Miracles and Sacrilege: Robert Rossellini, the Church, and Film Censorship in HollywoodMiracles and Sacrilege is the story of the epochal conflict between censorship and freedom in film, recounted through an in-depth analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down a government ban on Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle (1950). In this extraordinary case, the Court ultimately chose to abandon its own longstanding determination that film comprised a mere ‘business’ unworthy of free-speech rights, declaring for the first time that the First Amendment barred government from banning any film as ‘sacreligious.’ Using legal briefs, affidavits, and other court records, as well as letters, memoranda, and other archival materials to elucidate what was at issue in the case, William Bruce Johnson also analyzes the social, cultural, and religious elements that form the background of this complex and hard-fought controversy, focusing particularly on the fundamental role played by the Catholic Church in the history of film censorship. Tracing the development of the Church in the United States, Johnson discusses the reasons it found The Miracle sacrilegious and how it attained the power to persuade civil authorities to ban it. The Court’s decision was not only a milestone in the law of church-state relations, but it paved the way for a succession of later decisions which gradually established a firm legal basis for freedom of expression in the arts. |
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... Cardinal Spellman, the head of the Catholic Church in the United States, was not of that view, proclaiming that 'Satan alone' would make such a film. For many years the New York Board of Regents, that state's highest educational ...
... Cardinal Spellman, the head of the Catholic Church in the United States, was not of that view, proclaiming that 'Satan alone' would make such a film. For many years the New York Board of Regents, that state's highest educational ...
... Cardinals to resettle in the United States , where they ' might live in perfect safety , attend to their religious duties , and restore the Catholic Church to the purity and moral influence which it ... enjoyed in the first centuries of ...
... Cardinal Camillo Mazzella and Fathers Salvatore Brandi and Alberto Lepidi, it was important that Leo align himself with Europe's conserva- tives, and in 1899 Leo obliged, issuing an extraordinary letter to Gib- bons, Testem ...
... Cardinals , suffer , in great part silently , the insolence and abuse of the sect ; Catholic journalists endure the condemnations brought on them by their anti - Modernist rivals ; ecclesiastics in positions of authority tolerate , in ...
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