Stamp of Approval

Stamp of Approval | Gallagher Charles R. Gallagher Marquette University Stamp ofApproval Frank Walsch. Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry. Yale University Press, 1996. (394 pages, hardcover) In April 1996, the New York Times reported that the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Social Communications singled out forty five movies from the United States, Europe and Asia that "possessed special artistic and religious merit." In promulgating their list, the Pontifical Council failed to make clear whether the conjunctive "and" assumed both art and religion as necessary correlative forces in determining their list, or whether one criterion could be supplemented for the other. Typifying this religious malaise was the fact that Schindler's List made the Pontifical Commission's own list under encouraged "values." The irony ofthe situation was that Steven Speilberg's picture stood at the center of some controversy in 1994 when the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop ofManila recommended that it not be shown in the Philippines until a steamy sexual scene was expurgated. "No one should think," a befuddled Catholic source told the New York Times, "that the church wants to be definitive about modern cinema." The tension between true art and its relation to the silver screen is one that the Catholic church has struggled with since the inception ofthe cinema. It is clear that the anxiety between art and cinema remains even in modern times. It is this tension between the theological concept ofsin and the human attempt at censorship that Frank Walsh so ably chronicles in his new work. Walsh's treatment traces the history ofthe Catholic Legion of Decency from its enigmatic beginnings through its "glory years," to its ignominious decline. Walsh points out that the Legion had its origins not so much in a Catholic crusade against Hollywood, as in a gracious invitation from the Hollywood moguls to create a sanctioning body public for their product. Throughout the 1920's the motion picture industry in America was coming under great social scrutiny over the proliferation ofcontroversial themes. The industry looked to an outside body to provide a stamp ofapproval for the common viewer. An endorsement by a church-related body was viewed as a benefit for the box office. Walsh notes that many church organizations were sounded out to take on motion picture review. All the major Protestant organizations balked at an invitation to Hollywood. Only the Catholics —with their theological, diocesan and media structure in place—took up the industry's offer to serve as its companion and guide. The sentiment behind Catholic involvement in the motion picture industry went back as far as 1922, when Will Hayes was named president of the newly formed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors ofAmerica. Initially, Hayes office worked amicably with Catholics. Indeed the relationship was so cozy that Chicago's George Cardinal Mundelein served as a ghostwriter for the first Motion Picture Production Code. By 1934, however, the Catholics sensed that the code was something to be paraded around rather than obeyed. Over time, Catholics believed they "had been used by the film industry," and the Catholic Legion of Decency was born. Two Catholic laymen, Joseph Breen and Martin Quigley, were in charge ofthe Studio Relations Committee and acted as liaisons between the Legion and the industry. When the Jesuit Father John McClafferty took the helm as the executive secretary in 1936, the celluloid started to hit the cutting room floor. From cleavage to communism, the Legion ofDecency held the final word on what would be acceptable to the American people. They could promise a public relation's nightmare for any wayward studio producer. Rather than risk a backlash at the box office, Hollywood bent its knee in obeisance to Father McClafferty's office throughout the 1930's until the end ofWorld War II. Walsh's treatment of the Legion of Decency handsomely supplements, ifnot edges out, Gregory D. Black's Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies, as the definitive history. Both works, however, leave one essential question unanswered. What was the motivating force behind this "Catholic Crusade" against the movies? Both major treatments ofthe Legion are peppered with the notion that Catholic "puritanism" was the underlying imperative behind the Catholic...