Roger Ebert and the Happier Days

Posted By Brother André Marie On June 26, 2010

Film critic and columnist Roger Ebert penned a column for his blog at the Chicago Sun-Times, My Vocation as a Priest [1]. It’s a benevolent, slightly sentimental look at his Catholic upbringing. At one time, he considered the priestly vocation. But it turns out he was one of those, “whose mother had the vocation” — to use the words of an old priest I knew. Not only did Roger Ebert not become a priest, he lost his Catholic Faith outright. Certain aspects of his column — well written, as one would expect — show the glories of pre-Vatican II American Catholicism in all their splendor. For instance, he pays tribute to the Church’s aesthetic aspect when he says:
In my childhood the Church arched high above everything. I was awed by its ceremonies. Years later I agreed completely with Pauline Kael when she said that the three greatest American directors of the 1970s–Scorsese, Altman and Coppola–had derived much of their artistic richness from having grown up in the pre-Vatican Two era of Latin, incense, mortal sins, indulgences, dire sufferings in hell, Gregorian chant, and so on. Protestants and even Jews were victims, I suppose, of sensory deprivation.

Other passages show that those “Good Old Days,” [2] of American Catholicism, supposedly such a high-water mark for the religion, were not all they were cracked up to be. The Dominican teaching Sister who was dogmatically permissive, the seminarian who uttered a glaringly stupid remark about hell and Dante as he dragged on a cigarette: these were signs that the iconic Catholicism of the era had splotches on it, bad ones.

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