In current times, the Catholic Church has been getting a lot of bad press. The media has been portraying the institution as bigoted, behind the times, and filled with sexual predators. In light of this current bad press, this essay will discuss the television series Father Ted and will use the film Sister Act as a comparative example for the portrayal of Catholicism in the late twentieth century. Using the theories of Margaret Miles and Jacques Derrida, the representations of the Catholic Church within these texts will be analysed, focusing particularly on how they employ certain stereotypes to reflect the values and attitudes of British and American society.
In her work, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies, Margaret Miles suggests that we get our information from the recurring images provided by the media culture. According to her, the media generates and maintains certain attitudes towards religion, and circulates varying degrees of religious commitment throughout this popular medium (Miles 1996:3). As we receive numerous “representations of identity and diversity, relationships, and social arrangements and institutions” from these media images, we can discern a society’s religious and political preoccupations through their exploration (Miles 1996:3).
One of the more obvious underlying themes in the television series Father Ted is the Protestant preoccupation with Catholic religiosity. Drawing from the stereotypes created by Reformation leaders such as Martin Luther, the creators of Father Ted portray Catholic priests as lewd, lecherous drunks, who are chronic gamblers and incredibly stupid. These characters repeatedly undermine the authority of the Catholic Church; none more so than Father Dougal McGuire, whose often ridiculous observations occasionally question fundamental Christian beliefs (Free 2001:221):“It’s like that stuff we learnt in seminary school – heaven and hell and all that other stuff – you’re not meant to take it seriously.”
“Is there a God? Who knows? I don’t know. Personally, I don’t even believe in organised religion
(Father Ted, Series One, Episode One.)
While the series can be seen as anti-Catholic, there is actually little evidence of direct attacks on the Church. The writers have avoided any real criticism of the institution as an organisation, choosing not to deal with the contemporary religious scandals directly (O’Brien 2009:115). Although the character Bishop Brennan does bear some resemblance to Bishop Eamon Casey, in the respect that both men have sired a son, Father Ted chooses to provide a general social commentary of the goings on of the Church, and reflect in its satire the less scandalous issues of the time (O’Brien 2009:115).
Although in showing its members to be susceptible to such human foibles as swearing, drinking, smoking, gambling, and the odd sexual fantasy or indiscretion, Father Ted de-sacralises the position of the priesthood, the program also removes the occupation’s stigma as a social ‘other’. In bringing the clergymen down to the level of the everyday man, who likes to watch television and make childish bets with his mates, Father Ted creates an opportunity for viewers to see priests as one of their own, and not as a pious outsider.
Unlike Father Ted, the film Sister Act seeks to maintain the positioning of the Church and its members as the ‘other’. The walls of the convent play a key role in establishing this notion of ‘otherness,’ especially in its representation as either a sanctuary or a prison (Stone 1999:para. 13). Although in reality, numbers cloistered religious communities have declined, they are still a frequently used setting for Hollywood films (Schleich 2003:51). Originally shown to be a place of protection from one’s violent pursuers, it becomes linked with the characteristics of a prison as the film progresses. The recurring use of phrases such as “spring you” and “you’re a free woman,” and the use of the song Rescue Me during a montage of chores all provide the viewer with the idea that to be a nun is to be a prisoner. However, by the end of Sister Act, the convent regains its positive image, now represented as an opportunity to expand one’s worldview and achieve a degree of redemption (Schleich 2003:51). Regardless of this positive representation, the convent is shown to be nothing more than a creative retreat where one would not stay permanently – “This would not be place to begin a career” – and so maintains its identity as a place belonging to the ‘other.’
.jpg)
Sister Act often uses the nuns as a metaphor for the Catholic Church itself. The character of the Mother Superior is a prime example. The beginning of the film shows her to be resigned to the fact that her convent is at risk of closure, the church is in dire need of repairs, and that Sunday mass receives little attendance. She is utterly against the sisters roaming outside the protective walls of the convent, and firmly believes that all they can do for the community is pray for them. Even as modern, more secular songs attract a larger congregation on a Sunday, the Mother Superior staunchly refuses to support these changes, preferring traditional hymns and only referring to ‘progressive’ convents with distaste. However, by the end of the film, amid approval from her nuns, then monsignor, and even the pope himself, the Reverend Mother is forced to begrudgingly accept this push into modernity. The Roman Catholic Church also seems to be resigned to the problem of declining numbers, and the notion that the religion will eventually become socially irrelevant or extinct. Like the Mother Superior, the Church is also shown to resist change, and slam progressive members of the Catholic community. The institution must be dragged into the 21st century, and be forced to embrace modern culture in order to survive.
