Ca holic astes
I'LL BE DAMNED IF CATHOLICISM IS USED AS A PUNCHBAG
As The Da Vinci Code gets released Paul Dale looks at the history of Christianity
bashing at the movies.
hile I have no particular interest in seeing Ron Howard‘s big screen version of The Ha Vinci Code. I know that come Friday night I‘ll be queuing up with all the other pale skinned conspiracy theorists. Dan Brown completists. autistics and lapsed Catholics. You see i was born a Catholic. a cogger. a left footer. a taig. a fenian. l could go on. but I shan‘t. And like all mildly socially damaged men who survived the rigorous guilt that this religion throws at you (masturbation. lying. drinking. smoking. eating meat on a Friday. more masturbation) I would never stand tip for my faith in a pub brawl. but I'll be damned if I am going to stand by as some tilmmaking hack uses Catholicism as a punchbag. No that's a lie. Some of my very favourite films have
made hay out of the lies that perpetuate the oldest of
the Christian faiths (Judaism excepted for pedants out there). There‘s Bufiuel‘s Nazari'iz Costa Gavraz‘s condemnation of Rome‘s involvement with the Nazis Amen and Jean-Pierre Melville‘s brilliant Lean Morin. pretre. but in true film snob style I see these films as the acceptable face of sectarian derision because they are in beautiful foreign languages and made by old Marxist aristocrats.
No. my problem is the gloatingly obvious
defamation. ln I996 conservative film writer and self
styled ‘Hollywood observer‘ Michael Medved started noticing how some of the new remakes of old movies had been modified to introduce anti-ecumenical themes (he cited that year‘s version of Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s I955 Les Dialmliqaes as an example. the trouble being that this Sharon Stone vehicle had so many faults that its blatant ‘Cathophobia‘ was just a
40 THE LIST 1 1—25 May 2006
minor one). Far more blatant from the same year was the vicious portrayal of Archbishop of Chicago (played with considerable relish by craggy faced character actor Stanley Anderson) in the decidedly mediocre psycho-thriller Primal l’ear. Things at the movies in 1996 were not half as bad for Catholics as they were in the art world. A year after the Los Angeles-based Tom of Finland Foundation awarded its grand prize for artistic expression to a drawing showing a priest performing fellatio on Christ and a Penn State student who crafted a huge vagina grotto around a statue of ()ur Blessed Mother as part of an art project. Andres Serrano. the artist famous for dropping a crucifix into a jar of urine was invited to give a keynote speech at the Smithsonian. Catholic bashing had finally been given the green light from that most waspish of institutions.
From here. the mumbo jumbo cinematic representations of Catholicism fell like apocalyptic rain. There was John Carpenter 's' Vu"tpft'¢’s. in which a cardinal supervises Rome's vampire squad. Kevin Smith‘s hilariotts Dogma. the jaw dropping Stigmata. Almodovar‘s wickedly irreverent All About My Mother. Schwarzenegger cack End of Days. Sofia Coppola’s anti-Catholic suicide soft core porno The Virgin Sitit‘tdes'. The Magdalene Sisters. The Order — the list is endless. Unless you want to get your child into one of the better schools in the area. it must be difficult not to get dragged into this epidemic of Papist hatred. Join the line Mr Howard.
The Da Vinci Code is on general release from Fri 19 May.
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