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Significantly, before the murder takes place, the tennis player says in a moment of anger that he would very much like to kill his wife. So while he may be technically innocent of the crime, he still benefits from her murder, and he still arguably shares the guilt for her death on some deeper, spiritual level. At any rate, Hitchcock underscores how the impulse to sin lurks within us even when we don't commit it.

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The transference-of-guilt theme finds its most explicitly Catholic form in I Confess (1953), which stars Montgomery Clift as a priest who hears a murderer's confession and is then suspected of the murder himself. Because the priest is required by the sacrament of confession to keep what he hears to himself, he cannot tell the police who really committed the crime, not even to save his own life.

On one level, the priest has been interpreted as a sort of Christ figure, because he bears the burden of another man's sin. Hitchcock himself seems to point in that direction when he frames the priest against a large crucifix in the background, or when he puts the priest behind a statue depicting Christ carrying his cross.

But the film is more complex than that. For one thing, it turns out the priest himself stands to gain from the murder of the man in question; we learn that the victim, purely by coincidence, happened to be blackmailing a woman with whom the priest had had an affair some years before he was ordained. And as each character confesses the sins in his or her past, we begin to realize that the "I" of the movie's title could be referring to any one of them. In this way, Hitchcock underscores the shared fallenness of humanity, but also the shared possibility of redemption.

One of Hitchcock's more unusual films also touches on this theme. The Wrong Man (1956) is based on the true story of Manny Balestrero (Henry Fonda), a musician who is arrested outside his home and prosecuted for a series of armed robberies that he did not commit. As Manny is shuttled between the police station, prison, and the courtroom, his wife Rose (Vera Miles) suffers a nervous breakdown.

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Because it is based on a true story, The Wrong Man is filmed in a much more realistic style than most of Hitchcock's films—though there are exceptions to this "realism." In one scene, Manny's mother urges him to pray, and so he does, standing before an icon of Christ with his rosary beads. As he prays, Hitchcock uses a double exposure to show a man walking down a street until his face is in close-up, overlapping the image of Manny's face. This man then tries to rob a store—and when he is caught, he is promptly charged with all the crimes that Manny had been accused of.

Thus, Manny is set free, and at least some of his prayers are answered. According to biographer Patrick McGilligan, Hitchcock often apologized for this scene because it seemed to violate the film's "realism," yet he also insisted that it was one of his favorite things about the film. "The one thing he liked was a cinematic intrusion that violated neorealism—a moment that provided a moving reaffirmation of his faith that, in a just world, God wouldn't condemn a wrong man," McGilligan writes.

Of course, this is not to say that Hitchcock believed the world was just. Nor is it to say that Hitchcock's faith was uncomplicated. Richard A. Blake, author of Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers, says later films like The Birds (1963) reflect a troubling, terrifying view of the natural world. "The birds, like God, are most terrifying because they are most unpredictable," writes Blake.

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