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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... mother ... The girl who had always been known as decent up to the time she started on her downward path, became incorrigible and is now detained in one of our public institutions because of her gross immorality which she claims she ...
... mother goddess, then transformed into Saint Brigid of Kildare, became retrospectively in the records of Christian monks a virginal sister or companion to Mary, and in some iterations a 'Second Mary' or domesticated 'Mary of Gael,' even ...
... of Catholic Ireland ... [as] a devout and somewhat puritanical people, strongly under the influence of their priests and bishops,' is a nineteenth-century The chaste mother, devoted to her divine son, would have. phenomenon. 15.
... mother, devoted to her divine son, would have had particular resonance in Ireland's post-Famine world of gender segregation and delayed marriages, in which many unmarried males worked their widowed mothers' farms for so many years that ...
... Mother's breast' of Ireland, he 'rejoiced' that they were being transferred to the jurisdiction of 'one of our race ... a Prince of the Church whose love will be not less than our own, and under whose strong guardianship their souls ...
Contents
5 Protestantism Balkanized | |
6 Reining In Hollywood | |
7 The Production Code | |
17 A Sense of Decency and Good Morals | |
18 The Law Knows No Heresy | |
19 In the Supreme Court | |
20 Candour and Shame | |
Notes | |
12 New Realities | |
13 Visions of Mary | |
14 Mary or Communism | |
8 The Legion of Decency | |
9 The Breen Office | |
10 The Paramount Case | |
11 Cocktails and Communism | |
12 New Realities | |
13 Visions of Mary | |
14 Mary or Communism | |
15 The Priest as Public Figure | |
16 Woman Further Defamed | |
15 The Priest as Public Figure | |
16 Woman Further Defamed | |
17 A Sense of Decency and Good Morals | |
18 The Law Knows No Heresy | |
19 In the Supreme Court | |
20 Candour and Shame | |
Bibliography | |
Index | |