We can explore the social preoccupations found within Father Ted and Sister Act further by applying the theories of Jacques Derrida. According to Eugene O’Brien (2009:2), Derrida’s first theory, ‘there is nothing outside the text’, can be taken to mean that knowledge is a social and linguistic construct, and that all knowledge can be interpreted as a type of text. O’Brien (2009:2) also notes that Derrida’s second theory, ‘there is nothing outside of context’, is an expansion of the first, and explains it to mean that all meaning is socially constructed, and every discourse needs to be located within a specific context. By taking the Catholic stereotypes of both texts, and placing them within their respective social, political, and continental contexts, we can gain further understanding as to the American and British attitudes towards the Catholic Church and its members.
As the setting of the television series Father Ted is on a small island in Ireland, one must explore the relationship between Ireland and the British mainland. Alternatively their antithesis or mirror image, partner or parasite, abortive offspring or sympathetic sibling, Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (2000:128) believes that British society are unable to decide on the nature of their relationship with the Irish, as they are preoccupied with viewing them as the ‘other.’ The clearest evidence of this shifting ideal from antithesis to mirror image is in the character of Mrs Doyle, the priest’s housekeeper, who continuously offers visitors cups of tea. Her obsession with the brew is an indication of British society’s regarding Ireland as a sister nation, but the almost predictable refusal of it by the visitors, most of which are Irish, point to the contradictory belief that the British and Irish are nothing alike.
This concept of Ireland as the ‘other’ stems from its history as Britain’s first colony. According to Marcus Free (2001:223), Father Ted offers audiences the opportunity to engage critically and reflectively with this colonial construct, adding that the series offers subtle levels of social and cultural commentary through its satire. Its veiled references to real people and events place Father Ted in the Irish Republic of the late 1990s. The stereotypes that the series explore, including general drunkenness, generosity, and stupidity, are historically specific, and the plausibility of their exaggerated representations rely on the audience’s knowledge of the cultural and historical constructs surrounding the Irish Catholic identity (Free 221-222). Llewellyn-Jones (2002:126,132) agrees that Father Ted is more critically in touch with cultural history and the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, suggesting that it might resonate differently from the long-held prejudices of the British against the Irish. However, she argues that the series ignores key historical and political complexities of Ireland in the late 1990s, and believes that the political situation before and during the Peace Process is not dealt with at all (Llewellyn-Jones 2002:126).
The Peace Process refers to the conflicts between the Unionist and Nationalist parties, which culminated in the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) on April 10, 1998. With a protestant majority of 53%, the Unionists considered themselves British, and supported the continuing incorporation of Ireland with the United Kingdom. The Catholic minority (44%), on the other hand, considered themselves uniquely Irish, and called for the reunification of Ireland as a single nation (Archick 2010:1). The GFA, which the BBC’s ‘The Search for Peace’ hails as “little short of a historic breakthrough,” addressed the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as the relationship of both states with England, Scotland, and Wales (BBC News:online). The agreement called for the devolving of the current government and the transfer of power from London to Belfast (Archick 2010:1). After a referendum which returned a 71.2% in Northern Ireland, and a 94.39% Republican vote in favour of the agreement, a new Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive Committee took its place, with the power shared between Unionist and Nationalist parties (BBC News:online; Archick:2010:1).
However, the years following the signing of the GFA saw the government suspended four times by October 2002. The Unionist parties accused the Republicans of failing to live up to the spirit of the GFA and their promise to decommission arms; the Republicans countered this by declaring that they could not force people to give up their arms, and that the agreement merely stated that the parties would use all their power to influence the process. They also accused the British Government of not demilitarising Ireland as quickly as promised (BBC News:online). The process to peace in Ireland is still ongoing, and though the Good Friday Agreement was a historic step towards it, there is a long way to go before Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland come to a continuous and peaceful co-existence.
