Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry.

From the beginning, Christians have been justifiably nervous about images, because images can as easily distract as assist anyone who seeks the face of God. I may be prejudiced, but it seems to me that the Catholic and Orthodox traditions have admirably demonstrated that the enjoyment of an artifact and the praising of God need not be contradictory activities, and can in fact be one and the same experience. "It is not too great toil," the ancient Celtic prayer says, "to praise the Trinity." Surely among the reasons for this is that the "toil" of divine praise is always marvelously lightened by the created splendor which God invites us both to perceive and to celebrate. At the risk of sounding a little defensive, I'd even go so far as to say that the Catholic church's famous censoriousness about motion pictures derives at least as much from this salubrious reverence for human imagination as from the Jansenist prudishness on which so many contemporary satirists rely.

It's not surprising when a Hollywood story reaches a breathtakingly fatuous conclusion - in this case, that in the matter of censorship "sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease" - but before permitting himself to write those words, University of Massachusetts history professor Frank Walsh, in Sin and Censorship, assembles a thorough and useful study chock full of embarrassing and often depressing instances of hierarchical foolishness, anti-Semitism, and institutional hubris. Jansenist prudishness certainly abounds in the inglorious history of the bishops' relationship with Hollywood, but even more striking is the almost triumphal anti-intellectualism of the ecclesiastical bureaucrats in the deservedly defunct Legion of Decency. My favorite example of this was the Legion's condemnation of Strange Cargo, that numinous 1940 film about an escape from Devil's Island during which several convicts, including one played by Clark Gable and a floozy played by Joan Crawford, encounter Christ in a mysterious fellow escapee named Cambreau. The Legion announced that it had condemned the film because of its "naturalistic concept of religion contrary to the teachings of Christ and the Catholic church."

As the American Catholic bishops came to enjoy the manner in which the developing American film industry could be made to grovel and jump through hoops for lucrative Legion of Decency ratings, an unprecedented opportunity to teach American Catholics about the sacredness of the human imagination sank without a trace in a welter of asinine arguments about double-entendres and exposed cleavage. Anyone who believes in God will acknowledge that one's choice of films - no less than of books, pictures, songs, jokes, meals, drinks, and companions - has a profound moral dimension and cosmic consequences. But if our bishops had spent much less time and energy attempting (and failing) to manipulate Hollywood capitalists and much more time trying to learn and teach Catholics about the twentieth century's most notable art form, the church in this country would have been far better served.

At the end of Sin and Censorship, there is a revealing account of a confrontation between demonstrators at a New York showing of Martin Scorsese's controversial movie, The Last Temptation of Christ. One demonstrator waved a sign reading "Blasphemy." A counterdemonstrator waved a sign reading "It's only a movie." You don't need to be an advocate of censorship to believe that the counterdemonstrator wouldn't recognize a blasphemy if he were starring in one.

To be fair to her, Margaret Miles, who teaches historical theology at Harvard, would never argue that a movie is only a movie. In fact, her Seeing and Believing suggests a commendable scholarly conviction that nothing is ever "only" anything. Still, all these intriguing essays on a massive subject - the interaction between movies and prayer ("religious experience," as she calls it) - are hampered by a rigidly contemporary perspective.

If I and other ordinary churchgoing filmviewers sound as goofy to Miles and other ordinary academic agnostics as she sounds to me, it may simply be a matter of upbringing. She writes about being raised among Christians who condemned graven images as idolatrous and allowed only the bleakest collection of visual images to be seen, if not enjoyed, by children. This reminded me of the wonderful day in the second grade at Christ the King School when I imagined, drew, and colored a lurid depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, toothily smiling as the coals roasted his flesh. Sister Mary Antoinette praised my picture to the skies, displayed it on the bulletin board, put a gold star on it, and gave me a Hershey Bar before I went home.

I wonder what Professor Miles would have thought about my picture. If, as parts of her book indicate, she suffers from a sluggish appreciation of religious experience and a tin ear for religious voice, she certainly has a high standard for religious art, flunking both The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal as religious films. "To use the word religious with substantive content in the context of representations of Jesus' life and death," she says, "demands we acknowledge the history of the devotional use of religious images. On these grounds, both films fail to inspire imitation of their protagonist, or even to communicate clearly what such imitation might look like or feel like." That's a severe standard indeed. Few Sunday Masses can meet it.

But we ought to be grateful to Miles for recording such things as the critical response of the New Orleans Review to the martyrdoms concluding the memorable 1986 film, The Mission. The film, as most Commonweal readers will remember, concerns the destruction of the eighteenth-century Jesuit reductions in Paraguay, and the witnesses of two doomed missionaries among a doomed Guarani native population. One of the priests is killed while presiding at the Eucharist, and the other dies leading the Guarani in an armed resistance. As if to illustrate what the church is up against in the late twentieth century, John Mosier wrote in the New Orleans Review, "if this is moral history, it's hard to see what the subject is." I agree with Miles's suggestion that a more historically accurate ending for The Mission (one in which the Jesuit priests agree to abandon the reductions in order to avert the massacre of the Guarani people) would have made it a far more interesting movie, but viewers like Mosier would have been even more deeply confused.

Even a terminal academic like Miles can possess a keen and ingenuous eyesight. She is intrigued by the manner in which religious belief manifests itself in popular culture, and her fascination is often contagious. I hope it continues to deepen and that she writes more and more about it. I wonder if she's seen Dead Man Walking?

Michael O. Garvey is the author of Finding Fault (Thomas More Press).