UNITED STATES
Los Angeles Times
Lewis Beale
Sadistic nuns. Pedophile priests. Criminal coverups within the Roman Catholic Church. It seems Catholicism can’t win at the multiplex these days. In based-on-fact films such as 2013’s “Philomena,” 2002’s “The Magdalene Sisters,” last year’s “Jimmy’s Hall” and the don’t-take-it-too-seriously “The Da Vinci Code” from 2006, the Catholic Church comes off as a totalitarian institution sucking the joy out of its parishioners, willing to resort to murder to hide its secrets.
This year, a new film takes the church to task. “Spotlight,” from Open Road Films and starring Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber and Rachel McAdams, tells the true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered a clergy sex abuse scandal in the local archdiocese. It shows the church as a powerful force willing to do almost anything — transferring priests from parish to parish, covering up out-of-court settlements, pressuring the paper to tone down its coverage — to protect the sexual predators in its midst.
It wasn’t always this way. For years the Catholic Church was portrayed in a highly favorable light. Priests were kindly Bing Crosby types (1945’s “The Bells of St. Mary’s”) or tough but compassionate and socially conscious, a la Spencer Tracy in 1938’s “Boys Town.” And a whole slew of sometimes stern, but generally kindly, nuns were often played by hall of fame beauties like Ingrid Bergman (“The Bells of St. Mary’s”), Audrey Hepburn (1959’s “The Nun’s Story”) and Deborah Kerr (in 1957’s “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison”).
This disparity is the result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which set moral guidelines for the industry and was in force from the 1930s until the 1960s. Hoping to avoid government censorship of movies, studio heads adopted a set of strictures written by Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, and Martin Quigley, the Catholic editor of the trade paper Motion Picture Herald. The code was then administered for many years by another Catholic, Joseph Breen.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.