Butt News Movie Club #17: Stigmata

What's Stig-Matta With You?

[Did you know that I turned 40 in March and when you turn 40 it’s your birthday all year? IF YOU WANT TO GET ME SOMETHING FOR MY BIRTHDAY, MY ONLY BIRTHDAY WISH IS THAT YOU SUBSCRIBE TO BUTT NEWS USING MONEY! Especially if you are rich enough to go on vacation to Brazil and literally never come back even if your only child becomes possessed by a horny dead priest!

As always, if you have suggestions for future movies, put them in the comments HERE.

Also, I took a break but I’m BACK ON CAMEO! Just in time for the holidays! Or whatever you want! You should book me! Seriously I’m very good at it and all my videos are way longer than they should be because I cannot shut up.]

We open in the village of Belo Quinto in southeastern Brazil, which according to Google Maps is not actually a town but a 3-star motel outside of Sao Paolo. Mysterious!!!!! An old man is translating an ancient text about Jesus and he cannot believe what he is reading. Whatever is in this document blew the fingers right off his gloves! The man smacks his rosary against his forehead like “AY YAI YAI,” like here we fucking go again with this Jesus guy!

Next, oh no, a man with weird eyes is leading some sort of procession into an old stone church. Everybody is putting their hands in the air and waving them around, but it seems like they just DO care very much about something, which I think is that fingerless gloves guy up and died! Already! Just when I was getting attached!

Hot priest Gabriel Byrne, wearing THE sunglasses of 1999, is wandering around like WHO’S IN CHARGE OF THIS CHURCH!? Like, idk, you?? A priest points at the coffin to say that dead guy right there, he’s the boss. Gabriel Byrne is like AY YAI YAI! But he doesn’t have time to ay yai yai for very long, because just then a statue of the Virgin Mary starts weeping blood, the church fills with a demonic whispering, birds explode out from under all the nuns’ skirts, the candles blow out, and time goes backwards. Segundas!

Everyone except Gabriel Byrne seems to think this is pretty normal. He turns on a tape recorder and starts poking the statue with a little knife, then he gets out some kind of demon detector and waves it around, trying to figure out what the heck is going on here. Some lady is like, “Ummmmmm the tears of the mother are the blood of Christ? Obviouslyyyyyy??????” with this really condescending vibe, like no duh Gabriel, everyone knows the tears of the mother are the blood of Christ!

Gabriel Byrne takes pics of the statue and says he’s going to “crate it up” and take it back to the Vatican (how?!?!?!?!??!), but the assistant priest is like, “Father Almeida would NEVER HAVE ALLOWED THAT” because Father Almeida cares about body mechanics and that statue is way too heavy for you!!!! That’s a two-man lift! (Father Almeida is the dead guy btw.) As Gabriel Byrne is arguing about wanting to literally take this two-ton marble statue home in his carry-on and probably stick it in the overhead with his back instead of his legs, some creepy kid steals Father Almeida’s rosary OUT OF HIS COFFIN because Belo Quinto is impoverished as hell and MAYBE THAT’S WHAT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH SHOULD BE WORRYING ABOUT HERE INSTEAD OF A STATUE WITH EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS. I mean, dang, Father Almeida couldn’t even afford fingers on his gloves!!!! His fingies got so cold he died!!! Also we get a glimpse of a photo (in the coffin I think?) of three priests who look either worried, sad, serious, or tired. I didn’t see it long enough to tell. Like 90 minutes later you will learn what this photo is, kind of.

Now we pop out to the town square for a sec where a white woman is buying a “necklace” from a street vendor. Except it’s not a necklace though! It’s Father Almeida’s cursed Life Alert rosary! Some local is like LADY YOU SHOULD NOT BUY THAT but she does anyway because she wants it.

Then, WOWEE, Stigmata hits you with the opening creds and you thought you knew but you had no idea! Maybe you were thinking “What year did Stigmata come out again? 1994? 2003? 2009? Those years were all kind of the same, right?” NO, U LIL BITCH! THESE OPENING CREDITS ARE HERE TO SCARIFY “1999” ON THE INSIDE OF EVERY ROD AND CONE IN UR BODY!

