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  • The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War
  • Richard A. Blake S.J.
The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. By Anthony Burke Smith. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. 2010. Pp. xi, 284. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-700-61716-6.)

In presenting his study of media images of Catholics in America over forty tumultuous years, Anthony Burke Smith, associate professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Dayton, has opted for a variety of approaches. The complexity of topic demands no less. In each of the seven discrete but related chapters, he advances the exploration one step further through a chronological progression with perspectives borrowed from several academic disciplines. In his view, historical events in the United States and Europe set the context, but technology, economics, sociology, art, and theology all exerted an influence that must be included in his survey.

Movies learned to talk in 1927, not long after radio began to reach a majority of American homes. Within months the nation began its downward spiral into the depression. Photojournalism blossomed in the mid-1930s with the founding of Life magazine and flourished through the war years, only to be gradually supplanted by television during the cold war. American Catholics appeared in all these media through every period, and Smith explores the mutations and adaptations that their presence underwent, both as they were presented by the secular media and as they presented themselves. It was a reciprocal relationship. Catholics certainly influenced the media, while the media helped shape the perception of Catholics by themselves and non-Catholics alike.

In the early talkies, Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, appeared as gangsters and parish priests. Both roles represented the outsider striving for upward mobility in a hostile environment. In a period known for Catholic involvement in labor unions and social services, this image resonated remarkably well with the communitarian vision of the New Deal. As the nation prepared for war and valued unity over ethnic divisions, Pat O’Brien’s streetwise Father Connolly of Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) mellowed into Bing Crosby’s respectable but hip Father O’Malley in Going My Way (1944). In the early years of Life magazine, Catholics with their photogenic rituals and garb appeared as aliens to the American mainstream. In 1939, publisher Henry Luce proclaimed a new international order in his famous essay “The American Century,” and after it appeared, Life pictured Catholics around the world as important collaborators in America’s seemingly inevitable entry into the war. [End Page 395]

During the cold war period, Catholicism embodied an identifiable alternative to communism. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen transitioned from the private spirituality he preached on the Catholic Hour on radio to personal responsibility as the Catholic response to the collectivism proposed by Soviet Marxism. Appearing in full ecclesiastical regalia, he made this a recurring theme in his enormously popular television program Life Is Worth Living (1952–57). In his last two chapters Smith traces the development of two Irish Catholic filmmakers, Leo McCarey and John Ford. As background, he provides brief biographical sketches and then shows how their films reflect the Catholic cultural transition from New Deal communitarian progressivism to cold-war conservative individualism.

In his all-too-brief epilogue, Smith obliquely suggests that his study may provide a model for our understanding for more recent developments in the Church’s public presentation. He notes that Pope John Paul II paralleled Sheen in his anticommunist fervor and relied on elaborate Catholic imagery to popularize his message. Smith ends with the observation that once this vigorous pope declined and passed from the scene, the void in popular religious energy has been filled most remarkably by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). Since the film found an enormous resonance among American Evangelical Christians, Smith concludes that “the cultural fortunes of Catholics in early twenty-first century America had come to rest more upon the evangelical nation than solidarity with the forgotten man” (p. 225).

Richard A. Blake S.J.
Boston College
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