Catholic Church rejects an answer to its prayers

If you live in the US, have a television set and are of a particularly morbid position, you can watch the slow death of Nothing Sacred. It is, at least for the time being, a prime-time drama put out by the ABC network. It is also the sort of programme which RTE, if it had the sense and the money, ought to be making; a drama serial about the struggles of a young Catholic priest in a contemporary urban society.

And its grim fate tells you more about the crisis in Catholicism than any number of papal encyclicals.

The show is exactly the sort of thing which church leaders, complaining about their alienation from the modern media, are always telling us they want. How often have we heard the cry that the caricature of priests as either paedophiles or Holy Joes must end; that the living reality of the priesthood must be expressed? Nothing Sacred should be the answer to that prayer.

It was developed by a Jesuit priest, who wrote the pilot episode. It has won praise from the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, where it is made, and from the Jesuit magazine, America. It has at its centre a complex, human portrait of a young priest. Its hero, Father Francis Xavier Rayneaux, is a good guy, ruggedly handsome, passionately idealistic, devoted to the people of his inner-city parish.

So surely the church must be delighted with the show. Here, at last, is a sympathetic, serious minded portrayal in the mainstream media of what it's actually like to be a priest in a contemporary big city. Here is a committed Catholic character who lives a million miles from Craggy Island or Ballykissangel. Here is a human being who happens to wear a dog collar. Surely, there is joy in Heaven.

Not a bit of it. Nothing Sacred is being hounded off the air. Not by Protestant bigots or politically correct lefties or intolerant liberals, but by the Catholic Church. For, it turns out, Catholic conservatives don't want human complexity after all. They don't want to get rid of clerical caricatures. They just want caricatures of their own devising. They want Bing Crosby as Father Chuck O'Malley in Going My Way who, confronted by a young woman sleeping with her boyfriend, sits down at the piano and sings a little song about moral values, causing the errant couple to skip on down the aisle.

I first heard of Nothing Sacred during the early stages of the Irish presidential election campaign when I went to a New York diocesan lunch at which Dana was a guest of honour. The concluding speech at the lunch, delivered by a Franciscan friar, was a raging denunciation of the show.

The source of this rage was the fact that Father Ray, as the hero is usually called, confronts complex moral dilemmas. He is, like every sentient being known to science, wracked by doubts. He is tempted to sleep with his former girlfriend. He is confused and uncertain when faced with a woman in a terrible situation who wants to have an abortion.

Confronting messy human realities, he does not reach for the hotline to the Curia, but tries to work out what his religious commitment means in concrete situations. And that, for the conservative church leadership, is not merely unseemly, it is intolerable. They cannot, and will not, abide its presence on screen.

At that lunch, the denunciation of the series was not a mere expression of opinion. It was followed by the distribution of lists of companies which advertise during the show, with detailed instructions on how to contact them and what to say. They were to be told in no uncertain terms that until they withdrew their ads, all their products would be boycotted by Catholics.

In the land of the almighty dollar, this threat works. So far, more than a dozen major corporations have responded by pulling their ads. And the show is as good as dead. ABC, in a tacit admission of defeat, has scheduled it opposite Friends on the rival NBC network, the ratings equivalent of sending Finn Harps reserves out to play Manchester United at Old Trafford. Nothing Sacred hasn't a prayer.

All of this is perfectly consistent with a long history of Irish-American Catholic attempts at censorship of the electronic media. From the 1930s onwards, Joe Breen, Martin Quigley and the Limerick-born bishop of Los Angeles, John Cantwell, took on the "pagans" and "Jews" of Hollywood and won immense power over movie imagery. Breen became head of the studios' Production Code office and the Catholic press boasted that "a Catholic will be virtual dictator of film morals".

This dictatorship produced what Tennessee Williams called the "foul-minded tyranny" of sexual and moral circumlocution in the movies. Married couples tucked themselves up in separate twin beds. Kissing couples kept one foot on the floor at all times. Lips remained sealed. Crashing waves signalled intercourse.

And, of course, Catholic priests were rock-solid, square-jawed men played by Bing Crosby in Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary's; Spencer Tracy in San Francisco and Boys' Town; Pat O'Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces and The Fighting 69th; and Karl Malden in On the Water- front. They were John Wayne in a Roman collar, packing their impeccably orthodox faith in a holster and quick on the draw whenever a moral problem crossed their path.

The interesting thing is that even intelligent conservatives know that this image is a hopeless lie. They know that Nothing Sacred's Father Ray, with his doubts and complexities, is, if anything, an understatement of the reality of priesthood in contemporary society. They also know that an effective drama series, in which the central character doesn't face crises and never worries about whether he's doing the right thing, is a contradiction in terms. But when it comes down to it, if they can't have Spencer Tracy, they would prefer nothing at all.

SO long as they had the power, Catholic conservatives, in Ireland as in the US, used it ruthlessly. They crushed liberal Catholic dissent, forced writers and dramatists to conform to their agenda and created images of the priesthood that were about as truthful as Stalinist paintings of heroic and happy peasants.

But these days, if you listen to Catholic conservatives in Ireland, you will find that they have learned to use words like "tolerance" and "pluralism". Finding themselves for the first time in a minority, they have discovered the joys of diversity of opinion . They don't want to dominate or to repress or to exclude. They just want to be respected as a social group with the same rights as any other.

This is good to hear, and it may be sincerely intended. The only problem is that, given half a chance and a sniff of power, the dictators come out of the closet. When the conservatives feel like a vulnerable minority, they are all for mutual respect and freedom of expression. But when they feel their biceps rippling, they are all too ready with the iron fist.