We’ve got Patricia Arquette in a VERY Gwen Stefani/proto-Dirrty barrette-heavy-piecey-updo and frosty Wet ‘n’ Wild lips superimposed with LOTS of Catholic stuff and slow-mo close-ups of cigarette smoke curling around the words “MUSIC BY BILLY CORGAN” in Olde English Fonte while we strobe in and out of Arquette partying at the club with Portia di Rossi and Nia Long while MYSTERIOUS text that is either Aramaic or Zapf Dingbats floats around the screen like Father Almeida’s ghost. If these credits weren’t produced by Ed Hardy(‘s butt) then Stigmata owes him ten trillion dollars!!!!!!

Patricia Arquette is Frankie Paige, an atheist hairdresser who loves to party and only has one friend (Nia Long, recently of THE NEWS). She has sex with Patrick Muldoon (you will know him if you Google him) but he leaves in the morning without saying goodbye, but she doesn’t care because she’s chill as hell. Frankie wakes up in her… train… bed??

…because her mother is calling her from……..

BELO QUINTO!!!!!!!!

This conversation is, you guessed it, weird. Frankie’s mom is on vacation and tells Frankie that she mailed her a package from Belo Quinto, and Frankie is like, “I didn’t even know you went there,” as though Frankie knows all about this random village in rural Brazil, and the mom goes, “I took a little side trip over here!” implying that she’s still there? So she mailed Frankie a package from Belo Quinto and the package already got to Frankie all the way in Pittsburgh but the mom has just been in Belo Quinto this whole time?? Does that qualify as a “side trip”? Sounds like you moved there! How much stuff is there to do in this town!? How big is that complementary waffle bar!??!?!!?

Anyways, Frankie opens the package and finds a “NECKLACE,” only it’s not a necklace, is it, it’s FATHER ALMEIDA’S EVIL DEAD ROSARY! As soon as she picks up the rosary and looks at it, Frankie begins 2 barf. I guess Father Almeida had really bad BO!!!

Frankie and Nia Long go get “two lattes, low fat” at the florist(?) and aren’t you glad you survived the low fat era and lived to see the low carb era? Low carb sucks dick too, obviously, but at least you get to have MILKY CREAMS.

Frankie tells Nia Long that she threw up this morning from the smell of tea and also her period is a week late, which is never mentioned again.

Frankie: “I feel weird.”

Nia Long: “You’re so dramatic.”

You’re a mean friend!! Tell her to go home and lie down! Also, remember before Covid when your coworker would tell you they felt sick and you weren’t instantly afraid of them?

I know it’s not exactly my place to say this as a white woman, but this wig is really bad, right?

Meanwhile at the VATICAN.

Gabriel Byrne is walking to work (which is what, btw? What do priests actually do for a job??) when he gets propositioned by some hot ‘n’ horny street-based sex workers. He shows them his priest collar (FLIRTATIOUSLY) and they say LOLOLOLISSIMO because that makes them even hornier!

At “work” (DOING WHAT), Gabriel Byrne shows pictures of the Belo Quinto Virgin’s eye-period to Jonathan Pryce, because I guess he has never seen a Jonathan Pryce joint before. This man is obviously the villain! Let [clap emoji] Catholic priests [clap emoji] watch [clap emoji] more TV [clap emoji]!!!

Jonathan Pryce poo-poos the statue, even though Gabe tells him that the bloody tears are “not only warm but human” (same but for my farts) and “this isn’t a fake” (same, my farts are the real deal!) and “there is no scientific explanation” (SAME, MY FARTS DEFY THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE!). Jonathan Pryce gets mad and berates Gabe for leaving the statue there (has to be an OSHA violation), because he should have brought it back for special Vatican testing in their secret bloody statue testing lab located 20 stories below Roma’s best-a pizza pie!!!!!

As punishment, he says Gabe is NOT allowed to go back to Brazil to do more tests, ruining Gabe’s plan to “have to” go back to “test the statue more” DURING BIKINI SEASON!!!!!

