Happy Feast of the Sacred Heart!

And on this feast day of feast days (as Carl Olson makes plain), it seems only appropriate to share this fascinating French film I discovered in William F. Buckley's Nearer, My God. Called Le Défroqué (and leaving nearly no trace online), it uses an idea I'd half toyed with before. Excerpts:

A priest, defrocked by the Church, finds himself in a World War II German prison camp, where, oddly, his constant rails against the church inspire another inmate to discover the priesthood and then attempt to bring the heretic back to God.

The means? Buckley explains:

...At the hot end of the theological prod, the viewer could see a movie with a dazzling blend of faith, triumphant over sacrilege (Le Défroqué). Without faith there cannot, of course, be sacrilege; and here we had the sometime priest, become agnostic professor of philosophy, dining with his young protege, who had stayed true to their once-common faith and was now freshly ordained to the priesthood. In the noisy, bibulous tavern crowded with bons vivants, three violinists carry about the huge five-liter tankard of wine, plying away with their instruments on splashy and accelerando Gypsy-rhythmed music that is catalyst to happy frenzy, while one at a time guests chugalug competitively on the wine vat, the leader, up to the moment, a large-bellied Frenchman who, however, has succeeded in emptying only one half of the seemingly bottomless vat.

It is routinely refilled and the violinists move exuberantly to the next table down, where the earnest young priest is chatting animatedly with his apostate mentor. The audience is distracted. The ex-priest seizes the moment, drawing the wine to him. Driven to black mass exhibitionism he quietly intones, in the hearing only of his freshly consecrated companion, the transubstantiating incantation: Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis mei (...This is my Blood...) The violinists, unaware, noisily unaware, resume their routine. The young priest, dazed by his knowledge that apostate priests are not deprived of their sacramental powers, lifts the tankard--the blood of Christ--to his lips. He begins to drink. The applause at first is only routine. But the priest drinks on and the crowd goes wilder then breathlessly silent as the drama proceeds towards the impossible...the violinists sweat...the professor stands up in alarm. Now the boy priest has emptied the great tankard; the crowd is delirious with admiration. The young priest, stumbling outdoors to the cheers of the crowd, succumbs and, taken away by ambulance, dies. Flash-forward to the funeral Mass. It is being conducted by the professor, but he is dressed in clerical garb...