RELIGION / JOHN DART : Catholic Communication Group Gathers to Reward Media Angels

A national group of Catholic broadcasters and church communicators will come to Universal City next month--not to bury Hollywood in righteous criticism but to praise things of value.

Despite some dissenters on the Catholic right, that positive-thinking approach has characterized most efforts by the local Roman Catholic leadership in recent years.

Nearly 150 Catholic communications professionals are expected to attend the annual meeting at the Sheraton Universal Hotel of Unda-USA Nov. 8 through 11. ( Unda is Latin for “wave,” as in airwaves). Actress Angela Lansbury, star of the long-running television series “Murder, She Wrote,” will receive a personal achievement award, and three dozen “Gabriel” angel statuettes will be handed out to NBC’s “Today” show, ABC News and assorted secular and church-related productions on radio and television.

“We want to encourage the secular media,” said Sister Nancy Kinross of Dayton, Ohio, national office coordinator for Unda.

“Nothing is perfect. To praise that which is good is important.”

Actor Edward James Olmos will speak and other “value-oriented” industry insiders will take part in workshops on the creative process, programming and marketing, said Dan Pitre, public relations director for Family Theater Productions in Hollywood, which makes Catholic-oriented films.

Vatican-based Archbishop John Foley, who heads the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, will be the luncheon speaker Nov. 11.

Although Cardinal Roger M. Mahony will be in Rome during the conference, the Los Angeles prelate helped set the tone of constructive relations with the entertainment business with a pastoral letter in 1992, urging creative people in films, broadcasting and music to “not pander to baser instincts.”

He acknowledged that “to combine entertainment and enrichment is a creative challenge” but defended the principle of artistic freedom.

“Because I reject censorship, I do not propose a (production) code to govern what film makers may create, nor do I wish to dictate what intelligent viewers may see,” he wrote.

Earlier that year, a mistaken impression had emerged that the cardinal favored reviving a Hollywood film code, as proposed at a Hollywood seminar by Ted Baehr of Atlanta, who edits the religiously conservative Movieguide magazine. The previous production code, which died in 1966, was bolstered by the Catholic Legion of Decency, Hwhich issued film ratings that exercised a powerful influence on Catholic moviegoers from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Mahony did not actually favor such an action, however, and later used many occasions to reverse that impression.

His rejection was disappointing to Baehr and Dennis Jarrard of Santa Barbara, who then chaired the Los Angeles Archdiocesan Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Their philosophical disagreement with the cardinal showed up last month in a full-page ad in the Washington Times, in which Baehr and Jarrard criticized Mahony for not doing enough to “help shut off the pollution at its source” by pushing for a code to regulate depictions of sex and violence.

Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for Mahony, told the Religious News Service then, “It’s a fantasy to believe that one man or woman, religious leader or not, can influence the film and TV industries to the extent being asked for in the ad.”

Speakers at the upcoming Unda conference are not necessarily going to ignore Hollywood’s alleged moral shortcomings. Sister Elizabeth Thoman, director of the Los Angeles-based Center for Media and Values, will lead a workshop on violence in the media. Paulist Father Gregory Apparcel of Paulist Pictures in Pacific Palisades will talk about “Images of Catholicism in TV and Film.”

Yet, said Pitre, Unda does not take a combative stance.

Thoman’s center and its magazine focuses on educating people in using the entertainment media intelligently. She does not lead boycotts or petition campaigns against offending programs, Pitre said.

“And I think we’ll find from Father Apparcel that a lot more programs deal with Catholicism and other faiths and morals than people realize,” Pitre said.

A different picture was reported this year by the Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va., whose chairman, L. Brent Bozell III, is a conservative Catholic critic of the secular media. In 1,000 hours of prime-time television programs last year, the issue of religion came up 116 times, according to the center’s study released in March.

“When prime-time shows mention or cover religion, they regularly do so negatively, portraying religious leaders and religious viewpoints as cold, intolerant and oppressive,” said Bozell in a news conference in Hollywood.

Bozell will not be part of the Unda meeting. Neither is the independent and sometimes controversial Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a Catholic-oriented cable network based in Birmingham, Ala., that claims an audience of 27 million. It is run by an outspoken conservative, Mother Angelica.

“EWTN hasn’t shown much interest in our meetings in the last couple of years,” said Sister Kinross of Unda.

More representative of Unda’s approach is the Nov. 10 luncheon speaker, Ed Murray of St. Louis, president of the Catholic Telecasters Group, which supplies programs to the interdenominational Faith & Values cable network, formerly known as VISN.

The Nov. 8 conference opening includes a 5:30 p.m. Mass at St. Charles Borromeo Church in North Hollywood with Archbishop Foley presiding and Auxiliary Bishop Armando X. Ochoa of the San Fernando Pastoral Region giving the homily.