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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... Irish - born John Barry , ' the Father of the Navy . ' Although the subsequent exponential growth of the Catholic popula- tion triggered numerous anti - Catholic backlashes , in 1848–9 , when it appeared that various secular forces ...
... Irish , German , Polish , and French émigré parishes into one powerful Catholic entity which could then extend ecumenical ties to America's many Protestant factions . Hecker's was a prophetic vision of America's providential democracy ...
... Irish , Italian , German , and Polish parishes that had sprouted in thousands of America's ethnic enclaves , the new accent was on a uniform practice , supervised from Rome . Individual orders such as the Franciscans and the Ursulines ...
... Irish In 1790, the United States was home to a small number of Catholics, pending the influx of a few more fleeing the French Revolution, then substantial additions following the acquisitions of French Louisiana in 1803 and Spanish ...
... Irish had even more reason than before to wish revenge upon British Protestants , either their immediate Anglo - Irish landlords , or the English across St George's Channel , some of whom blithely considered the death of a million or ...
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