Llewellyn-Jones is correct in stating that the television series, Father Ted, does not discuss the political upheaval experienced by the Irish during the mid to late 1990s. However, perhaps this was the program’s intention, to provide an escape from the tension and horror that emanated from the border conflicts. By creating an image of bumbling, innocent priests meeting the religious needs of a peaceful and remote island, the creators of Father Ted were able to discuss certain social and religious issues, whilst tactfully avoiding those of political importance, thus catering to its British and Irish audiences without obvious bias.
As it was written in the early 1990s, the film Sister Act can be placed in the socio-religious context of shifting faith loyalties. According to a 2001 study undertaken by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the decade of the nineties seems to be a period of shift and decline for membership to religious institutions (Kosmin et al 2001:14). Through a random digit-dialled telephone survey of US households, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) asked participants to identify their religion, as well as whether they were members of any religious institution (Kosmin et al 2001:6). The results of this study were then compared to those of the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI). Although Catholicism continued to share the majority of adherents with the Baptist Church on a state-by-state basis, the study found that over the past decade, Evangelical Christians experienced a 37% increase in membership (Kosmin et al 2001:39-42, 24). Sister Act reflects this newfound interest in evangelised Christianity through its incorporation of secular songs with traditional hymns. It mirrors the attempts by Evangelical congregations to create mainstream music that hold religious messages. This is highly evident in the changing of lyrics from ‘my guy’ to ‘my God’; while maintaining a thin veil of religiosity, the song is obviously rooted in the secular realm of pop culture. The subsequent rise of church attendance as shown in the film reflects the rising popularity of the Evangelical Christian movement.
Through the application of the theories of Margaret Miles and Jacques Derrida, we have explored the social preoccupations present in filmic texts Father Ted and Sister Act. The stereotypes utilised throughout Father Ted draw attention to the underlying relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism, and highlight an attempt by the authors to bring members of the clergy down to an empathetic level, and reduce their stigmatisation as the ‘other.’ Sister Act, on the other hand, serves to maintain the idea of a religious other, in its use of the convent setting and refusal to willingly move with the times. By looking at the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as the island’s relations with the British mainland, we were able to establish Father Ted in a socio-political context. It has been argued that in order to create an arena within which to discuss social and religious issues without fear of causing serious offence to its Irish and British audiences, the writers of the Father Ted purposely ignored the contemporary events of political upheaval in its portrayal of Irish life. Sister Act has been placed within a socio-religious context of shifting faith loyalties, and was shown to reflect the rise of the Evangelical Christian movement, which occurred throughout the 1990s. It is clear that through the employment of well-known cultural stereotypes of the Catholic Church, these filmic texts have been able to raise and discuss a variety of issues contemporaneous with the social preoccupations of Britain and the United States in the late twentieth century.
Reference List
Archick, K. 2010, Northern Ireland: The Peace Process, Congressional Research Service.
Howard, J. 1992, Sister Act, Touchstone Pictures.
Free, M. 2001, “From the 'Other' Island to the One with 'No West Side': The Irish in British Soap and Sitcom,” Irish Studies Review vol. 9 no. 2, 215-227.
Kosmin, B.A., Mayer, E. & Keysar, A. 2001, American Religious Identification Survey, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Linehan, G. & Mathews, A. 1995-1998, Father Ted, Hat Trick Productions.
Llewellyn-Jones, M. 2000. “The Grotesque and the Ideal: Representations of Ireland and the Irish in Popular Comedy Programmes on British TV,” in B. Carson & M.
Llewellyn-Jones (eds) Frames and fictions on television: the politics of identity within drama, 126-140.
Miles, M. 1996, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies, Beacon Press, Boston.
O’Brien, E. 2009, ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse’: negotiating texts and contexts in contemporary Irish studies, Peter Lang.
Schleich, K. 2003, Hollywood and Catholic Women: Virgins, Whores, Mothers, and Other Images, iUniverse.
Stone, B.P. 1999, “Religion and Violence in Popular Film,” Journal of Religion and Film vol. 3 no. 1, Online. Available from: http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Violence.htm
‘The Search for Peace: The Good Friday Agreement,’ BBC News, Online. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/northern_ireland/understanding/events/good_friday.stm
While the series can be seen as anti-Catholic, there is actually little evidence of direct attacks on the Church. The writers have avoided any real criticism of the institution as an organisation, choosing not to deal with the contemporary religious scandals directly (O’Brien 2009:115). Although the character Bishop Brennan does bear some resemblance to Bishop Eamon Casey, in the respect that both men have sired a son, Father Ted chooses to provide a general social commentary of the goings on of the Church, and reflect in its satire the less scandalous issues of the time (O’Brien 2009:115).
