News- United States

What We Learned

An otherwise unremarkable television show provoked an extraordinarily loud and revealing controversy among Catholic Americans.

by Russell Shaw

Dark Ages Catholicism like this deserves no place in the religiosity of modern Catholics!

Commonweal said of the show: "Its grasp of the transcendent is shaky; its notion of sin essentially psychological." That was exactly right; nor was it accidental.

"It is designed to manipulate public opinion against Church loyalists while endearing itself to those who seek to upend the status quo."

Was this a new claim of teaching authority: the diocesan press as magisterium?

Perhaps "Nothing Sacred" no longer will be with us by the time this appears in print. Or perhaps it will. For the present purposes, it doesn’t matter much either way, since these reflections have more to do with the controversy this television show touched off than with the show itself. Yes, the controversy was more important than the show.

Long after this ABC television series about the New American Church (which has been widely discussed, but apparently not widely watched) has been forgotten, that controversy will stand as a paradigm, setting in bold relief the fault lines--and, more and more, the battles lines--within Catholicism. It is a paradigm, too, of conflicts likely to erupt in the future, on the question of which Catholic Americans are entitled to address the secular culture, rightfully claiming to be authentic Catholic voices.

Still, the controversy cannot be understood without reference to "Nothing Sacred" itself. Consider the program that aired on Thursday, October 23:

The parish pastoral team is planning a parish Halloween party. Father Ray, the pastor, is opposed to the idea. Halloween, he insists, is a carryover from the times of pagans and their superstitious beliefs: ghosts and evil spirits--all that stuff. Modern Catholics should have nothing to do with it. But eventually Father Ray relents, and the preparations go on.

Three subplots in this Halloween show deserve close attention.

The first concerned Father Ray’s haunting by a ghost--his unresolved relationship with his girl friend of pre-seminary days, who lately has turned up again in his life. The theme of haunting is emphasized by visual clichés from ghost movies: glimpses of the woman who is seen in a mirror although she isn’t there, curtains that billow eerily. At the end, though, Father Ray and his old flame apparently have settled things. The relationship has been resolved, the haunting is over.

The second subplot was about demonic possession. A woman has been raped. The "demon" driving her into denial and deep depression is psychological trauma caused by that horrid occurrence. In a climactic scene in the church, Sister Maureen, the parish’s feminist nun, performs a secular exorcism, helping the woman to acknowledge what happened and to scream the demon away.

Subplot number three puzzled me at first. Father Ray has given a film company permission to shoot scenes of a movie in the church. Snippets of this work-in-progress show that it is to be a sensationalized Gothic melodrama about a nun who may (or may not) have the stigmata. Learning what the movie is about, Father Ray storms into the church and throws out the film makers. We want nothing to do with that version of religion, he shouts.

This last sequence was not only implausible, but at first it also seemed unrelated to anything else in the program. Then light dawned: Here was the very clearest statement of the show’s thesis. Young women who dressed in bridal gowns (as "brides of Christ") when taking religious vows, a nun with the stigmata--these were seen as trumpery and superstition. Dark Ages Catholicism like this deserves no place in the religiosity of modern Catholics!

The program ended with the Halloween party. The parishioners gather around a blazing outdoor fire--a metaphor, I suppose, for the purging process, exemplified by "Nothing Sacred" itself, by which Catholics are to cast the shards of their religious past into the bright, pure flame of psychologized religion. Father Ray declaims a prayer as firelight plays on his boyish, rugged features. The New American Church is at peace with itself.

Before we go further, two preliminary points are in order.

First, the thesis of this program was not entirely wrong. Superstition has always been a problem for religions, including Catholicism, and it remains a problem today. And people do have psychological problems that need healing. The difficulty with this episode of "Nothing Sacred" lies not in these fairly banal notions, but with the ideological program underlying their presentation: a systematic deconstruction of the supernatural element in religion, in favor of a psychological account.

Second, it hardly needs saying that not all Catholic defenders of "Nothing Sacred" saw the program in the same light. Missing the point, but doing so in good faith (after all, wasn’t the show scripted by a Jesuit priest, Father William Cain? and wasn't Father Ray sketched as a sympathetic character?), many Catholic viewers took this to be the rare network television show that depicts believing Catholics in a favorable light. Isn’t that good for the Church?

