The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (review)

It should come as no surprise to devotees of American film that Catholics and the Catholic religion are popular subjects. For one thing, Catholicism is particularly visual: nuns and priests often wear [or wore] distinctive garb, churches are often full of statues and candles, practitioners display their faith with outer signs such as making the sign of the cross. There are confessionals, images of saints, rosaries, holy water fonts, and altar servers. There are elaborate rituals full of ornate music, elaborate gestures, and Latin phrases. The very things that the Protestant Reformation tried to strip away are what cinematographers love. Not only is Catholic symbolism visually and aurally engaging towards its own ends, it can also be an efficient way to signal “religion” in general. Want to show rather than explain that someone is “religious”? Have that person make the sign of the cross. Want to throw a little religion into a crowd scene? Have a couple of nuns walk by in full habit.

Thus, it is both understandable and worthwhile that Anthony Burke Smith has made the look of Catholics in United States popular culture a central aspect of his book, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. But Smith goes beyond the mere cataloguing of this phenomenon to explore “the cultural work of Catholic images” during a particularly turbulent time of national self-definition and social struggle, the 1930s through the time period of the 1950s known as The Cold War. Smith argues that mass media images of Catholics and Catholic values during that time did double duty. For one thing, they facilitated the transformation of Catholics from ethnic “others” to “American.” For another, they provided a visual language through which all Americans “discussed” what it meant to be American.

Smith sets his analysis against the background of earlier anti-Catholicism in which Catholics were dismissed as too old world and too “ethnic” to be real Americans. Thus, their incorporation into later versions of Americanism became a way to demonstrate to ourselves and others that the United States was a unique place of cooperation and tolerance. Smith argues that as the political climate of the United States shifted from the angst of The Depression through the turmoil of World War II to the anxiety of The Cold War, depictions of Catholicism shifted as well. What held constant was the reliance on Catholic images and Catholic themes as important [though certainly not exclusive] means to express changing emphases.

As indicated by the cover photo of Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley, Smith pays a lot of attention to films and for good reason. In the time period he examines, Catholics were the darlings of the film world . . . to the point of aggravating some Protestant viewers who complained that this attention was out of keeping with America’s essentially Protestant nature. Still, as Smith successfully argues, there was no denying what the visual appeal of Catholicism could accomplish. But he also pays attention to other visual media as well as including the extraordinary television series success of Bishop Fulton Sheen (replete in cape and zucchetto) and the striking Life Magazine photo essays on Jesuits. And he examines the persistent, yet often subtle, Catholic themes of directors Leo Carey and John Ford.

Given this scope, however, it is remarkable that Smith gives such short shrift to images of women religious. After spending an entire chapter on Going My Way, he mentions The Bells of St. Mary’s only in passing and ignores The Nun’s Story entirely, despite Rebecca Sullivan’s Visual Habits: nuns, feminism and American postwar popular culture, a work of extraordinary depth that speaks directly to an important aspect of Smith’s.

That said, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the intersection of Catholic and American identity with popular culture...