Commonweal Magazine: Faith in the Streets – An interview with Martin Scorsese
Antonio Spadaro February 5, 2025
Moderators: Mr. Scorsese, please tell us about your faith. What was your experience like, from childhood to today?
Martin Scorsese: When I was growing up, my parents didn’t really practice religion. But when we moved to New York, to Little Italy in Lower Manhattan, I was sent to a Catholic grammar school that was operated by nuns, the Sisters of Charity. That gave me another structure and another way of thinking about life. I was seven or eight years old, and where we lived was a very difficult place. Third Avenue and the Bowery are very chic now, but back then the area was known as the “Devil’s Mile”; a few blocks west was Mulberry Street, called “Murder Mile.” As a kid, I was thrown into the middle of all this, and I found that the only place I could find a sense of refuge, peace, and protection was inside Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the first Catholic church in New York.
As I grew older, witnessing what I witnessed, in the streets and in my family—I should say that my parents made great efforts to give us a decent life—I began to understand that faith wasn’t just something you practiced in church, in the building alone. Imitating Christ had to be something you translated into daily life. How, I wondered, could I take those elements of love and compassion, which meant so much to me when I was growing up, out into the streets and into the world, which was so violent and full of conflict?
That’s how I learned what faith is: by losing it, doubting it, coming back to it, being gifted with the ability to make films, and finding a kind of faith in that. Filmmaking is a gift from God, and a very powerful one, because you can touch a lot of people. I’ve come to understand that rather than a conviction of faith, I have a trust in faith. I trust there is faith—yes, there are doubts, at times, but really it’s a more constant searching, a constant attempt at living with faith. It’s about learning to adapt to whichever way the wave of faith takes you.
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