But the people who dreamed up "Nothing Sacred" had a better understanding of what they were doing--as did the program's more sophisticated defenders. Commonweal, for instance, said in part: "Its grasp of the transcendent is shaky; its notion of sin essentially psychological." That was exactly right; nor was it accidental. The intention of the show was to encourage just such a version of religion.

The counter-attack against "Nothing Sacred" was led by the Catholic League and its president, William Donahue. Other Catholic groups also were critical, as were non-Catholic organizations like Focus on the Family, which recognize a common enemy when they see one.

Reasonable people can disagree with some of things said and done by these critics. Was the rhetoric sometimes too harsh? Is threatening advertiser boycotts a bad idea? Such prudential judgments are always debatable.

On the central issue, nevertheless, the League’s critique was correct, as the analysis above makes clear. "The purpose of this show is political," Donohue said after one episode. "It is designed to manipulate public opinion against Church loyalists while endearing itself to those who seek to upend the status quo." Or, more precisely: The beliefs and attitudes of traditional Catholicism are wrong and harmful, and must be set aside; in their place the beliefs and attitudes of the New American Church must prevail.

In this context, the Disney connection was important. The Disney Corporation owns the ABC television network which airs "Nothing Sacred," and conservative religionists have grown deeply suspicious of the Magic Kingdom lately. A few years back it was "Priest," a British import that many felt depicted the Catholic clergy as a maladjusted, alienated lot. And now "Nothing Sacred." Not a few people found themselves asking again what Michael Eisner and friends are up to.

In any case, the most interesting aspect of this controversy concerned the deep divisions among Catholics that it brought to light. This internecine struggle reflected the ongoing conflict--an ecclesial civil war--between liberals and conservatives, traditionalists and progressives, within the Church. At its deepest level this is a clash between fundamentally opposed understandings of religion, with the future of the Church at stake. And, as the "Nothing Sacred" controversy showed, it also and unavoidably is a struggle over which Catholics will address the larger culture as the authentic voice of the Church. As a headline in the National Catholic Reporter asked, "Who speaks for Catholics?"

Who does speak for Catholics.? The Pope and the bishops speak for Catholics, and also to Catholics, when they speak about faith and morals. Apparently not all Catholics accept that authority these days, but that is another issue. Nevertheless, the authority of the magisterium does not extend to judging a problematical television drama series. Some bishops reacted favorably to "Nothing Sacred;" others did not. Unless one holds that whatever the clerical hierarchy says about anything at all settles the issue (an attitude which becomes untenable when members of the hierarchy are at odds), such opinions, pro and con, should be received respectfully and weighed on their merits.

In fact, on matters like this, there is no authoritative locus of teaching authority in the Church. Different Catholics hold different opinions and have a right to argue for them. That includes the laity. And given the fractured state of Catholic opinion now, the conflict among Catholics over "Nothing Sacred," however painful in some respects, was an accurate and arguably necessary reflection of how things are.

Organs of the Catholic left like the National Catholic Reporter and Commonweal were visibly upset at the efforts against "Nothing Sacred" carried on by the Catholic League. "A campaign of vilification...small-minded," Commonweal huffed. The Reporter, likening "Nothing Sacred" to the mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages ("often irreverent and bawdy but always immediate and bubbling with the ferment of the times"), wrung its hands at the thought that "if it fails, it will be many a long year before the hard-nosed TV industry will again risk a series about church."

These reactions were hardly surprising. The Catholic left has grown accustomed to preferential attention from the secular media in the last thirty years. "Nothing Sacred" itself was only the latest example of that treatment, albeit a very notable one. The National Catholic Reporter has long sought actively to draw the attention of the secular media to itself and its views on many occasions. And no, with the conservative outcry against "Nothing Sacred," other voices, from a very different point on the Catholic spectrum, were playing the game with considerable skill How dare they?

