No matter how unfair to the Church, a program like “Nothing Sacred” will have lots of Catholic backers. Many Catholics who would blanch at a mild ethnic joke see nothing wrong in a program in which the priest-protagonist rails against the Church’s teaching on sexuality and counsels a pregnant woman to make up her own mind about abortion.
Has there ever been a Catholic priest who said aloud to his congregation that he no longer wanted anyone to confess sexual sins? Maybe, but certainly such a priest would be an oddity suitable for Ripley’s Museum. Granted, there are priests who would prefer not hear such sins—or any sins—being confessed (other than a few politically correct sins: racism, sexism, and skipping one’s daily enneagram without sufficient cause), but how many such priests announce the fact in public? How many tell pregnant women to follow their own consciences regarding abortion and don’t strongly counsel against taking a life? Yes, there may be such priests, but they aren’t representative of the priesthood. “Nothing Sacred” pretends they are.
The judgment of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.—God rest his soul—remains true: Anti-Catholicism is the most persistent prejudice in America, and it is persistent precisely because most Americans who participate in it don’t even realize that they do. The prejudice is so ingrained in our culture that an anti-Catholic program will be defended by prominent people who, if the program were recast in terms of blacks or Jews, would insist the program be scrapped and its producers fired.
Among the worst offenders are those Catholics who sympathize with the bigots. It has been disconcerting to read Catholic encomiums of “Nothing Sacred”: paeans to the cleverness of the dialogue or to the professional talents of the actors or to the nice-guy image of the main character. Yes, he’s so caring, and so what if he illustrates some of the worst attributes in a priest, such as moral cowardice, the lack of a strong spiritual sense, and disloyalty to the teachings he was ordained to promote? In the eyes of Michael Eisner and the show’s producers, these aren’t negatives.
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has done a fine job in putting pressure on Disney by putting pressure on the companies that advertised on “Nothing Sacred.” It’s encouraging to see Catholics making a stink. Will the folks at Disney mend their ways—or at least have the courtesy to drop Walt’s name from the letterhead? Not likely.
They’re in it, second of all, for the money, but first of all for the effect. At root they hate the Church. That’s the bottom line. If their chief interest were money, they could have filled the time slot with any of a hundred other story ideas. But they wanted to undermine the Church, and what better way than to suggest that the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic—and all the better when the bad Catholic is a priest?