Exploiting the religious habit.

You don't see many Canadian or American nuns in traditional habits any more. A 1960s Vatican decree which called for modifying religious habits that were unsuited "to circumstances of time and place" prompted many religious orders to abandon them altogether. Today some sisters still wear a short veil with a knee-length habit, or a modest blouse and skirt. Others, indistinguishable from businesswomen, dress mostly in smart secular attire, displaying perhaps a cross on a neck chain, or worn as a lapel pin.

In the strangest places

The traditional habit consisting of full-length veil and ground-sweeping robe is rarely seen outside of Europe. At least, it is absent where you most might expect to see it, in churches and religious houses. Switch on your television, however, and you will find that the old habit lives on in the strangest places.

Perhaps you will come across the traditional habit in some television news footage, being modelled by two or three marchers, usually males, in a gay rights parade. Or you might find the habit being employed as a cheap eye-catcher for a television promo: radio station CHUM-FM in Toronto, for example, dressing three of its broadcasters, 'Roger, Rick and Marilyn', in full traditional habit to publicize its morning show. On other occasions the novelty, not to say, incongruity of the habit might be supplying a titillating juxtaposition, such as that provided by Sister Wendy Beckett, a bit-of-a-character cloistered nun, as she guides us through the PBS series on Western art, pausing now and then to muse over the aesthetic appeal of some particular arrangement of naked bodies.

Pop a video into your VCR, and there's a fully-habited but streetwise Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act, transforming a traditionally dressed convent choir of tone-deaf, smiling idiots into a hand-clapping, rockin', Motown chorus.

"I haven't enjoyed Mass so much in years," twitters the movie's convent chaplain. In the real world, his admiration for swingin' liturgical music was shared by hundreds of handclapping Catholic teachers at a professional in-service I attended in Pickering, Ontario, where participants were treated to a medley of Sister Act numbers performed by a Catholic high school choir.

Is it harmless?

The teachers' response would seem to be typical: most Catholics view all of this as harmless fun. With seeming unconcern, they buy tickets to see still more wacky nuns in the musical comedy Nunsense, and even stage Sister Act skits at their Catholic church social.

So is there anything here that should concern anybody, Catholics in particular? What's wrong with just playing along, allowing traditional nuns to be treated as "walking sight gags rather than real people," as New York Times critic Janet Maslin put it, in her review of Sister Act?

Well, quite apart from the fact that such movies show disrespect for women dedicated to the service of God, these seemingly harmless comedies also contain an uncomfortable blend of the religious and the unsavoury. Nuns on the Run, for example, includes a mocking parody of the Sign of the Cross--"spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch"--and an impostor nun who ogles young women in the shower room. The Pope Must Die, as described by film critic Michael Medved, presents "sultry and seductive nuns who provide the Holy Father with his own private harem."

But it's all in good fun, right? Well, you might think so until you read the Miramax press kit, as Medved did, and see The Pope Must Die described as "a film that urges an end to the corruption that threatens the Catholic Church." Profound aspirations, indeed, for what most patrons would dismiss as a silly but harmless little comedy.

That press-kit description reminds us how the entertainment industry really feels about organized religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular. The religious attitudes of those who dressed Whoppi in a habit are little different from those who gave you Jesus-the-voyeur in the Last Temptation of Christ; supplied an entire cast of degenerate Catholic misfits in Priest; presented a young novice in Agnes of God who strangles her baby and dumps it in a convent wastepaper basket.

Funny thing about humour. We usually can handle a friend poking fun at us--even taking a few liberties with things we hold dear. Most of us, however, draw the line when an outsider tries the same trick. Whatever else it is, the entertainment industry is no ally of Catholicism, yet Catholics are either amazingly tolerant or dumbly compliant when it comes to what is little more than the commercial exploitation of their Church by unfriendly forces.

Not only do they support this exploitation with their dollars, but a few who should know better even contribute at the source. Nuns on the Run, for example, boasted a Jesuit priest, Father Jim Christie, as one of its advisers. The other was a real nun, Sister Elizabeth Phillips. Agnes of God acknowledged the help of no fewer than a total of six priests and nuns.

Sign of consecrated life

No, before Catholics so readily laugh along, they really ought take a second look at the company they are keeping. Even Toronto's CHUM FM, which doesn't mind using comic Catholic nuns in its advertising, in fact objected when a real Catholic nun, Mother Angelica, tried to broadcast on the Canadian airwaves. CHUM claims its opposition to the American nun's Eternal Word Television Network is nothing more than a simple endorsement of current CRTC policy. All right, but then isn't using nuns up front to promote your station just a little bold, to say the least?

A few years ago I walked through Rome with a young Filipino nun who wore a traditional religious habit. A former disc jockey from Manila, she was smart and poised and wonderfully witty, everything Whoopi's nuns were not. She replied, when asked about religious dress, "I am proud of my habit. It is testimony to what I have professed."

That's the real problem, you see, with treating the habit as just another costume from Theatre Rentals. The habit is intended to be a sign of the consecrated life, the life devoted to God and to the church.

Hence, unopposed by a comatose Catholic community, the entertainment industry has expropriated elements of Catholic heritage for its own, sometimes ignoble, purposes. If Catholics don't wake up soon and reclaim the territory, they may find that the last laugh is truly on them.

James Delaney is a school teacher retired from the Durham Catholic system, Oshawa, ON.