Sundance review: 'Rebel Hearts' digs into a battle for justice in Los Angeles' Catholic community, and how it still reverberates today
‘Rebel Hearts’
★★★1/2
Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 103 minutes.
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For many, the battle waged by the Immaculate Heart of Mary order of nuns against the archdiocese of Los Angeles may be forgotten history — which is why Pedro Kos’ eye-opening documentary “Rebel Hearts” is so necessary.
On one side of the battle were an order of nuns in Los Angeles who ran their own women’s college, Immaculate Heart College. They also were required, by John Francis Cardinal McIntyre, the head of the archdiocese, to teach in the region’s Catholic schools — even though the classes were overcrowded and the sisters severely undertrained.
In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which ordered Catholic churches worldwide to modernize to be in touch with their communities, the nuns at Immaculate Heart tried to take the Vatican at its word. The nuns, after much deliberation, wrote a set of decrees that urged the archdiocese to let the nuns get training to teach, to set their own worship practices within the order, and to make wearing the nun’s habit voluntary.
Cardinal McIntyre, depicted in the film as a rigid authoritarian more concerned with the archdiocese’s financial portfolio and political connections than with theology, reportedly blew his stack.
Kos has constructed a thoughtful chronicle of the nuns’ efforts to stand up for what they believed to be right, and the furious blowback from Cardinal McIntyre for having his authority questioned by a bunch of sisters. Many of the interviews have been compiled from decades past, originally conducted by Shawnee Isaac-Smith, who is one of the film’s producers and has been trying to tell this story for years.
Kos takes great pains in “Rebel Hearts” to be fair to the nuns and the archdiocese, though even recent representatives of the church in Los Angeles acknowledge now that McIntyre might have been too strict.
A few of the nuns are still alive, and their work for social justice continues in ways Kos chronicles — including the Corita Art Center, named for Corita Kent, an artist nun whose work is recognized internationally but riled McIntyre at the time. This gently powerful movie connects the past to the present, revealing how some battles are never over and always worth fighting.