Meanwhile in PITTSBURGH, Frankie gets home from work and goes upstairs where she lights 1700 candles and EATS AN APPLE IN THE BATHTUB, which, 1) no one has ever done that, and 2) do u think she at least bobbed for it first? Because even though that’s demonic behavior through and through it at least fits with SOME recognizable American custom! Frankie’s just letting out a sigh of relief and rubbing her satanic bellybutton tattoo when all of a sudden FLAP FLAP FLAP THERE’S A BIRD IN THERE! A feather falls in her bathtub just like a feather fell in Father Almeida’s death bathtub (coffin). Now a demon pulls her under the water and tries to drown her, and she has visions of big nails being hammered into her wrists. Ugh, not cursed visions when you’re trying to relax with a traditional and very normal human apple bath!

An ambulance picks her up—WHO CALLED THE AMBULANCE? The bird??

Bird: “Look, 911, I was just trying to get my friend’s necklace back from Gwen Stefani and then she died or something, I’m really tired, I flew all the way here from Brazil, I’m really me-lagged, can you just send someone? Cheep cheep!”

At the hospital Frankie kind of dies but then she sits straight up and screams! She wants another apple!!

Why is Nia Long there? They just let your friend from work go into the emergency surgery room with you? What if her wig falls into the open wound and the doctor sews it up without noticing????

They’re about to give her the paddles but then suddenly all her vitals go back to normal and she wakes up like blink blink where am I what happened. Then the doctor just PULLS OFF HER WRIST BANDAGES—WHY???—and she starts firehosing blood everywhere and the doctor is like WHAT THE FUCK?

Someone finally notices that Nia Long is just IN THERE and they make her leave.

The doctor tells Frankie that “these are puncture wounds, Frankie,” and “it only bleeds when I touch it” and Frankie is like, “Maybe you should not touch it.” lmao

Then Doc implies that Frankie impaled her own wrists with large ancient Judean spikes while taking a bath, pointing out, “With wounds like this it’s pretty obviously they were self-inflicted.” R U SURE!? Wouldn’t she need, like, at least a cutting board, a hammer, and a 1st-century blacksmith? Where do you even put the cutting board in a bathtub? The logistics alone are demonic!! Frankie replies that she would never self-harm by doing an autocrucifixion in the bath because “I love being me. Ask anyone.” Which, respectfully, is like the 20th most compelling counter-argument on my list, but okay!

They go home and meanwhile the bath is still running?? It’s overflowing and there’s still blood everywhere but Nia Long just tells Frankie to turn off the light and come to bed. No! You need to deal with that! Your landlord is going to flip! Also, couldn’t you stay at Nia Long’s house tonight? Or is her character not developed enough to have a house?

Back at the Vatican, all the horny priests are smoking and drinking wine in the library. Hey, these priests are actually pretty cool! Some of them are even scientists! We should really give the Catholic Church another chance.

Gabriel Byrne is having a crisis of faith because he is one of the scientist priests and all he does is debunk miracles all day. His bud Father Delmonico, a translation priest, is explaining what the gospels are (“So there’s no gospel in Jesus’s actual words?”), and I feel like Gabe would know this?? Surely they teach you about THE BIBLE in priest school?

Father Delmonico is translating an ancient document but explains that he doesn’t know what it’s about because he only has every third page because highly sensitive documents get split up between the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits so nobody knows too much stuff. Pretty sure that kind of thinking is how 9/11 happened!

Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, it’s STILL RAINING. Frankie goes to her job at The Cut, which is apparently a nail salon, a hair salon, a tattoo salon, AND a piercing salon. Portia di Rossi is there and she has those fake dreads that white girls would do in the 90s using hair wax and a tutorial from YM. Do we think Nia Long is going to get any personality trait whatsoever other than “friend”? LOL, joke question!

I did love a big 70s revival collar in the 90s, though. We can bring that ONE thing back. Don’t get greedy!

Frankie is trying to cut hair but she can’t even pay attention to salon gossip because she sees a vision of a lady across the street throwing a red baby into traffic.

I have a question. Is having stigmata GOOD? Or bad? It’s like a Jesus thing so it should be good, right? Are we supposed to want to have the stigmata??

