Hollywood Knows, Mr. A.

Hollywood long ago discovered that priests and nuns were box office. Protestants were tossed a few films such as A Man Called Peter and Battle Hymn, but it was the Roman collar that looked best on Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien--not to mention Barry Fitzgerald, Van Johnson, Paul Douglas, Gregory Peck, Charles Boyer, Montgomery Clift, Henry Fonda, Charles Bickford, Karl Maiden, and even Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra. All this adds up to vulgar exploitation of the Roman Catholic Church, says Film Critic Robert Brizzolara of The Voice of St. Jude, national magazine of the Claretian Missionary Fathers. With a few exceptions, he writes in the current issue, the formula is classic: "Take priest, mix in dash of sex with preposterous plot. Hollywood reads. Hollywood buys."

To Catholics who argue that it is good public relations for the church to show that priests and nuns are human, Brizzolara reports that "unfortunately, their humanity is all such movies can depict and thus give us only half a priest or half a nun . . . The best [Hollywood] can hope for is to show Father as a 'real Joe,' and Sister as a 'good egg,' naive, perhaps, but wisecracking, gay, dedicated--always the part, never the whole."

Hollywood's only accomplishment in making such pictures as Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, The Left Hand of God and I Confess, he writes, is "exploiting for dollars the sacredness of clerical celibacy, chastity and the seal of the confessional.

"The sum effect, then ... is the equating of the Church with a stock character out of Central Casting to be trotted out at will and bedecked as a sort of ecclesiastical Liberace for crassly commercial purposes. In so doing, not one jot is added to the stature of the Church or its mission in the world, a chore, incidentally, reserved not to Hollywood but to the Holy Ghost. Let us devoutly hope that the cassock and habit may enjoy eternal rest from moviedom's commercialism, and pray that they may never decide to shoot St. Augustine's Confessions with George Raft in the lead."

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