UNITED KINGDOM
The Independent
The Catholic Church in film: When the men in black lost their role as the good guys
Geoffrey Macnab
Friday 08 February 2013
In old Hollywood films, you rarely come across a bad Catholic. Picture Bing Crosby as the kind-hearted Father O’Malley trying to have a school saved from closing down in The Bells of St Mary’s (1945) or Pat O’Brien as the priest striving to keep kids away from crime – and his old friend James Cagney’s bad example – in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938.)
European films likewise used to portray Catholic priests in a heroic light. In Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945), there is an immensely moving performance from Aldo Fabrizi as the priest who works with the Italian resistance against the Nazis and is prepared to face torture and death for his beliefs. When they weren’t genial, avuncular sorts or wartime heroes, priests were depicted as complex, intense, but still sympathetic. Witness Montogomery Clift as Father Michael, hearing a murderer’s guilt in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953.) Even in horror films like The Exorcist (1973), the priests were there to ward off evil.
It’s hardly surprising that priests were given such a positive spin. During the studio era, the American Catholic Church had a strong influence over the kinds of films that were made. The Legion of Decency was an influential body set up by Catholic bishops in the 1930s to police the film industry. When the League took against a film, it could scupper its chances. …
It is striking, though, how recent depictions of Catholic priests in feature films and documentaries have become ever harsher and more skeptical. US director Alex Gibney’s new doc Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God offers a devastating picture of Catholic priests at their very worst. The film shows how, for over a quarter of a century, a Catholic priest at St John’s School for the Deaf in St Francis, Wisconsin, preyed on and sexually abused pupils. In spite of repeated warnings about his behaviour that reached the Vatican, no action was taken against Lawrence C Murphy, the priest.
Gibney’s film starts in Wisconsin and follows a trail that leads it via the notorious case of the Elvis-impersonating paedophile priest Father Murphy in Ireland all the way to the “highest corridors of the Vatican”. Mea Maxima Culpa makes it very clear that senior Catholic authorities knew about the abuse in Ireland and the US long before the media did but were very slow to act against it.
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