I have watched with great interest and not a little discomfort The Sundays, a film directed by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, author of the screenplay. A great film, recently awarded the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival. It tells the –real– story of Ainara, who at 17 feels strongly called by God to become a cloistered nun and to dedicate herself entirely and exclusively to divine love. Her desire provokes some condescension –not without economic interest– on the part of her father Iñaki and the intransigent and angry rejection of her aunt Maite.
Some analysts, especially those closest to the Catholic institution, welcome this film – or Rosalía’s album Lux or Byung Chul Han’s book On God. Thinking with Simone Weil – as a sign of the “spiritual return” that would be taking place today in our modern society, which is so turbulent and disoriented. It depends on what we understand by spirituality. I wonder why a monastery of celibate monks in seclusion is more readily associated with spirituality than an eco-feminist and socialist vocation or movement.
A well-known bishop goes much further. He claims that “in times when faith is often caricatured, this film is a breath of fresh air,” “renders a great service against theories of suspicion” towards religious life, and “does a great deal of good for young people.” He is unable to applaud the film without baptizing it, nor to baptize it without attacking and condemning the character of Maite, Ainara’s aunt, “marked – the bishop dictates – by militant atheism and rejection of religious fact.” Maite reflects a “life frustration,” the bishop notes, and wonders if “perhaps this woman, who has not known how to love, feels envy of the pure love she sees in her niece.” Typical drift and clerical conduct: canonizing half the film and excommunicating the other half.
It’s a poor favor for the film and its inspired and respectful director.
I believe, in effect, that one of the great virtues of this work of art is that it portrays with great force and beauty, and with much honesty, the real story of an adolescent trapped between two ideologically closed worlds: the “religious” world and the “anti-religious” world. Two blocs that at no point throughout the film truly dialogue, but merely limit themselves to defending their respective convictions as absolute truth, impermeable to the search for and the truth of the other. I will focus on this issue, analyzing not so much the specific characters but the stereotypes they suggest.
Maite, Ainara’s aunt, is absolutely sure that the religious search and the desire for God’s love of her dear niece have no value whatsoever. They are simply alienation and lies, a product of her adolescent (motherless) psychology, sensitive and wounded, and, above all, the result of the manipulation she has suffered by the school of nuns where she studies, by the young priest who, in his capacity as spiritual director, discerns and certifies the authenticity of her vocation, and by the prioress, eager to receive her into her community. Is that all? Won’l all Maites, also, be victims of prejudices?
Doesn’t Ainara, all Ainaras, deserve more attention and care, more delicacy and respect, more profound empathy, from her aunt and from our irritated society? Deep down in her search, with all its ambiguities and shadows, isn’t a truer, greater longing hidden than any career and business, the longing for infinity that moves the human heart and all beings?
Even more unwavering is the certainty of the religious institution, for it has as its guarantor the very God himself, and seeks to know where God manifests: speaks, yes, in the depths of each human person, like in the delicate heart of Ainara, but the sure discernment and the final word on what God says and wants is not held by Ainara nor anyone else, but by the hierarchical Church instituted by Jesus and assisted by the Holy Spirit of truth and love, from the Pope and the bishop to “Father Txema.” They know that God calls some more than others, and they alone know, in the final analysis, whom he entirely chooses for himself and whom he does not, and they also know that celibacy is the condition and the carnal seal of that full and exclusive belonging to God.
If we were to ask Father Txema or the prioress of the monastery why, they would respond with the argument we heard in the film: “Faith is a gift that is received or not received. And this is a matter of faith.” Perfect circular reasoning, a round begging of the question: “Through faith we know that faith is true.” We know that God chooses some for himself exclusively because the Bible says so, and the Bible is the word of God. Why do we know that? Because the Church teaches it, and the Church cannot lie because God speaks through it. There is no further proof than faith founded on its own faith.
Two cartoons, one religious, the other anti-religious. Two dogmatic fundamentalisms without communication or possible dialogue, of which Ainara is the main victim in the sad story of Los domingos. Both fundamentalisms feed off each other as much as they deny each other, and they never truly meet, blind to recognizing themselves in the bottom of their common wound. And along with all the other fundamentalisms – economic, technological, political – they deepen our general uprooting and lead us to a global shipwreck.
The director of this film takes no sides nor calls for it, but rather describes the facts with sharpness and resolutely invites viewers to open up, look at themselves, listen to themselves, dialogue. To dialogue from the deep awareness of the ambiguity of all convictions and options, from the rigorous questioning and respectful humility, from the hesitant and necessary trust in the other, in the human being, in the mysterious reality of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. We are gambling our common planetary future.
And I would venture to say that religious institutions in general, and the Catholic hierarchical institution in particular, have a greater responsibility. Don’t they still not know that atheism is a necessary historical product of the dominant theism in the great monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)? Don’t they continue to call “God” their fears? Don’t they blindly defend it to maintain their power and privileges?
Don’t they notice that the image of a God, an entity sovereign and arbitrary, in human image – who chooses some instead of others and demands the renunciation of sexual relations as a condition of exclusive belonging to Him – has been surpassed for millennia in all mystical traditions, including Christianity, and that today it has simply become absurd, and that the collapse of seminaries and monasteries is not due to the spiritual insensitivity of young people, but to the radical cultural transformations we are experiencing?
The roots and the deep breath – personal, social, political – of which we are so lacking pressed upon us. They urge us to be free of dogmas and prejudices, to recognize the shadow and the light of which we are all made, to let ourselves be guided by the deepest universal desire. The Breath or the loving Presence inhabits us and calls us all alike, it is revealed equally in the mystery of the atom and the infinite universe, it is in eternal Christmas and eternal Advent in the heart of all that exists. All beings can embody it for our common joy of being.
José Arregi
Aizarna, December 12, 2025
www.josearregi.com
English version translated with AI