Cinema: I Condemn

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I condemn indecent and immoral motion pictures and those which glorify crime or criminals. . . . I acknowledge my obligation to form a right conscience about pictures that are dangerous to my moral life. As a member of the Legion of Decency, I pledge myself to remain away from them. I promise, further, to stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy.

Last Sunday that pledge was read aloud by priests at mass in thousands and thousands of Roman Catholic churches in the U. S. And,uprising, millions of Catholics repeated the words which, in the eyes of their Church, bound them all for one year.*

This latest move by the Legion of Decency, planned last month in Washington at the annual meeting of the U. S. hierarchy, had been ordered for all U. S. dioceses.Typical was the pastoral issued by New York’s archbishop, Patrick Cardinal Hayes. Graciously acknowledging the support given by non-Catholics, this silver-haired Prince wrote: “Admonish the faithful that it is a matter of experience that the public presentation on the screen of scenes of shame and crime insidiously dulls the sensitive edge of right conscience. Absolutely false standards of moral conduct, at first disapproved, soon tolerated, and finally accepted, result from the erroneous notion that the fundamental moral laws of right and wrong could possibly change to meet the laxity of our times. . . .”

Last week’s official Catholic “Motion Picture Guide” listed 37 suitable “Class A” pictures (“unobjectionable and suitable for public entertainment”). Listed along with not a few mediocre films were Anne of Green Gables, Babes in Toyland, Baby Take a Bow, Marie Galante, One Night of Love, The Count of Monte Cristo, Great Expectations, Judge Priest, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, Treasure Island, What Every Woman Knows.

In “Class B” (“more or less objectionable because of their possible suggestiveness or vulgarity or sophistication or lack of modesty. Neither approved nor forbidden but for adults only”) were 32 films including Belle of the Nineties, The Gay Divorcee, The Merry Widow, Cleopatra, Crime Without Passion and We Live Again.

“Indecent and immoral and unfit for public entertainment” were 36 “Class C” pictures including Affairs of a Gentleman, The Affairs of Cellini, Born to Be Bad, Catherine the Great, Dr. Monica, The Firebird, The Girl from Missouri, Little Man What Now, Madame du Barry, Nona, The Scarlet Empress, Of Human Bondage, One More River.

*How many millions of Catholics took the pledge no man knew for sure. In the U. S. are 20,000,000 Catholics. The Church claims that 90% of these attend mass each Sunday. In the New York Archdiocese are 1,273,000 Catholics. Press estimates placed the number taking the pledge in this Archdiocese at 750,000.