College of Arts and Sciences Newsroom

By Dave Larsen

“Saints, Sinners and Scorsese” is the unofficial title of a University of Dayton religion and film course taught by American studies scholar Anthony Smith that explores religious themes in a selection of films of renowned director Martin Scorsese, including Silence, Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ.

In January, Smith interviewed Scorsese at the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral in New York City’s Little Italy — the filmmaker’s boyhood parish, where he served as an altar boy.

Smith, associate professor in the UD Department of Religious Studies, presented Scorsese with the American Catholic Historical Association’s 2025 Distinguished Service Award, which recognizes outstanding service to the field of Catholic studies. Smith said it is the first time the association gave the award to an artist.

Smith, the association’s past president, spoke with Scorsese at the historic landmark church before about 100 attendees of ACHA’s annual meeting in New York City. He spent nearly 1 1/2 years bringing the event to fruition, starting in 2023 as president-elect and continuing through his 2024 term as president.

“Martin Scorsese is, I would argue, our most important living filmmaker,” Smith said. “His career and achievements are remarkable. He’s also a Catholic and a number of his films manifest a Catholic sensibility. Some films, like Silence, are directly about Catholicism, but even when they’re not explicitly about Catholicism, his films reflect a moral complexity and a spiritual seriousness.”

Scorsese’s films also include Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Aviator, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street and most recently Killers of the Flower Moon. He has been honored with an Academy Award for best director and lifetime achievement awards from the American Film Institute and the Directors Guild of America, among other accolades. In 2019, Scorsese was named a Kennedy Center honoree for his lifetime contribution to American culture.

In March 2024, Smith published an article in The Conversation about Scorsese’s focus on religious faith in his films. He described the director as a warm, accessible and generous person. “He was very easy to interview,” Smith said.

Smith started their 45-minute conversation by asking Scorsese what it was like to be back at Old St. Patrick’s, which had served as a refuge from the rough and often violent streets of Lower Manhattan where Scorsese was raised. One of its priests, Father Principe, had been an important role model to Scorsese.

“He spoke very eloquently about this world he grew up in and some of the complexities of it,” Smith said. “Some of the people who, in conventional terms, might be considered overlooked, discarded or forgotten about, but they were important. They were human beings and had their own stories, and that also shaped him and informed his imagination.”

Smith also asked Scorsese to elaborate on a comment he made several years ago regarding whether gangsters think about their souls. The filmmaker explained he wasn’t interested in typical Hollywood depictions of moral anguish or guilt.

“Instead, he was interested in rendering that complexity in terms of how a character acts, not whether they go inside a confessional or into a church,” Smith said. “I found that very interesting because it suggests his approach to these complicated issues and his refusal to be reductive or simplistic about them.”

Given his audience of historians, Smith asked Scorsese to reflect on his attraction to historical subjects in films such as Gangs of New York, The Aviator and The Age of Innocence — what was it about history that drew his imagination?

“He turned it back to where we were, Old St. Patrick’s, and how that place was very conducive to thinking about history — thinking about all the different people who had gone through that church, the Irish who had helped build it before the Civil War,” Smith said. “And he talked about Archbishop John Hughes, who shows up in Gangs of New York.”

Smith plans to draw on the interview in future lectures for his religion and film course.

“It was a pretty special moment,” he said. “As someone who has thought a lot about and taught his movies and who has enormous respect for his work, it was a very special moment to have that time with him in person.”

Photo credits: Joe Jenkins