In a similar vein, a revealing comment came from the editor of a Catholic paper in Texas. Instructing William Donohue to "confer and get in sync" with him and his peers, he said it is "Catholic editors in this country who are officially charged with the responsibility of reflecting the teachings and positions of the Church." Was this a new claim of teaching authority: the diocesan press as magisterium? But listen carefully, for this is the authentic mind set of at least some other members of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy--not just on television shows but on matters from liturgy to religious education: We’re in charge.

To repeat, the Catholic split over "Nothing Sacred" reflected the divided state of America Catholicism. The New American Church liked the program because it expressed its view of religious experience and backed its prescription for the Church of the future; Catholics of a traditional persuasion generally opposed the show for the same reasons.

The heated nature of the argument also was significant. Lately the Catholic League has become an important voice on the Church scene, as have other representatives of a traditional point of view. Even the National Catholic Reporter conceded the League’s newfound ability to "thrust itself into the conversation," while saying this raises "questions about the stance that Catholics should take toward American society--and whose job it is to make that decision."

Indeed it does. The questions are serious ones. But as the controversy over "Nothing Sacred" made clear, they will not--and should not--be answered unilaterally by the New American Church and its organs such as the National Catholic Reporter.

Running throughout this debate was a double standard. Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal caught the essence of it when she wrote:

In an analysis of how several elite US news organizations treated the Catholic Church from the mid-1960s to the later 1980s, carried out for the Catholic League and the Knights of Columbus and published in 1991 with the title Media Coverage of the Catholic Church, S. Robert Lichter and colleagues at the Center for Media and Public Affairs detected a pattern: "...a long-running media drama that pitted a hidebound institutional hierarchy against reformers from within and without." Commenting on this at the time, I wrote that the Lichter study had revealed "not old-fashioned anti-Catholicism" but rather the tendency of "some media to take sides in internal conflicts in the Catholic Church."

"Nothing Sacred" was more of the same, but it also represented something new--secular media playing an advocacy role in internal Church conflicts via network entertainment programming. The Catholic League and its allies blew the whistle on that and took flak from the New American Church for doing so. Good for the Catholic League, I say, and let traditional Catholics learn from the experience, so that when something like this happens again--as it will--they will know what’s really going on.

Russell Shaw, who writes from Washington, DC, notes: "The ethics of disclosure oblige me to note that I am a member of the board of directors of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties, the most visible critic of the show. But the views that follow are mine, not the League’s."

Weeks before show was first scheduled to air, the Catholic League began a publicity campaign designed to generation widespread opposition to "Nothing Sacred." That campaign was a resounding success. By November, several hundred thousand Americans had signed petitions, addressed to the Disney Corporation, asking that the show be withdrawn.

The campaign picked up momentum when several larger groups joined with the Catholic League. When Dr. James Dobson endorsed the boycott in one of his nationally syndicated "Focus on the Family" radio broadcasts, his headquarters immediately received 13,000 requests for further information, and copies of the petition. Soon leading corporations began to announce that they would not support "Nothing Sacred" with their advertising dollars, and by October some major sponsors had withdrawn from the show.

Ironically, however, the fate of "Nothing Sacred" will probably be sealed--and soon--for reasons largely unconnected with the boycott. While the Catholic League and its allies concentrated on convincing advertisers to pull their commercials off the show, ordinary viewers apparently needed little encouragement to turn the TV dial when "Nothing Sacred" appeared on the screen. Despite the enormous free publicity generated by the boycott, "Nothing Sacred" has consistently placed dead last in audience share among the network shows in its time slot.

As a result, those advertisers who have not abandoned the show are now painfully aware that their commercials will be seen by only a small portion of the television audience. Consequently, the market price for an advertising minute on "Nothing Sacred" has plummeted. As this account is written, ABC is offering one-minute commercial on the show for less than one-tenth the price advertisers pay for a similar spot on "Friends," the reigning champion of audience share in that prime-time period.

Such statistics usually seal the fate of a prime-time show. ABC executives have adamantly insisted that they will now bow to the Catholic League boycott. But barring some dramatic change in the size of the audience, "Nothing Sacred" will soon bow to the inexorable logic of the marketplace.