Uproar Over Film About Fallen Priest

The Roman Catholic hierarchy in this fervidly Catholic country prefers silent ways of confronting scandal. Last month, after learning about “The Crime of Father Amaro,” several bishops arranged to watch a private screening of the unreleased film at Interior Ministry headquarters.

One bishop was so offended he walked out before the end. Carlos Carrera’s movie portrays a small-town Mexican priest who struggles with his celibacy vows and has sex with a 16-year-old girl. Senior clerics quietly urged the government of Vicente Fox, Mexico’s first openly Catholic president in more than a century, to ban the film.

Instead, the movie is opening today at 358 theaters across the country, the widest release ever for a Mexican film. It stars Gael Garcia Bernal, one of Mexico’s most popular young actors, as the errant Father Amaro and has created a buzz of clerical outrage and liberal counterattack on the airwaves and in news columns here.

No event since Fox’s election two summers ago illustrates more clearly the paradox of the church’s new place in Mexico: After chafing for seven decades under a rigidly secular one-party state, the bishops enjoy a higher public profile and easier access to the corridors of power. Yet, on many things that matter to them, their voices are heeded no more, and sometimes less, than before.

“El Crimen del Padre Amaro,” as the film is called in Spanish, is premiering at an awkward time for Mexico’s Catholic clergy, which has not escaped the real-life sex abuse scandals shaking the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The Mexican Bishops Conference, which has condemned the film as “an insult to the religious beliefs of Catholics,” won nothing more than a brief delay so that “Father Amaro” wouldn’t draw attention from Pope John Paul II, who visited Mexico from July 30 to Aug. 1.

“Under the old regime, the church was less visible, but it had subtle ways of influencing what people were allowed to see or read,” said Roberto Blancarte Pimentel, a religion specialist at the Colegio de Mexico. “The same democratic forces that brought Fox to power now make it impossible for him to practice that kind of censorship. Our society has become accustomed to free expression as never before.”

Investors were so leery of the old Mexico that it took Carrera and one of the film’s producers, Daniel Birman Ripstein, seven years to line up the $1.8 million financing from Argentine, French, Mexican and Spanish pockets. Among the other producers is Don Alfredo Ripstein, who has been trying to develop the film since 1970.

Buena Vista/Columbia TriStar, the equally wary distributor, deliberately kept trailers and advertisements for the film vague, focusing more on its stars than its sinful themes.

In Mexico--where 88% of the population is Catholic, the pope a folk hero and the Virgin of Guadalupe a national mother figure--those themes are explosive. Their use reflects a five-year trend toward edgy, contemporary films that have brought Mexicans flocking to theaters.

In the movie, Father Amaro, freshly ordained and newly assigned to a stiflingly small pueblo in Veracruz state, succumbs to Amelia, impregnates the young parishioner and then abandons her. He also becomes the protege of Father Benito, an older priest who is having an affair with Amelia’s mother and has ties to drug traffickers and leftist guerrillas.

Vicente Lenero’s script has adapted an 1875 novel by Portuguese satirist Jose Eca de Queiroz to give what Mexican reviewer Eduardo Alvarado called “a rude inspection of the Catholic Church as an institution” in modern-day Mexico.

While tackling such topics as clerical sex, abortion and liberation theology, Alvarado wrote in the newspaper Reforma, the film highlights “the enormous gulf between the teachings of the church and the beliefs of Catholics.”

That approach may be a hit with moviegoers in Mexico, where surveys confirm that Catholics favor birth control, oppose religious education and are open to abortion--positions that have forced Fox to retreat from pledges to back key elements of the church’s political agenda.

Even such committed Catholics as the president and the first lady, Martha Sahagun de Fox, are at odds with some dogma; both divorced, they were wed last year in a civil ceremony without having their first marriages annulled by the church.