Frankie goes apeshit about the imaginary baby so Nia Long takes her home on the subway, which is packed with nuns and priests for some reason. Frankie gets up and goes to fight a priest.

Frankie: “Hey, you! Are you Andrew Kiernan [Gabriel Byrne]?”

Priest: “No, my name is Father Durning. Can I help you?”

Frankie: “No one can help me now. I’m fucked.”

Then she rips off a nun’s crucifix and THROWS IT, which derails the subway car, and while the subway is derailing she gets whipped on the naked back with the bloody lashes of Christ.

This movie is written by two men named Tom and Rick. Patricia Arquette and Nia Long always look like they’re ABOUT 2 FUCK, and all the stigmata stuff looks like fucking! That’s how men write, and that’s the Men Guarantee!

Haha, one of the nuns is played by a lady named Mariah Nunn.

Back at the hospital AGAIN, and the doctor is toasting a marshmallow over Frankie’s back lashes.

At the hospital they’re still doing tests on Frankie. Man, her 23 and Me’s gonna come back “99% Christ (1% Irish, sticky earwax, CAN smell asparagus pee)” and Jonathan Pryce is gonna LOSE IT! The doctor says maybe she has epilepsy, so they’re gonna insert some electrodes into the upper neocortex. Nia Long thinks Frankie should get a second opinion. Then Father Durning from the train just SHOWS UP at the hospital like a fucking creep (MEN!!!) and is like, “Do you know what stigmata are?” but Nia Long is immediately like NOT FALLING FOR THAT OLD LINE, PERVART and hustles Frankie away.

Is this what Pittsburgh is like? Why are there priests everywhere? I feel like I have never seen a priest in real life, and I’ve been to the Vatican three times (choir tour!).

Jonathan Pryce’s little henchpriest Father Elliot-from-Just-Shoot-Me has been investigating Belo Quinto to figure out what’s up with that statue, and he’s back with a veeeery scaaaary report: “We don’t HAVE a church in Belo Quinto!!!!”

It was a haunted demon decoy church all along!!!!!!!!! Like a crisis pregnancy center but for Satan (so, a crisis pregnancy center!). Que escândalo! How dare anyone trick people into thinking an old stone building was literally the house of God where you could drink God’s blood and eat God’s body when it actually WASN’T!? How shocking that it’s not part of this DEFINITELY REAL THING (Catholicism) but instead is something totally bullshit and evil, unlike the Catholic Church! Probably the priests at this Brazilian fake church did BAD things, UNLIKE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH!!!!

Bitter rejected volcel Father Durning sends the Vatican footage of Frankie’s stigmata from the subway’s security camera (say it with me: HOW DID HE GET THAT) and I hope he knows that while the church might be exempt from taxation, they are not exempt from snitches getting stitches!!!!!

Father Elliot-from-Just-Shoot-Me and Jonathan Pryce watch the footage and send Gabe to investigate to get him out of their dang hair (jk they r bald).

Frankie goes back to the salon but nobody wants her to cut their hair what on account of being possessed by a demon from the time of Christ when hairdos were way different. Then Gabriel Byrne walks in, and it’s time for men to start writing women again!!

Frankie: “Would you like a haircut, a manicure, or maybe you’d like to have your nipples pierced?”

Gabe: “Well maybe we’ll just start with a trim and see where it goes from there.”

Frankie asks what his name is because “I feel kind of weird calling a guy I could date ‘Father’” (exactly what a woman would say!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and he’s like “Andrew Kiernan” and she’s like hmmmmmm where did I hear that name before…oh yeah I screamed it in a priest’s face right before I derailed the subway with my mind. They decide to go hang out.

