The late Irish American author Brian Moore (1921-1999) had serious issues with the Catholic Church. So much so that in their obituary on Moore, the BBC notes: “Brian Moore’s youthful rejection of Catholicism colored all of his novels.”
Is This Picture Anti-Catholic?
Some of Moore’s novels were banned by the Church. (He once described Ireland as “a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction.”)
One of Moore’s novels, The Statement, has recently been made into a movie starring British actor Michael Caine.
In it, Caine plays Pierre Brossard, an aging Frenchman and former Nazi collaborator, who personally ordered the execution of seven Jews in a small French village. Since the war, Brossard has lived in relatively comfortable obscurity largely thanks to a presidential pardon and the benediction of elements in the Catholic Church who harbor him in a rotating shuffle of sympathetic monasteries.
Given that Brian Moore authored the book the movie is based on, and given that Moore’s novels were so consistently anti-Catholic throughout his life, someone asked Michael Caine the obvious question, “Is this picture anti-Catholic?”
To which Caine said, “No. It's pro-Catholic because we all imagined the Catholic Church was anti-Nazi and it is. The reason we made the picture is for the surprise. That some of them weren't.”
Now correct me if I've missed something, but is Michael Caine arguing that the film is pro-Catholic because it shows off elements of the Church in such an unfavorable light that they remind us all how really good the Church is?
A Daily Communicant Like No Other
The USCCB's review of the movie reaches a somewhat different conclusion: “Brossard is a daily communicant, devoted to the Blessed Mother and St. Christopher. He is also a cold-blooded killer who doesn't like kneeling next to blacks in church and accuses post-Tridentine 'leftist' priests of ruining the Catholic faith — not to mention that he loves kicking dogs.”
In other words, Brossard is not like any daily communicant that has ever existed anywhere on planet earth.
The reviewer continues: “…Jewison (producer Norman Jewison) jettisons objectivity in favor of broad-brushstroke anticlericalism, painting the Catholic hierarchy for the most part as a den of duplicitous vipers willing to cover up atrocities for the greater good (read “public image”) of the Church.
“And though Jewison does make sure to sidestep the card of 'anti-Catholicism' by including a 'nice' Jesuit priest, such blink-and-you'll-miss-it nods to piety are but a drop in the bucket of hypocrisy and ecclesiastical indifference presented by the film — one character goes so far as to say that the corruption 'goes all the way up to Rome.'”
Michael Caine — Sir Michael Caine — says this movie is pro-Catholic.
Unrecognized Prejudice
Even though it seems so obviously a duplicitous comment, I'm not ruling out the possibility that Michael Caine really believes the stupid statement he made about his movie being pro-Catholic.
Philip Jenkins, after all, has already convinced us — in his book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice — that Anti-Catholicism is a vast unacknowledged problem in this culture.
Widespread prejudice, like anti-Catholicism today, is never recognized for what it is. Quite simply, this is because many people have already bought into the myth that the Church really is a fundamentally corrupt and very likely thoroughly evil institution.
Therefore anyone saying something absolutely beyond the pale and factually untrue, or employing negative stereotypes in referring to priests, or the pope, or the Church in general, is unlikely to be criticized for it even though no one would ever get away with making similar characterizations about Jews, or blacks, or homosexuals, or least of all Moslems. Only the Catholic Church gets treated so dishonorably. And, of course, that’s exactly what He told us to expect. That’s one of the very signs that our Church is His Church.
And from that it follows that it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that in the mind of a thoroughly secularized British actor, anti-Catholicism might even appear to be pro-Catholicism.
Nevertheless, if the trend continues and deepens, life is bound to become more difficult for those of us with enough faith and enough courage to still identify ourselves as Catholic. It also promises to become more and more frustrating for those of us who can still think clearly.
J. Fraser Field is Executive Officer of the Catholic Educator’s Resource Center the principle author of the CERC Blog).
