Skyfall: God Is Everywhere, Even In Places We Don't Expect

One of the many things I love about the 007 film Skyfall is the unexpected significant Catholic themes and connections during the long  sequence at the titular estate in the Scottish Highlands towards the end. Bishop Barron even did a video commentary on it when he saw it back in 2012. He admits early on in his video that he didn't see the movie in search of Catholic themes. He went to go see it for fun and was pleasantly surprised to find Catholic themes in the movie at all, let alone strong Catholic themes.  The Skyfall estate is Bond's childhood home. Towards the end of the movie, he and M, his boss who is also the head of MI6, travel to Skyfall to gain a tactical advantage for the final showdown with the film's villain, Raoul Silva, and his henchmen.  Soon after arriving at the estate, which is the site of childhood trauma for Bond, they meet Kincade, the ground and gamekeeper of the estate since Bond's childhood. Before the final battle begins, Kincade shows M one of the house's life-saving secrets: a priest hole from the time of the Protestant Reformation. He shows it to her as a hiding place just in case she gets in trouble during the fight and reveals that a pre-teen James stayed in the priest-hole for two days after learning his parents had  died. When Bond came out, Kincade says, "he wasn't a boy anymore."  

Priest holes were a way recusant Catholics could protect priests during the Protestant Reformation. But the priest hole in the manor house isn't the only Catholic element in the whole sequence at Skyfall. There is also a chapel on the property. At one point during the final battle, M and Kincade go to the chapel at James's instruction. Bond soon follows, but he falls through ice into a lake while struggling with one of Silva's henchman. After killing the man, Bond fires a single shot at the ice, which fractures it, and swims to the surface. This is the second time in the entire film that James falls into a body of water, but is able to resurface offscreen. Bishop Barron said in his video that the second time around can be seen as a kind of baptism imagery. And he kills Silva in the chapel, averting Silva's attempt to get M to kill him and herself with a gunshot through both of their temples. 

The presence of a priest hole and a chapel tells us something: that whether we like it or not, God is everywhere, including in a James Bond movie, which is the last place most people would expect to find Him.