating that Benedetta was faking her stigmata.
The lesson here is that whether stigmata is self-inflicted or involves some kind of disassociation where you don't know what you are doing or some kind of mind over matter influence the account from Christianity about what Jesus' wounds were like is harmful to some people.
Benedetta "dies" and rises again. Jesus was not the only claimant to such magic.
Jesus gives her guidance so the implication is that he helped her choose the right moments to fake her wounds without being caught. If you believe in the paranormal, you have to admit that the forces will help a person
- fake wonders it cannot do
- fake wonders it could do but does not bother for tricks will do.
The Church found she was less than honest but it could not rule that she was faking all the time.
The paranormal can explain why a fake miracle cannot be detected as a fake. People doubt the paranormal is real. But it remains a more modest approach when somebody supposedly rises from the dead after being crucified. You can say that forces made the witnesses think this happened instead of invoking a miracle to say it really took took place.