Gabe is interviewing her about her stigmata to find out if she’s the rill dill or a big faker. He asks if she’s a Catholic and she says, “No, I don’t go to church because I don’t believe in God,” so he’s like oh all right L8R LOSER because “all stigmatics are religious” so, sorry, whatever invisible entity lashed you on the subway it wasn’t one of ours! But then she shows him her wrist stigmatas and he’s like EXQUEESE ME? But no no no it’s not enough, because “to say that a self-confessed atheist exhibits the wound of Christ is a contradiction in terms.” So THEN she shows him a note she wrote IN ITALIAN and he translates it for her but he’s still not convinced and says it’s just a nice little poem! Finally he’s like idk ma’am, I can’t help you, and he leaves—but like, sir, you’re not even A LITTLE BIT CURIOUS OR SYMPATHETIC? Bare minimum a ghost stabbed her with spikes!

Since things didn’t work out with Gabeybaby, Frankie goes out clubbing with her friends. Hey, Frankie, how about a night in? You are still ACTIVELY BLEEDING FROM YOUR STIGMATA. When the server comes she says, “Hey, can we get two doubles each?” which does seem like the appropriate amount of alcohol for her situation but TWO DOUBLES OF WHAT? That’s not how ordering at a bar works!

Frankie tells Nia Long about her conversation with Gabriel Byrne and wants Nia Long to agree that it’s bogus that Gabe says she can’t have the real stigmata. Nia Long is a huge asshole about this for some reason—I guess she has been to the emergency room like eight times in one week because her work-wife keeps getting impaled, so maybe I get it.

Frankie: “I have fucking holes through my wrists! I have slashes across my back! If God isn’t doing it, then who is?”

Nia Long: “I think you’re losing it, man.”

OKAY BUT YOU SAW AN UNKNOWN FORCE WHIP HER BLOODY ON THE SUBWAY. YOU SAW HER RIP A CRUCIFIX OFF OF A NUN AND USE IT TO STOP A TRAIN.

Then Frankie screams and falls down AGAIN, clutching her head this time, which is now perforated and pouring blood from her invisible crown of thorns. Nia Long tries to get her in an ambulance AGAIN but she runs home (STILL RAINING) and finds Gabe lurking outside by her call box. Frankie’s all, “I do not have time for this right now I do not have time for YOU!” and runs away. Gabe chases her into an alley and bing bong! It’s an iconic scene!

There are birds flapping everywhere, all the pipes are pumping big steamy farts cuz the devil had a burrito, all kinds of things are exploding, Frankie grabs a broken bottle and starts carving something into the hood of a Cadillac and talking in demon language, and Gabe is just like whaaaaaaaaat??????

He turns on his tape recorder and she’s like demon demon demon demon and the pipes are like FART FART FART and then Nia Long shows up and Frankie drops the bottle and starts crying. Gabe carries her to Father Durning’s church and puts her to beddy-bye in… Father Durning’s fluid-free twin bed in his lil priest apartment? Was this all Father Durning’s long con to get a girl in his bed?

Gabe and Father Durning listen to the recording of Frankie’s demon chatting in the alleyway. They call Father Delmonico to translate, and he’s says, oh, it’s not gibberish, “It’s a form of Aramaic that hasn’t been used in 1900 years.” Why do you SPEAK THAT?

Frankie sneaks out of bed and climbs up on the roof like one of those Russian parkour TikTokers I hate. Hey, how about she’s supervised in some kind of way? She’s just WALKING AROUND ON THE LEDGE OF THE SKYSCRAPER WITH A DEMON INSIDE HER. And this chick had terrible judgment before the demon. Have you seen her apartment??

You weren’t possessed when you decorated that, babe!

No one can get a hold of Frankie, so Gabe sneaks into her building and finds her covering her wall with Aramaic conspiracy theories. He says, “Who are you?” and she turns around and looks like shit and she says “the messenger is not important” in Italian.

Then she creeps toward him in her demonic jelly flatforms, but luckily water drips on her face and the water makes her not a demon. (That’s all it takes?)

Frankie: “I feel like my heart is breaking. Why am I so sad?”

I don’t know, maybe because you own not one not two not three not four but FIVE inflatable chairs??

Gabe takes pictures of the wall, then badgers her to come look at the shit she wrote to make sure none of it means anything to her. Frankie pops a bandanna over her crown of thorns and she and Gabe go on a boho date.

