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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... wrote that it was erroneous to regard Catholicism as an enemy of democracy, when in his view it was, of the several Christian sects, 'one of the most favourable to equality of conditions.' Not that America's Catholic leaders needed to ...
... wrote in 1914 of a ' spirit of suspiciousness and ... keenness for the denunciation of others ' : ... The anti - Modernist profession is one in which place and use can be found for some of the basest qualities of human nature It is one ...
... wrote that it was as if – for almost a century – Catholic Ireland had never existed . Yet , he added , the Irishman , stripped for decades of his civil rights and of lawful religious observances , came through this more Catholic than ...
... wrote that a trip down Italy was a trip back in time : modernity in Turin and Milan , Renaissance Florence , medieval Rome , the pagan era around Naples , then Salerno , where ' the customs present themselves to you with all the native ...
... wrote that the cult of the Madonna first emerged in fourth - century Italy , thereafter providing Christianity with what it lacked but the pagan Mediterra- nean had always provided : ' a female element in religion . ' In 1944 Leonard ...
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