There’s a scene in the early going of The Nun’s Story that raises an interesting question. In any hierarchy, each of us must serve one master, but in a hierarchy with God, we find ourselves serving two. In Christianity, given the thing Jesus says about the two masters business, this is especially amusing. Gaby’s master is God, of course, but the commands and implorations she receives on Earth, the ones she can actually hear with her own two ears, come from various Mothers Superior. Belgian-born Gaby, now Sister Luke, has developed her ambitions to be sent to the Belgian Congo as a nurse. To do so, she will need to pass a rigorous set of exams, and the fact that she is so good at her studies is making another candidate feel bad about herself. Her current Mother Superior, Marcella, comes to her with an unorthodox request. Fail your exams, she tells Sister Luke. Fail the exams, tell no one that you have failed them on purpose, and mortify your pride. Perhaps the opportunity to take these exams will never come again, but likewise, there may never be a chance to diminish your pride in such a bald way.

This Sister Luke does not do, and like, bully for her, you know? If I were living in the Belgian Congo, under what, historically, was the most brutal regime in imperial Africa, and I were depending on the largesse of white do-gooders like Sister Luke to keep myself healthy, I would want the one who was actually good at science to do it. For another thing, failing the exams on purpose and refusing to tell anyone about why that happened seems to qualify as a lie, which, theoretically, Christians tend to be a little squeamish about.

For all this, the film does not present Sister Luke’s decision as the “right” one. The idea that comes across is that her pride is as intact as ever, and more than that, she has a defiant streak in her, someone who has entered holy orders but still means to keep her own counsel rather than obeying God’s representative in the convent. This is the moral quandary that she faces, a case, for a nun, where she might literally be damned if she does or does not do. Scuttle your pride at the expense of human life is on one side of the equation: surely this is not God’s will? On the other, fulfill your position as a nun, the one you have sacrificed all else for, and trust that this is God’s plan and not the plan of some fallible old woman playing favorites. Watching the movie, and seeing Hepburn’s performance, it was impossible for me to see what Sister Luke does as the wrong decision, but then again, maybe I just have more pride than I ought to have.

The film ultimately comes around, though. Sister Luke ultimately leaves the convent after feeling that she cannot stand by and do nothing while the Nazis invade Belgium. She intends to join the resistance, and she gets that rare dispensation to leave. Without her pride, she would wait, and persevere, and be humble in her sequestered world. There is a holiness in that discipline, but surely there is more goodness in her last decision.