Catholics & the Movies

This week, at Sunday Masses in U.S. Roman Catholic churches, priests read the annual pledge of the Legion of Decency, a national Catholic body which reviews all U.S. movies. Most members of their congregations, reciting the pledge with the priests, acknowledged a commitment: to avoid and, if possible, to attack openly all movies which the legion's censors have noted as "objectionable."

Admittedly, the legion and Catholic moviegoers have hiked up the moral tone of Hollywood productions. But this week Drama Critic Walter Kerr, writing in the Catholic lay weekly, the Commonweal, asked his fellow Catholics an embarrassing question: Are they censoring the art out of movies, as well as the immorality?

Purity with Popcorn. Writes Critic Kerr: "The Church in this country has . . . seemed to say, 'I don't care what the quality of the art work is, so long as its content is innocuous, or perhaps favorably disposed in our direction . . .' A film featuring a saint is a film of majestic technical excellence. A film showing a nun driving a jeep is a superbly made comedy. A film embracing a jolly priest, a self-sacrificing Catholic mother and an anti-Communist message must be defended in the diocesan press from those irresponsible esthetes . . . who have had the meanness and the malice to question it.

"Catholic taste in motion pictures has been frozen at the 'unobjectionable,' or purity-with-popcorn level, a level which, if pursued down the ages, would have called into question nearly every literary or dramatic masterpiece ever produced."

Kerr argues that the pat identification of good art with characters who behave in a manner morally irreproachable has discredited the Catholic intellectual position in the arts, and almost nullified Catholic intellectual influence therein. As for "the influence which Catholicism has had" on the screen: "We forget that this influence has been wholly of one kind: the influence of the pressure group . . ."

Vulgarity for God's Sake? Although the Catholic Church has never quailed from the reality of sin in this world, its movie censors almost ban the depiction of sin from the screen: "The notion, for instance, that sin is always, and very precisely, punished in this life would not appear to be Catholic dogma; yet it is at Catholic insistence that the screen echoes and re-echoes the concept."

The "morally simpleminded" standards of the legion, Kerr continues, would automatically ban the filming of much of Nobel Prizewinner Franc,ois Mauriac's work, or that of English Novelist Graham Greene, both Catholics. Concludes Kerr, after recalling a maxim quoted by French Catholic Paul Claudel ("God writes straight with crooked lines"): "Art without crooked lines is unnatural art--inevitably inferior art. And in its production not only the creative mind is betrayed; the Catholic mind, in its fullness, in its scope, in its centricity, is betrayed as well . . . We are moving closer and closer to the sort of stand which might well be described as 'vulgarity for God's sake.' "

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