The Catholic as Censor
"Of course it's obvious why Kerr gave Candide such an all-out panning," a musician in the Broadway show's orchestra told a friend last week. "He's a Catholic and the book's on the Index."
Walter Kerr, drama critic on the New York Herald Tribune, has heard many such snap judgments. U.S. Roman Catholics, says Catholic Kerr in a sharp little book called Criticism and Censorship (Bruce; $2.75), are wide-open to the suspicion of being too Index-minded or too censorship-conscious. He writes: "It sometimes seems as though the struggle over censorship were a struggle between Catholicism and the rest of America."
A Kind of Ignorance. Alarmed at the Catholic tendency to judge a work of art according to prurient standards of "decency," says Kerr, professional critics tend to take an unreasoning position against any form of censorship; equally alarmed at this anarchic attitude, Catholics damn all critics as "artsakists" who are insensitive to sin and indifferent to its effects. Wise censorship simply means the exercise of prudence, says Kerr, but "the censor is not acting out of clear knowledge. He is acting in a kind of ignorance." And he should proceed with great caution for fear of destroying something good.
Professional censors are cautious enough; the Vatican's Index contains surprisingly few titles.*But U.S. Catholics, says Kerr, have "dozens of 'little Indexes' that pursue them from the pages of diocesan newspapers, devotional magazines, magazines created especially for the purpose of giving moral ratings to 'bestsellers,' and--finally--from the lips of well-meaning Catholic neighbors ... A few seasons ago a New York playgoer who took his Catholic magazine listings to heart would have felt free to see exactly one legitimate entertainment--Howdy Mr. Ice of 1950."
The result is disintegration of taste. "The [Catholic] community no longer has any means at its disposal for distinguishing one piece of work from another, provided both subscribe to the same moral code. A vulgar virgin is as good as a sensitively conceived virgin; the only thing that matters is that it is a virgin." The "generally low taste" of U.S. Catholics, according to Kerr, "has been a minor scandal for quite a time now."
The Real World. For a solution to the problem, Kerr invites both artsakists and sinsniffers to meet on St.Thomas Aquinas' conception of integrity in art, which Kerr interprets as a wholeness and honesty in relation to life that makes a book or play or picture moral in the highest sense, no matter what evil it may depict. In that sense, nothing truly beautiful could ever be called bad, nothing bad could ever be called beautiful. Esthetics and ethics would be the same. But that, Kerr admits, could probably come to pass only in an ideal world.
As for the real world, he advises his fellow Catholics to relax a little. Says Kerr: "It is perfectly possible for a society to be prudently, scrupulously self-protective--and still be sick. Bundling up won't do the job all by itself; exercise is essential. As Catholics, we've been doing a lot of bundling up and taking very little exercise."