The National Catholic Register portal reports on the film The Uprising, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Andrew Garfield, which dramatizes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England. The article highlights the film’s Catholic imagery — a Corpus Christi procession, the preaching of John Ball, royal confession — only to depict the Blessed Sacrament profaned in the dirt as the catalyst for violent insurrection. Garfield describes his character’s “soul awakening” to “human dignity” and “human rights,” while Greengrass explicitly parallels the medieval revolt with the COVID-19 pandemic and modern “oligarchy.” The Register presents this R-rated spectacle of mob violence as an exploration of the “Catholic heart.” This is not a Catholic film but a revolutionary manifesto draped in liturgical vestments, weaponizing the Sacred Species to sanctify insurrection against God-ordained authority.
The Profanation of Corpus Christi as Revolutionary Theater
The article’s central image — the Corpus Christi procession shattered, the Blessed Sacrament “scattered in the dirt” — reveals the film’s demonic inversion. The feast instituted by Pope Urban IV in 1264 and extended to the universal Church by Pope Clement V to proclaim the Real Presence of Christ the King in the Eucharist becomes, in Greengrass’s hands, the stage for its own desecration. The article states:
Instead, as tension boils over, the procession turns violent, leaving the Blessed Sacrament scattered in the dirt and shattering their expectations.
This is not historical drama; it is liturgical sabotage. The Syllabus of Errors condemns the proposition that “the Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect” (Error 24), yet here the Church’s highest act of worship is reduced to a trigger for anarchic violence. The filmmakers treat the Corpus Domini not as the Immolation of the Lamb but as a prop for class warfare. To film the Sacred Host trampled in mud as a narrative device is not art — it is a reenactment of the soldiers’ dice-throwing at the foot of the Cross, directed by those who hate the King.
John Ball: The Heresiarch as Prophet of Liberation
The article celebrates John Ball as a “radical preacher” whose “preaching” fuels the revolt. History records Ball as a condemned heretic, excommunicated by Archbishop Simon of Sudbury, who denied transubstantiation, preached communism (omnia sunt communia), and incited the murder of clergy and nobles. The Syllabus anathematizes socialism and communism as “pests” (Section IV). Yet Greengrass and Garfield present this wolf in clerical garb as a voice for “human dignity.” The article notes the film echoes Piers Plowman — Langland’s poem indeed criticized corruption, but from within the faith, not by overthrowing the social order. The film baptizes the Lollard heresy with holy water, making a precursor of Wycliffe into a martyr for “human rights.” This is the hermeneutic of rupture applied to history: the Church’s enemies become her true prophets.
The Modernist Language of “Dignity” and “Rights” Divorced from God
Garfield’s rhetoric is pure liberal modernity:
“Well, if I’m supposed to live a life of dignity, this isn’t it.”
And again:
“the world has to change in order for me to live a life of basic dignity and human rights.”
Not a word of supernatural dignity — the imago Dei restored by grace, the dignity of the baptized as coheirs of Christ (Rom 8:17). No mention of the rights of God (jura Dei), the Social Kingship of Christ proclaimed by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” Instead, “human rights” — the slogan of the Masonic Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), condemned by Pius VI in Quod aliquantum and by Pius IX in the Syllabus (Error 55: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church”). The film’s “soul awakening” is the awakening of the natural man, animal rationale unmoored from gratia sanans, demanding his “due” from a universe without a Creator.
Rebellion Against Legitimate Authority: The Syllabus Condemned It
The Peasants’ Revolt was an armed insurrection against King Richard II, the anointed monarch. The Syllabus Error 63 condemns: “It is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to rebel against them.” St. Paul teaches: “Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (Rom 13:1-2). The film portrays the rebels as hymn-singing pilgrims driven to “mob mentality” only when “order comes down.” Greengrass admits:
“Rebellions are anarchic by nature… Order comes down, the rules fall away, and there is always a descent into violence.”
Yet he directs the audience’s sympathy to the rebels. The article quotes Garfield:
“What happens when good people are squeezed to the point of saying, ‘No more’?”
This is the theology of liberation — the Gospel according to Marx. The true Catholic question is not “when do we revolt?” but “how do we suffer with Christ for the salvation of souls?” The film offers the immanentist eschaton: justice now, by the sword.
The Pandemic Parallel: Instrumentalizing History for Revolutionary Agitation
Greengrass explicitly links 1381 to 2020:
“Half of England had once been wiped out by the Black Death, and what followed wasn’t only grief — it was fury, along with a complete collapse of trust in the people who ruled… That felt like distant history. It really isn’t.”
The Register notes the historian Dan Jones “has some doubts about comparing this revolt from 600 years ago to today,” but Greengrass presses the analogy. This is actualization in the Modernist sense: history stripped of its providential meaning, reduced to a cycle of oppression and revolt. The Black Death was a chastisement permitted by God for the conversion of sinners; the film turns it into a grievance justifying regicide. The “collapse of trust” is the collapse of the hierarchical principle — the very foundation of Christian civilization. The film preaches that when the shepherd fails, the sheep may slaughter him and seize the fold.
The Register’s Complicity: The Neo-Church as Promoter of Subversion
The National Catholic Register, an organ of the post-conciliar establishment, publishes this puff piece without a whisper of doctrinal correction. It calls the film an exploration of the “Catholic heart.” There is no Catholic heart in a film that makes the Blessed Sacrament a casualty of class war, that canonizes a heretic, that preaches “human rights” over jura Dei, that validates the Syllabus‘s condemned errors. The article’s “Viewer Caveat” warns only of “violence and bloody images” — not of the spiritual poison. This is the abomination of desolation in the holy place: the neo-church’s media blessing a film that uses Catholic aesthetics to crucify the Catholic order.
Conclusion: The Counter-Revolutionary Verdict
The Uprising is not a medieval epic. It is a 21st-century revolutionary tract costumed in 14th-century wool. It takes the Mysterium Fidei and makes it a Molotov cocktail. It takes the Pax Christi in regno Christi and replaces it with the pax satanae in regno hominis. The true Catholic response to tyranny is not the pike and the torch but the Rosary and the Cross — the Consecratio Mundi to the Sacred Heart, the Reconquista of souls for Christ the King. As Pius XI taught: “When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” This film removes them again, celluloid frame by celluloid frame. Let the faithful flee this cinema as they would a plague house. The only “uprising” a Catholic seeks is the Resurrectio Domini — and the resurrectio of Christendom under His sceptrum iustitiae.
Source:
‘A Soul Awakening’: Andrew Garfield on the Catholic Heart of ‘The Uprising’ (ncregister.com)
Date: 10.09.2026