Black on White

The audacity of the Catholic Church is staggering. Arbitrarily its spokesmen have selected a list of motion pictures and smeared them with the words “indecent, immoral and unfit for public entertainment.” The comprehensive insult—directed against the authors, producers, exhibitors and millions of clean-minded, simple-hearted Americans who have enjoyed those pictures without realizing their sinfulness—is not only read from the pulpits, but it is published in the press.

Newspapers normally hesitate before attacking any person or commercial product with words like “indecent,” “immoral” and “unfit.” There are stringent laws of libel to be considered. The fact that they are quoting a third party (unless it be an official court record) does not remove responsibility from the press.

But in this instance editors proceed blithely to libel a long list of persons and commercial products and artistic productions, feeling themselves immune because the libel is of churchly origin. The opinion of the Catholic hierarchy is treated as though it had the force of an official court record—or better, an official verdict.

Legally speaking, no religious body has any greater rights than a body of laymen. It is not supposed to enjoy special immunities in the matter of insulting and libelling its fellow-citizens or interfering with their legitimate business.

If a Church is permitted to choose a batch of pictures at random—representing an investment of immense effort, talent and money—and tar them with vile names, what is to prevent any other group from doing likewise? Who is to judge whether the libel is dictated by public-spiritedness or by self-seeking? If anyone may with impunity vilify publicly the products of Hollywood picture factories, why not the products of Schenectady electrical works or Grand Rapids furniture factories?

Certainly the Catholic Church could not in open court prove that its charges of indecency, immorality and unfitness are a literally true description of “Little Man— What Now?” or “Of Human Bondage” or “One More River.” At best it could only set up its own opinions.

Indeed, the line between the indecent “class C” and the tolerable “class B” of its lists is hard to find. No doubt the judges themselves often could not make up their minds where to draw that line.

Some of the pictures branded as immoral stand as proof that the minds which read indecency into them are peculiarly warped—the sort of minds which see indecent shapes in the shifting clouds and blush at the sight of an incubator. The whole life process is for them muddied with original sin, and anything which betrays the emotional depts, the passional grandeurs and terrors of existence, is indecent.

They are more than welcome to their moralistic nightmares. But why, in the name of that liberty and human dignity some of us still talk about, should their idiosyncracies suddenly attain privileged position and an immunity to the law?

Some motion picture exhibitor somewhere, it is to be hoped, will challenge the legal light of any group of men to interfere with his business by deliberately misrepresenting his product. A libel suit against the so-called Legion of Decency, and against the newspapers which publish its fulminations, might clear the air a bit.