And, as church officials quietly admit, Mexico has real-life characters like the priest portrayed by Garcia Bernal, who starred in last year’s Oscar-nominated “Amores Perros” and more recently in “Y Tu Mama Tambien.” A number of priests, especially in rural Mexico, have girlfriends or live-in companions, and many parishioners tolerate the unions.

Garcia Bernal, whose mug looks down from promotional billboards in a clerical collar, says he is getting about 30 e-mail petitions a day from fans who want to confess their sins to him--evidence, perhaps, of the erosion of support in the pews for Catholic authority.

In scattered parishes across Mexico last Sunday, priests took to the pulpit to call for a boycott of the film, arguing that clerics like the fictional Father Amaro are unrepresentative. “It’s like pornography,” Msgr. Hernan Zambrano told his flock in Monterrey. “Once you watch porn, you cannot get the images out of your head.”

The instinct to hide problem priests made headlines last spring--and prompted a public outcry--when the Mexican Bishops Conference defended its practice of covering up child sexual abuse cases to protect the church and the victims. “Dirty laundry is best washed at home,” Sergio Obeso, archbishop of Jalapa, told reporters then.

But the hierarchy’s main objection to “Father Amaro” is a pair of scenes that the bishops conference said “makes a mockery of the Catholic community’s most sacred religious symbols.”

A love scene reportedly shows Garcia Bernal handing a shawl bearing the Virgin Mary’s image to his mistress, played by Ana Claudia Talancon, to cover her body. In another scene, an alley cat gobbles a Communion wafer spat on the floor by a churchgoer.

Both scenes were cited in a criminal complaint filed Monday by the Pro-Life anti-abortion group against Interior Minister Santiago Creel for failing to use his authority under federal law to ban the film--which is rated B-15, not recommended for those under 15--and Culture Minister Sari Bermudez for approving $350,000 in government financing.

Pro-Life, which has close ties to the church hierarchy, says it is distributing 400,000 leaflets urging a boycott of the movie.

The government has found itself in the middle of other such battles in recent years. In 2000, it tried unsuccessfully to ban the politically sardonic “La Ley de Herodes” (“Herod’s Law”). Last year, director Alfonso Cuaron sued the Interior Ministry over the rating given to “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” which he maintained was arbitrary and shut out most of the younger audience he wanted to reach.

Catholic leaders used to win their share of these censorship struggles. Despite 19th century anticlerical laws that kept the church all but invisible until 1992, Mexico’s bishops starting in the 1940s achieved a rapprochement with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that allowed them a degree of political and social influence behind the scenes.

Pressure from bishops, for example, forced a six-year delay in the Mexican release of Arturo Ripstein’s 1977 film “La Viuda Negra” (“Black Widow”), in which a priest shares with his mistress what he hears in the confessional. And Martin Scorcese’s controversial 1988 movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” was never released in Mexican theaters.

What appalls today’s bishops is that this clout has waned under Fox, whose National Action Party was founded by persecuted Catholics in the 1930s and whose election ended the PRI’s rule in 2000.

After Fox’s government ignored the quiet calls of individual bishops to ban “Father Amaro,” the church this week openly attacked the film while appealing to “the judgment and maturity of Catholics...to distinguish the truth from insults to the faith.”

In response, the film’s actors have granted interviews and called news conferences to portray the bishops as out-of-touch parents lecturing grown-up children. “We are tired of being treated like idiots,” Garcia Bernal said.

“The film is about the church as an institution, not about religion,” said Carrera, a practicing Catholic best known here for directing the 1998 feature “Un Embrujo,” or “Under a Spell.” “It is a reflection on people who use religion to their own advantage and who hide behind a veil of hypocrisy.”

In the end, the public battle could boost the film’s audience.

“This controversy is excellent publicity,” said Antonio Gonzalez, a 21-year-old Catholic engineering student who joined the lines here Thursday for advance ticket sales. “I don’t understand why the church is making all this noise. When they say we must not go, it backfires and people become more interested.”

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Boudreaux reported from Mexico City and Munoz from Los Angeles.