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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... Bishop Denis J. 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 ...
... Bishop William McCloskey of Louisville facetiously noted: 'It is consoling to think that Our Holy Father has in all his ... bishops to ratify his declaration that all papal pronouncements on matters of faith and morals were infallible ...
... Bishop Bernard McQuaid of Rochester, and nineteen other Americans being among the eighty-eight bishops who found this declaration of papal infallibility to be 'inopportune.' As discussions went forward, Kenrick in March 1870 feared that ...
... bishop' because he was the youngest in attendance, prudentially omitted from his reports to an American Catholic periodical the widespread unease among the American bishops. Although Gibbons stayed for the vote and joined the majority ...
... bishops of the right to think for themselves. 13 By May 1871, Italian forces had ended a papal monarchy that had ruled substantial portions of central Italy for 1,100 years. Not until 1929 would any of a succession of so-called ...
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