Frankie: “Hey, what kind of a scientist is a priest, anyway?” (WEIRD SENTENCE)

Gabe: “You don’t want to know.” (WHAT?)

He follows her to the flower market/low-fat latte stand and apologizes for trying to get her to look at the wall before when obviously she has never even done one day of ancient Aramaic on DuoLingo. He tells her he used to be an organic chemist and she asks if he wore a pocket protector and he says, “I did, actually.”

Gabe: “Anyway one day I just decided that I was going to become a priest.”

Good origin story.

Frankie is like wow I’ve never met a virgin before and he goes, “I wasn’t born a priest.” (You fucked when you were a baby????) She asks if he misses fucking and he says kinda. Then she tugs on his ear and it’s so inappropriate!!!! Unfortunately the horny tension is broken when Frankie gets a vision of getting impaled in the foot and falls over. It’s stigmat-o’-clock again!

Father Gabe tends her foot wounds and she’s like, hey, Father Gabe, I’ve done one through four, so what’s the 5th stigmata wound? And he’s like “uuuummmmm the spear…” and she’s like, “isn’t that the wound that killed Jesus?” and he’s like AY YAI YAI… COLLAR TUG… I THINK I HEAR MY RIDE!

Reassuringly, he just tells her that she shouldn’t worry. Oh, okay! Sure seems like I’ve got nothing to worry about! No, seriously, he says, it’s chill, “no stigmatic has ever received the full five wounds,” and bonus fact: the first person to ever get the stigmata was St. Francis of Assisi. No one points out that HER name is ST. FRANKIE OF PITTSBURGH but I noticed!!!! I noticed.

We’re in the home stretch. Gabe sends pics of the wall to Father Delmonico for translation and Father Delmonico is like EW, DON’T SEND ME ANY MORE OF THESE PICTURES because the wall says “Father Durning dick pic” in Aramaic. JK, it’s because—long story short—Frankie wrote the text of a lost gospel of Jesus that was in Jesus’s actual words and Jonathan Pryce is trying to cover it up because it might destabilize the Catholic Church if it turns out that Jesus said “don’t be evil.”

Unfortunately Father Elliot-from-Just-Shoot-Me saw Father Delmonico messing around on the computer in the Vatican computer lab and he restores the deleted images and finds out about the illegal gospel. He shows the pics to Jonathan Pryce and tells him that Gabe e-mailed them to Delmonico because he doesn’t know that narcs get… sparks. Applied to their butt!!!!!!

Father Delmonico calls his friend who we’ve never seen before and tells him that “the missing Jesus gospel turned up,” but says he can’t send any pictures of it or Jonathan Pryce will kill him.

Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, Frankie’s roof is still leaking and Father Gabe goes over there to say hi and she offers him a beer and he says “sure” (HORNY). He looks at her wounds and touches her very tenderly as though he’s a doctor, which he is not. HORNYYYYYY. They have some sexy tension but then he notices that she painted over her Aramaic wall, which annoys him. The water starts dripping backwards and she tries to kiss him but he is like I think u might be a demon rn tbh but they kiss anyway and then she rips open his priest shirt, but then he turns away, disgusted by his own surging wiener.

Frankie: “You took a vow to be dead from the neck down? Come on! I’ve seen the way you look at me. You know the way that I feel about you. Come on, I’m not blind.”

She turns fully into the demon and gets really mad that he won’t bang so she throws him into a lamp and wrecks her own apartment (anything is an improvement) and accuses him of thinking of women as “dirty little complications” (feminist demon!). She grabs a butter knife out of her drawer but then when she gets over to Gabe it’s turned into a steak knife (no propmaster is safe from MY eagle eye!). Then she starts stabbing herself with it while screaming. Gabe is NOT HORNY ANYMORE.

A lot of people don’t know that there’s a secret fourth-and-a-half stigmata which represents when Jesus had wicked PMS!

Frankie floats up in the air like Jesus on the cross and starts crying blood like the statue, so Gabe goes over and pulls her down and puts her in train bed. YOU DIDN’T TAKE HER TO THE DOCTOR?????? She invites him to lay down with her in train bed and he hesitates but she’s like “it’s okay” and so HE DOES and they lay there sensually forehead to forehead. Why does he still like her? She kind of blows to be around!

