The Messages That Bind

Nearly a decade ago, relations between the motion picture and television industry and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles were incendiary.

To borrow a phrase of Hollywood hype, it was a clash of titans, two institutions--perhaps second only to the family--with the power to influence values, form consciences, present role models and motivate human behavior.

If, as the church charged, sex, violence and anti-Catholic videotape were oozing from Hollywood studios, fire and brimstone was erupting from Cardinal Roger M. Mahony’s chancellery. Many in the industry accused the cardinal of threatening free expression.

That was in 1991 and 1992. Nine years later, the picture has changed dramatically. This week, the archdiocese received an e-mail from a concerned parishioner asking for a list of movies “condemned” by the church, presumably for the purpose of avoiding those movies. The archdiocese replied that it now chooses to applaud good films instead of criticizing bad ones.

In 1991, Mahony accused KCET, Southern California’s public television station, of encouraging “hatemongers” to “burn, loot and vandalize houses of worship” by broadcasting a controversial video about AIDS protests at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

The next year, in a speech to the Knights of Columbus and his now moribund Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Mahony said that “many filmmakers traffic in gratuitous and graphic violence,” and that the entertainment media played “a significant role” in the nation’s moral decline. The cardinal’s media office also issued a statement--later disavowed by the cardinal--favoring a new television and motion picture code. The code, the idea of Ted Baehr of the conservative and non-Catholic Christian Film and Television Commission, would have barred the portrayal of illegal drug activity and “excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embracing, suggestive postures and gestures.”

Now, “the church is not the bugaboo it was of people thinking that Catholics are always looking for evil,” said screenwriter Patt Shea, a co-founder with her husband, Directors Guild President Jack Shea, of an annual awards program saluting actors, writers, producers and directors whose work meets “the highest standards of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Patt Shea said she hears many more sermons that use stories in films and television as a point of departure. “Let’s face it, Christ is a storyteller,” she said. “If he were born today, he’d be a filmmaker.”

‘What Is Right in Hollywood?’

For their part, church officials say television programming and motion pictures have never been better when it comes to portraying human and spiritual values.

“The entertainment industry is in a different place now, as the country is in a different place,” said Father Elwood “Bud” Kieser, founder of the Humanitas Prize, awarded to screenwriters for promoting human and God-centered values.

“There’s an awful lot of junk, an awful lot of coarse language and dehumanization in both feature films and television,” Kieser said. “But the best has never been so good.”

The new mood began with an unprecedented pastoral letter from Mahony in late 1992 that was well received by Hollywood and set the stage for new cooperation. Then, in a 1995 Florida speech, Mahony said, “It is easy to ask, ‘What has gone wrong in Hollywood?’ It is far more challenging to ask, ‘What is right in Hollywood?’ ”

He answered his own question. “Not all is bad in Hollywood and, in fact, much of the entertainment industry’s output is really quite good.”

To be sure, no one has returned to the “innocence” of the 1950s, when even the word “pregnant” was avoided on the “I Love Lucy” show. Moreover, individual movies or corporate activities can still provoke indignation from religious bodies, such as the protests last year by Catholic figures, including the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, against the film “Dogma.”

But there is much more collaboration and encouragement--both official and unofficial--between the Los Angeles archdiocese and Hollywood.

“There’s a mutual respect. The church no longer comes on nor is seen as the ‘legion of decency,’ ” said Father Tony Scannell of the archdiocese’s telecommunications department. Instead, the church is seen as “trying to understand the challenges of the industry and encouraging those in it . . . to make it better.”

‘God-Centered Humanism’

The Humanitas prizes, which total $130,000 this year, are intended to encourage writers to deal with “God-centered humanism” and human values. Humanitas also sponsors nine “master writers” workshops to help screenwriters communicate human values.

Past winners in the feature film category include writers of “October Sky,” “Good Will Hunting,” “Contact,” “Dead Man Walking” and “Schindler’s List.”

Kieser also heads Paulist Productions, which has produced 250 motion pictures and television programs, including films about Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador and Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement.

Another program is the City of Angels Film Festival, launched in 1994. An outgrowth of a dialogue between filmmakers and theologians and of Mahony’s 1992 pastoral letter, the festival showcases movies and promotes discussion of films that “probe the ambiguities of human life” and the “longing for transcendence.”

At the same time, Father Robert Lawton, the new Jesuit president of Loyola Marymount University, recently elevated the university’s communication and fine arts department to a full-fledged school. Lawton, who arrived last October, made it clear early on that Hollywood and the media would be a priority.

“There’s every reason for the church to be very involved here,” Kieser said in an interview. “Values, conscience, meaning and role models--this is the business of the church.”