Whatever is lovely (on the screen)
Ihe weather at the 1988 summer U.S. Catholic bishops meeting was scorching and it didn’t help that the flock of middle-aged and elderly men in black suits and tight collars were cloistered in an un-air-conditioned hall under bright TV lights.
But the lights were appropriate, since one of the big questions they spent hours discussing was what the hierarchy should try to accomplish in television. Finally, after voting to stick with a conventional approach to worship and public affairs, the bishops took an afternoon off.
I was one of the reporters there and, during that lazy afternoon, spend some time eating ice cream with an archbishop or two under the shade trees at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn. For days, I had pressed bishops to answer what I knew was a loaded question: Is it wise to invest so much money in talking-heads programs, when so few Americans — Catholics included — enjoy this style of television?
Finally, one of the men in the red hats turned the question around. OK, he asked, you’re a media man. What would YOU propose that we do with our TV budget?
Here’s what I remember saying: “I would get on an airplane and fly over to England and hand my entire budget — the whole shooting match for the year — to Sir Alec Guinness and ask him to film as many of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mystery stories as he can.”
In other words, hire one of the century’s greatest actors to take some of the most entertaining works of one of history’s great writers and turn them into excellent video entertainment — programs that would be cherished for generations. Of course, it’s crucial that Guinness and Chesterton were Catholics. But the goal was to create excellence that would both appeal to mainstream viewers and offer a witty, winsomely Christian alternative in the world of VCRs and cable television.
Talking heads with Roman collars are not enough, I said. Do one great thing. Dare to believe that entertainment can be both great and Christian. The prelate said he wished they could take that approach. But trying to produce mass-market entertainment was just too risky.
What brought this scene back into my mind was the recent death of Guinness, which drove me back into the pages of his autobiography, “Blessings in Disguise.” Glowing media tributes covered his stunning 66-year stage and screen career — from “Hamlet” to “Star Wars” — but most missed his faith.
It’s symbolic that Guinness took his first steps from atheism to Christianity while playing Father Brown, that great detective-priest, in a 1954 film that in America was called “The Detective.” In his autobiography, Guinness described how, soon after this conversion: “I was walking up Kingsway in the middle of an afternoon when an impulse compelled me to start running. With joy in my heart, and in a state of almost sexual excitement, I ran until I reached the little Catholic church there … which I had never entered before; I knelt; caught my breath, and for 10 minutes was lost to the world.” At a loss to explain his actions, he decided this was a “rather nonsensical gesture of love.”
But it also was a response to a faith that offered beauty, depth and truths that provided a foundation under the life of a great artist and his family.
Guinness was not an evangelist. He was an actor. But he did good work, work that brings to mind the New Testament’s admonition: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things.”
Critics of Hollywood have a tendency to think about entertainment in purely negative terms, focusing on what we should not see, should not consume and what we should not dwell upon. That is, of course, an important issue — especially for parents.
But whole question can be turned around. We must urge our schools to help raise up screenwriters, actors and other artists who can create work that is true, honorable, lovely and excellent. We must urge the shepherds of our religious flocks to praise what is good, as well as criticize what is bad.
We must dare to think that art and entertainment can be excellent, beautiful and worthy of praise. Then we need to put our time and our money where our mouths are.