Then knock knock, Jonathan Pryce is at the door with poop-licking suck-ups Father Elliot-from-Just-Shoot-Me and Father Durning.

Pryce: “We’ve come to help. Take her to the archdiocese straight away.”

HE DIDN’T COME TO HELP! HE CAME TO BE EVIL!

Some nuns are taking care of Frankie in a big bed. Jonathan Pryce gets mad at Gabe for letting Frankie paint over the wall and also for not sending the pics to him immediately, as though there’s a formal HR protocol for when your Burning Man hairdresser demon girlfriend channels the lost gospel of Jesus and then paints over it while 17 mannequins watch.

Pryce tells Gabe to go home and Gabe asks if this had anything to do with the cancelled gospel commission, which is the thing Jonathan Pryce squashed to protect Catholicism, and Jonathan Pryce LIES AND SAYS NO!!!! Not very not evil if you ask me!

The guy who Father Delmonico called on the phone earlier (no clue why this character needs to exist but he is hot in a Croatian way) shows up to talk to Gabe and explains about why the gospel matters: “It’s maybe the most significant Christian relic ever found…an Aramaic scroll from the first century.” The gospel contains Jesus’s instructions to his disciples on the night of the Last Supper on how to continue the church after his death, and presumably they don’t say “whatever this [gestures vaguely at Catholicism] is.”

When he and Father Almeida originally found the document, they showed their findings to Jonathan Pryce and he freaked and shut it all down and excommunicated them, so Almeida winkled the document and disappeared to Brazil. Oh, and Father Almeida had the stigmata so that’s why he wore the fingerless gloves! Wow, I truly did not think that detail was going to be wrapped up!

Oh, I promised I’d tell you this: Delmonico, this guy, and Almeida are the guys in the pic from the beginning. Ta-dah!

Gabriel Byrne starts putting it all together. Frankie isn’t possessed by a demon, she’s possessed by the ghost of Father Almeida! “She’s just his messenger!”

So… Father Almeida wanted to fuck Gabriel Byrne????

By the way, where tf is Frankie’s mom? She just NEVER CHECKED ON HER DAUGHTER this whole time????

The nuns hold Frankie down while Pryce and Father Elliot-from-Just-Shoot-Me try to do an exorcism, but the demon-not-demon calls Pryce OUT and is like actually YOU’RE the drama!!!!!! Somewhere in Pittsburgh (RAINING), Gabe can sense something is amiss and turns his car around. He starts rushing back to the archdiocese, but at a leisurely pace. No hurry, Pryce is only choking Frankie to death! Gabe ambles slowly up the stairs.

Pryce: “You will not destroy my church!”

Gabe finally gets there and saves Frankie and throws Pryce on the floor and, despite having just witnessed an attempted MURDER, is like, “You’ve spent your last days in the church!” Yeah, Jonathan Pryce! You’re so fired!

Now Frankie sets the room ablaze with the power of Jesus, and I thought Pryce meant “destroy the church” figuratively, but great!

Gabe, on fire: “Are you Father Almeida? Give me your wisdom, let me be your messenger.”

Frankie: “A messenger believes. A messenger has faith. You only have doubt.”

So Gabe walks through the fire and prays a special prayer because his faith has been restored by this hot chick. Then a bird flies out of the fire and Frankie is like “Aaaaah!” Gabe carries Frankie out of the room and all the fire goes away. He holds her like a baby and they make out. They really don’t know each other that well, though! This bond has not been earned!

Then I guess at some point Father Almeida’s demon must have told Gabe where he hid his Jesus gospel notebook because now Gabe is in a church digging up the floor. The movie tells us that this was based on a true story. Haha, no it wasn’t.

Okay, then it’s over? So is Gabe just going to leave the priesthood and get a job now? At the organic chemistry lab? He’s really gonna get fucked by the dot com bubble! Is Frankie Catholic now? Or does she go back to partying? Does Father Almeida still live inside of her? WHERE DID HER MOM GO?

We never see them fuck.