The Acceptable Bigotry

“Dogma,” the religious satire by writer-director Kevin Smith scheduled to open next month, has inspired a predictable wave of protest from defenders of the faith. William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, already has published newspaper advertisements condemning the film’s “Catholic bashing” under the not unreasonable suspicion that a comedy featuring George Carlin as a cardinal and Alanis Morissette as God will never share a double bill with “The Bells of St Mary’s.”

Yet whether the sins committed by “Dogma” turn out to be mortal or merely venial, the battle between Smith and Donohue highlights the once happy, now hostile relationship between Catholicism and Hollywood. Not so long ago, the church and the studio system enjoyed a warmly symbiotic association. From 1930 to 1968, under the censorious “production code,” American Catholics wielded virtual final cut over morality on screen.

The most influential of the Hollywood censors was Joseph I. Breen, a strict Irish Catholic who enforced the code from 1934 to 1954. Backing up Breen in the field was the powerful Legion of Decency, a group stationed priests outside theaters to discourage Catholics from a matinee fling with Mae West.

During Breen’s reign, gangster films and comedies did God’s work every time Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien or Bing Crosby assumed the guise of a good-hearted padre. No wonder the ecumenical but reliably pro-Catholic spirit of the movies gave rise to the glib definition of Hollywood cinema as “a Jewish-owned business selling Roman Catholic theology to Protestant America.”

Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, a Catholic imprimatur on the screen no longer guaranteed box office success. An emblematic shift occurred in 1956, when Cardinal Francis Spellman’s condemnation hurt, but did not kill, Elia Kazan’s lurid film “Baby Doll.” By the time the production code was abolished in 1968, church leaders had discovered that Catholics were no more willing to follow their dictates about moviegoing than about birth control.

Still, though Catholic influence over Hollywood vanished long ago, only recently has the Church of Rome become a kind of command central for sinister intrigue, its priests objects of caricature and insult. Today, for at least some filmmakers, Catholicism is less a religion than a ready-made sound stage for horror films and conspiracy thrillers, a creepy cult devoted to blood-soaked rituals, child sexual abuse and the greatest perversion of all in contemporary American culture, celibacy. A clerical collar, once the sign of protection and reassurance, is now more likely the mark of the scoundrel. In the 1996 thriller “Primal Fear,” a murdered archbishop is exposed as a pervert who forces altar boys to perform sex acts for his amusement. In HBO’s “The Sopranos,” the lustful weasel who ministers to the family’s spiritual needs certainly qualifies as a criminal character.

In its most extreme forms, the anti-Catholicism on movie and television screens hearkens back to the nativism of 19th century America, when attacks on the subversive influence of “papistry” flowed from Know-Nothings, and Thomas Nast cartoons portrayed cardinals as loathsome reptiles invading Anglo-Protestant America. Playing to the same instincts, the current thriller “Stigmata” casts the Vatican as an international nexus of evil, radiating out to all parts of the globe, sort of like SPECTRE in the old James Bond films, with a nefarious Prince of the Church as Dr. No.

Admittedly, a lot of this stuff is simply silly, but it is difficult to imagine another religion whose iconography, rituals and priesthood could be so casually demonized on screen. If Hollywood routinely portrayed African American ministers as lustful con artists or Orthodox rabbis as sordid agents of Israel, editorial pages across the nation would launch cruise missiles at the offenders. Donohue and the Catholic League are wrong to condemn “Dogma” sight unseen, but given the Know-Nothing sympathies of some of the current product line, they are right to be on guard against one of the few acceptable bigotries in American cinema.