Doubt and Faith: Religion’s Strange Bedfellows

It’s 1964, the year after JFK was assassinated, and all is not well at a Catholic school in the Bronx. This is the opening of Doubt, the 2005 play by John Patrick Shanley, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is back on Broadway until April in a dazzling new production starring Liev Schreiber, Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine.

Shanley wrote the play only two years after the Boston Globe exposed the Catholic Church’s child-sex-abuse scandal, when the evil inflicted on the vulnerable by men of the cloth had shocked the world and demoralized the faithful. Doubt is the fictional story of Sister Aloysius (Ryan), the formidable principal at St. Nicholas School, who suspects the charismatic and progressive-minded priest Father Brendan Flynn (Schreiber) of sexually abusing one of the students, Donald Muller, the only African-American child in the school. She confides in Sister James (Kazan), a good-hearted but naïve nun, who is mortified by Sister Aloysius’s suspicions yet nevertheless shares them.

About the Author

Madeleine Kearns

Madeleine Kearns is a former staff writer at National Review.

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It’s 1964, the year after JFK was assassinated, and all is not well at a Catholic school in the Bronx. This is the opening of Doubt, the 2005 play by John Patrick Shanley, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is back on Broadway until April in a dazzling new production starring Liev Schreiber, Amy Ryan, Zoe Kazan, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine.

Shanley wrote the play only two years after the Boston Globe exposed the Catholic Church’s child-sex-abuse scandal, when the evil inflicted on the vulnerable by men of the cloth had shocked the world and demoralized the faithful. Doubt is the fictional story of Sister Aloysius (Ryan), the formidable principal at St. Nicholas School, who suspects the charismatic and progressive-minded priest Father Brendan Flynn (Schreiber) of sexually abusing one of the students, Donald Muller, the only African-American child in the school. She confides in Sister James (Kazan), a good-hearted but naïve nun, who is mortified by Sister Aloysius’s suspicions yet nevertheless shares them.