By Rob Sexton, Catholic Exchange, Oct. 24, 2025
Rob Sexton is a Catholic writer, husband, and father of six. He’s the voice behind Costly Things, a blog exploring faith, fatherhood, and spiritual formation through the lens of everyday life. A lifelong student of both theology and strength training, he writes about discipleship in the trenches. A stationary engineer by trade and contemplative by nature, he draws from late hours logged in the boiler room and the Adoration Chapel and is as comfortable with a pipe wrench in his hand as with a rosary.
In our walk with Christ, we can mistake “sanitizing” our lives for purity. This is especially true in the media we consume. Indeed, there are books, films, and television shows Christians simply should not expose themselves to—but the solution is not to avoid everything that seems questionable. Nor is it to arbitrarily baptize content to permit ourselves to consume it. For example, having a priest in a film does not make it inherently Catholic, but the presence of a Catholic imagination does.
This is why films like The Exorcist, The Rite, Nefarious, and Silence are, to me, deeply Catholic works that—when approached with discernment—can both entertain and edify. These films wrestle honestly with evil, possession, and despair without sanitizing them or reducing faith and the Church to token forces for good. We see grace and corruption existing side by side, and the very real struggle to choose between them. While fictional, such works insist that evil is real, that priests and sacraments matter, and that a battle rages all around us. Where the Catholic imagination is alive in art, faith is not a talisman against fear and evil but the only authentic way through them. ….
Continue reading >>>>>>>>>>
