In fact you can. It’s called having empathy to put yourself in her situation, and believing in objective truths of right and wrong to judge her actions. If you’re in the “I can’t just anyone else crowd” it’s the same as ‘whatever I feel is right is right’.

Perhaps it’s my pulp aesthetics, but I’ve always held a belief, somewhat corrolary to a statement of Raymond Chandler’s –

Whenever a story spends more than one scene on hand-wringing doubt, self-questioning, and the idea of never being able to make a value judgement, a platoon of Nazis should burst in the door, guns blazing.

With that in mind, MY ending would involve Sister Wooden and Sister Hot finding out that Father O’Molester is not, in fact, a molester, but part of the Secret Monster-Hunting Order within the church, and has been spending time with Little Timmy Victim in order to determine whether or not, in fact, his parents are raising him to be the Antichrist. Sister Wooden is willing to believe this, as we find that the reason she’s such a stick-in-the-mud is because, as a young woman, she was seduced by Beelzebub on Lammastide, and despite trying to have a back-room abortion, the horrid thing still lived, and crawled off into the night. After this, Sister Wooden joined the nunnery. Anyway, back in the present, she and Father O’Molester decide to join forces. Investigating the Victim family, we find that Timmy’s father has the blood of the Deep Ones in him, and is beginning to go through his Batrachian metamorphosis into a webbed, gilled horror of the seas. Finding out that his son prefers weiners to tacos was the last straw – Father Dagon and Mother Hydra want Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, worshipping them. Sister Wooden and Father O’Molester club Mister Victim on the head, grab up little Timmy, and head back to the church.

But then, in a surprise twist, we find that Sister Hot was, in fact, manipulating everyone all along. She directed Wooden and O’Molester’s attention to Timmy Victim, in order to hide the TRUE antichrist lurking in the Bronx – her! For she is, in fact, the horrid spawn of Sister Wooden and the Devil on The Hill! She morphs into her even-hotter succubus form, as the hordes of darkness begin to rise up from cracks opening up in the ground. In a desperate attempt to stop them, Father O’Molester begins chanting from the Forbidden Tome of Lore, calling out to the Dark Star Fomalhaut, and summoning forth Cthugha, Lord of Flame and Light, who comes down from the sky to earth with his full court of Fire Vampires, destroying the entire church and school in a great fiery conflagration. When all is done, there is nothing but a smoldering crater, a single white-hot crucifix, and an unconscious, gay, Deep One child.

THERE’S your Oscar-winning ending!

Liberals don’t like what catholisism preaches so our faith is attacked. And quite frankly I have met some atheistic liberal jews that for what ever reason hate catholics. I don’t know why and thankfully it is not the majority of jewish people but there is an element of far left jewish people that I have come to believe are anti-catholic bigots. I have no real understanding as to why?

I think the point of this movie is to yet again try to use this as a philosophical bludgeon against the church.

Flynn: “That child needed a friend.”

Sister Aloysius: “You are a cheat. The warm feeling you experienced when that boy looked at you with trust is not the sensation of virtue. It can be got from the drunkard from his tot of rum . . .

Flynn: “Where’s your compassion?”

Sister Aloysius: “Nowhere you can get at it . . . ”

That’s an exchange speaking way beyond the issue of “did he or didn’t he?”

And all you see, because perhaps you must, is sanctioned pedophilia.

A very rough start.

By the way, from the reviews I’ve read, and several in-depth reports on the play on which the film is based, I was under the impression that what is not clear is whether any actual sexual activity took place. I do intend to see the film to clarify that. One important measure in free society is the concept of “innocent until proven guilty”. That is one of the most important restrictions on government power around because it is absolutely necessary to protect individual rights from unwarranted or unproven charges. The purpose of such laws are not to protect the “guilty” but to protect the innocent. And the history of the radical feminist inspired hysteria has shown that thousands of innocent people have been jailed and tens of thousands of families have been ripped apart by the abuse sniffers. When this started with bogus cases like McMartin Day Care many conservatives noted how these false charges were harmful to families and diverted investigatory resources from legitimate abuse cases to phony ones. But ever since the Religious Right joined the radical feminists a lot of mainstream conservatives have been afraid to criticize the ongoing hysteria and the Big Government types have used that to expand state power.

Her accent was dead on. I had eight years of the Sisters of Charity in New York back in the day. Streep’s Sister Aloysius was perfect. And before you whisper otherwise, remember: she can see your reflection in Pius XII’s eyes!

As for Sister Aloysius being a monster, not compared with the Charitys who left their paw prints on the faces of my classmates. Besides, she was right: the fountain pens gave way to the cartridges, and thence to the facile, effortless ballpoints that surely paved the slippery slope to texting and twittering.

Now trim those nails!

Loved the play, loved the film. The ambiguity makes it an audience participation mystery. You see the film you want to see. Here, for once, it’s just possible that the old school nun was right and the liberal, post-Vatican II priest was being a very naughty boy. So HBEMIS’ take rings true for me.