COLUMN: Trashing Traditional Values

From Marc Teillon's "The Public Pillory," Fall '95 From Marc Teillon's "The Public Pillory," Fall '95The knights in Hollywood are riding again. They've done their best to rid the countryside of love, family and patriotism, but there is one dragon that still is terrorizing the populace with repressive rules and a ridiculous reliance on faith. And while the directors and screen writers sit at their Round Table and tell tales of glorious exploits and wonderful deeds of arms, they know they will eventually have to meet the beast head on. Sir Miramax with his Disney squire is the most recent knight to do battle with the monolithic monster called the Roman Catholic Church. The movie starts with a young priest sermonizing about unchanging truths and the sanctity of eternal doctrine. Then the film proceeds to show every priest in a negative light. The two main clergymen each have a bout with the celibacy oath they took when ordained. One finds himself sexually liberated as he sails the high seas from bath house to gay bar. The other young priest has an affair with his housekeeper-concubine. After the one priest is caught sodomizing a random partner in a police sweep, his colleague implores him to celebrate the next mass with him, despite his community disgrace. Priest ends with one priest defending the other in front of the congregation. He blames the Catholic Church for its teachings on sexual morality and questions, in graphic language, why the Church is so concerned about the placement of one's sexual organ while greater travesties such as war and famine seem to escape the Vatican's attention. Jim McGovern, though claiming to be a Catholic, must be confused about the nature of priesthood. One does have to take a vow of chastity to be ordained, but nobody forces anyone to become a priest. Young men are not held against their will in the seminary. The Cardinals and Bishops are not holding a gun to the proteges' heads to force them to pray to their Father and spend hour after hour pouring over the Bible and theological texts. Most men become priests because they were called to the profession by God. And as they join the order of the priesthood, they have rules they have to follow, one of them being celibacy. But McGovern and the rest of the Hollywood ilk find such a rule out dated. The Church isn't keeping up with the times. Their rules may have been applicable to the medieval manor but this is the '90s. McGovern can't understand that individuals may exist who are able to honor such a stringent code of conduct as a life of chastity. It seems that as far as Hollywood is concerned, everyone should be having sex, and the Catholic Church is the evil villain preventing priests from enjoying such a pleasure. Miramax must have felt a moral duty to crucify the Catholic Church by exposing the oppressive tendencies of its rules and regulations. Michael Eisner of Disney did his best Pilate imitation by disavowing any relationship with Priest (Disney owns Miramax), and washed his hands of any responsibility a CEO should have. But what does one expect from Hollywood? The "progressive" people running Tinsel Town have done their best to trounce every other value individuals hold dear in this country. They relegate love to five-minute romps with Sharon Stone in an elevator. They compare family to incarceration in movies like Paper Moon. They glorify reckless and dangerous lifestyles. They blame society in teen-exploitation films for the crimes plaguing America. And they do all this with the audacious claim that they are the ones actually helping the country move forward. They are the knights protecting the damsels from distress. They are the ones protecting the First Amendment from the censor. They are the ones fighting for honor, courage and decency. But despite the delusions the rot in Hollywood are under, they are not pure of heart like Galahad. They are, in fact, the ones who should be smote from the helm and stricken from their horse. Hollywood has done everything in its power to trash traditional values, especially those professed by the Catholic Church. National boycotts of Miramax and Disney may stop the these two companies from producing the likes of Priest ever again, but as long as Hollywood rears its ugly head, the values many Americans hold dear will constantly be in danger. Tinsel Town hates traditional values and feels the cultural revolution going on in this country is for the betterment of mankind. They find it necessary to weaken the symbols of traditional norms and values in order to allow their own symbols to be ingrained in the minds of the masses. The Catholic Church is just one of the many symbols that Hollywood has been trying to replace. In the end, Miramax did nothing to further the debate over priests' celibacy in their latest flick. Instead, they have sounded the tocsin to all Catholics and anyone else who believes in order over chaos and spirituality over depravity. The proper response to this clarion call to action is to stop subsidizing Hollywood and put the McGovern ilk in the only place it belongs -- locked in the public pillory for a few days to let Catholics really show their disdain with rotten eggs and decaying fruit. Until that time, the errant knights of the silver screen will continue to besiege Catholicism and any other religion it finds burdened with rules of conduct and discipline, and the Roman Catholic Church will remain the one being pilloried.