We’re the Church that Bans Puppies, Kitties, Movies and Other Things You Love (Not really, but it’s fun to say!)

“Through his works, the artist speaks to others and communicates with them. The history of art, therefore, is not only a story of works produced but also a story of men and women. Works of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life, and they reveal the original contribution which artists offer to the history of culture.” –St. John Paul II

One of the reasons we (both Jessica and I) came back to the Catholic Church was because it has a long history of encouraging, developing and spiritually leading artists of all stripes. Pope after Pope, theologian after theologian, has written about the importance of artists in the life of the church. One of our favorites is St. Pope John Paul II’s  pastoral letter to artists.

So we both rolled our eyes at the New York Post‘s coverage of TCM’s marketing campaign for “Condemned,” a festival of movies condemned by the (now-defunct) Catholic Legion of Decency.  The Post article conflates the Legion–An American group created to police American movies for any content it deemed morally objectionable in light of Catholic teaching–with the Roman Catholic Church. But it isn’t the only publication to do so. The Church Militant, a watchdog group devoted to addressing the “serious erosion of the Catholic faith,” also described the films as “condemned by the Catholic Church,” not the Legion, in their coverage of the festival. Their article focused mostly on festival host Sister Rose Pacatte, a Catholic nun and director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Los Angeles (and Patheos blogger), who was then savaged by Church Militant readers in the comments section.

The Legion of Decency has a long, complicated history (and yes, it was ultimately subsumed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which still writes reviews and provides a ratings system for movies, though it doesn’t condemn or ban or censor them), but it was an American phenomenon and never spoke for the worldwide church. I realize marketing campaigns are not invitations to deep, critical thought, but both the New York Post and the Church Militant are guilty of presenting imprecision as the truth to bait their respective readers. Both equate the Legion with the Roman Catholic Church, but the truth is, the Legion never claimed to speak officially for the Church, because it was not officially empowered by the Church to do so. Brad Miner wrote a good, short history of the Legion of Decency over at First Things.

But Miner is more sympathetic than I am to the Legion, which was an anomaly in the history of a church whose patronage of the arts goes back, oh, 2000 years.

Sister Rose admits many of these condemned movies aren’t very good–and she’s speaking as a film critic there, not as a moralist–her aim as a festival host will be to reflect on and contextualize the Legion’s influence on American filmmaking and movie-going. It should be a fascinating look at this period of American pop culture and American Catholicism, and we at Sick Pilgrim will definitely be setting the DVR.

But let’s set a few things straight.

Despite the insinuation of the headlines, Sister Rose is not in any way taking on the Church or standing in opposition to Catholic teaching by hosting this festival and watching some campy movies that showed too much skin for the tastes of a 1950s priest. As Catholics we’re all encouraged to research, reflect, and wrestle with the world and see how it stands up to the truth, and that means all of the world, even the bad movies, if we like. We’re not controlled by the thought police. Bad Catholics though we are (speaking for Jess and me here), we strive to make decisions according to consciences formed by the official teachings of the Catholic Church–not a defunct group of American superprudes. And not the Church Militant, either.

I’m in no way suggesting that people shouldn’t be careful about what they watch. You should feel free to swear off violence or sex or sophomoric scatological humor in the movies if it troubles your conscience (though if I did I’d be out of job. And really bored). But I’m not committing a mortal sin by watching The Witch and giving it a positive review (see the June Issue of U.S. Catholic). 

If you’re interested in the arts, pop culture, the Church, and this particular period of American history–and we at Sick Pilgrim definitely are–we hope you’ll join us in watching some of these movies with Sister Rose. (We’re looking forward to the bad ones too, but Black Narcissus is really worth watching.) We’ll be writing more here on the blog about our reactions to the festival and, more generally, the influence of Catholicism in American culture at the time. Can it be a coincidence that our most beloved American Catholic writers were at work at the same time as the Legion? We think not. And did Brad Miner have a point when he wrote in First Things that “something potentially salvific has been lost in religion’s accommodation to the standards of pop culture?”

Pass the popcorn!

Go to the a list of films condemned by the Legion of Decency.  Many of our all-time favorites are on it.

An example of a review and a rating by the critics of the USCCB, otherwise known as the Catholic News Service (for The Witch, which they gave a classification of L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. Now that doesn’t sound like the thought police, does it?)