As you may have read on Roxy’s blog, she and Gerardo and Katie and I went out on a double-date Saturday morning to see the Nativity Story.

Overall, the movie is worth-watching because it is encouraging to the Christian faith and a good-hearted portrayal of the events immediately leading up to the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Most Protestants would be hard-pressed to find fault in it, but for Catholics, there are many faults. The central one is the portrayal of the Virgin Mary and the made-up parts of the story (I’ll use “interpolations”) that surround her marriage to St. Joseph and her conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit.

The beginning of the movie has our Blessed Mother as a teenage girl doing normal Jewish-girl things in her small village of Nazareth. The problem is, she acts more like a “typical” 21st century American teenage girl and her parents, St. Anne and St. Joachim, respond to her less-than-holy attitude the way that typical 21st century American parents would respond to their daughter after receiving backtalk.

Katie and I both looked at each other after one particularly un-saintly interaction between Mary and her parents and frowned in unison.

Joseph and Mary don’t get married in the temple. Instead, he shows up at her house and when Mary walks in, her parents ambush her and tell her she is marrying Joseph right then and there. She makes a face showing her clear distaste for this arrangement and later on we hear her thoughts about “being forced to marry a man she doesn’t even love”. Ugh. I’m no scholar, but I can tell you with confidence that that is NOT the way Mary and Joseph’s marriage went.

The final most grievous fault is how they portray Mary’s pregnancy: The town all finds out about it, and so Mary is confronted by her parents, with St. Joseph close by, as they all accuse her of having relations with another man. This interpolation of the events in the Bible seems the most obvious to us given our modern culture.

It is not, however, how I believe things went at all. I wrote a post some time ago explaining how things went based on what I have read in the Life of St. Joseph. Mary and Joseph are HOLY people, living saints while they walked the earth. Given this truth and the Catholic Church’s Tradition concerning Mary and Joseph, the movie’s portrayal of their relationship is almost certainly way off.

Given all these problems, Katie and I still enjoyed the movie. Because Mary is not shown as the holy woman that she is, I would not want my future children to watch the movie until they were older and could understand why this portrayal was flawed.

May God bless all the people involved in making this film–they made it, and I did not, so I give them much credit. If I wanted a better film, then I should have gone into the movie-making industry.