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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... O'Connell – born in County Cork in 1849 , arriving in America in 1854 , and rising to the rectorship of the North American College in Rome ( 1885–95 ) – and John J. Keane – born in Donegal , arriving in America in 1846 at age seven ...
... O'Connell too liberal to retain the rectorship of the American College in Rome, and in 1895 he was forced out. When Satolli had Keane ousted from the rectorship of Catholic University, Keane moved to Rome, where he and other liberals ...
... O'Connell , Gibbons found it ' very discouraging ' that the enemies of what he and his colleagues had been trying to accomplish ' lie with impunity ' and ' are listened to ' in Rome . Gibbons frankly told Leo : ' This doctrine , which I ...
... O'Connell as Boston's new archbishop . O'Connell immediately issued an anti - Modernist statement of his own , had it published in the secular press , sent copies to the Vatican as evidence of his ultramontane loyalty , and publicly ...
... O'Connell's ascendancy , as if he personified romanità and thus to deny him preferment would be to favour Rome's enemies . In 1906 , again without consulting local bishops , Rome chose O'Connell as Boston's coadjutor , in line to ...
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