Although in showing its members to be susceptible to such human foibles as swearing, drinking, smoking, gambling, and the odd sexual fantasy or indiscretion, Father Ted de-sacralises the position of the priesthood, the program also removes the occupation’s stigma as a social ‘other’. In bringing the clergymen down to the level of the everyday man, who likes to watch television and make childish bets with his mates, Father Ted creates an opportunity for viewers to see priests as one of their own, and not as a pious outsider.
Unlike Father Ted, the film Sister Act seeks to maintain the positioning of the Church and its members as the ‘other’. The walls of the convent play a key role in establishing this notion of ‘otherness,’ especially in its representation as either a sanctuary or a prison (Stone 1999:para. 13). Although in reality, numbers cloistered religious communities have declined, they are still a frequently used setting for Hollywood films (Schleich 2003:51). Originally shown to be a place of protection from one’s violent pursuers, it becomes linked with the characteristics of a prison as the film progresses. The recurring use of phrases such as “spring you” and “you’re a free woman,” and the use of the song Rescue Me during a montage of chores all provide the viewer with the idea that to be a nun is to be a prisoner. However, by the end of Sister Act, the convent regains its positive image, now represented as an opportunity to expand one’s worldview and achieve a degree of redemption (Schleich 2003:51). Regardless of this positive representation, the convent is shown to be nothing more than a creative retreat where one would not stay permanently – “This would not be place to begin a career” – and so maintains its identity as a place belonging to the ‘other.’
.jpg)
Sister Act often uses the nuns as a metaphor for the Catholic Church itself. The character of the Mother Superior is a prime example. The beginning of the film shows her to be resigned to the fact that her convent is at risk of closure, the church is in dire need of repairs, and that Sunday mass receives little attendance. She is utterly against the sisters roaming outside the protective walls of the convent, and firmly believes that all they can do for the community is pray for them. Even as modern, more secular songs attract a larger congregation on a Sunday, the Mother Superior staunchly refuses to support these changes, preferring traditional hymns and only referring to ‘progressive’ convents with distaste. However, by the end of the film, amid approval from her nuns, then monsignor, and even the pope himself, the Reverend Mother is forced to begrudgingly accept this push into modernity. The Roman Catholic Church also seems to be resigned to the problem of declining numbers, and the notion that the religion will eventually become socially irrelevant or extinct. Like the Mother Superior, the Church is also shown to resist change, and slam progressive members of the Catholic community. The institution must be dragged into the 21st century, and be forced to embrace modern culture in order to survive.
We can explore the social preoccupations found within Father Ted and Sister Act further by applying the theories of Jacques Derrida. According to Eugene O’Brien (2009:2), Derrida’s first theory, ‘there is nothing outside the text’, can be taken to mean that knowledge is a social and linguistic construct, and that all knowledge can be interpreted as a type of text. O’Brien (2009:2) also notes that Derrida’s second theory, ‘there is nothing outside of context’, is an expansion of the first, and explains it to mean that all meaning is socially constructed, and every discourse needs to be located within a specific context. By taking the Catholic stereotypes of both texts, and placing them within their respective social, political, and continental contexts, we can gain further understanding as to the American and British attitudes towards the Catholic Church and its members.
As the setting of the television series Father Ted is on a small island in Ireland, one must explore the relationship between Ireland and the British mainland. Alternatively their antithesis or mirror image, partner or parasite, abortive offspring or sympathetic sibling, Margaret Llewellyn-Jones (2000:128) believes that British society are unable to decide on the nature of their relationship with the Irish, as they are preoccupied with viewing them as the ‘other.’ The clearest evidence of this shifting ideal from antithesis to mirror image is in the character of Mrs Doyle, the priest’s housekeeper, who continuously offers visitors cups of tea. Her obsession with the brew is an indication of British society’s regarding Ireland as a sister nation, but the almost predictable refusal of it by the visitors, most of which are Irish, point to the contradictory belief that the British and Irish are nothing alike.
This concept of Ireland as the ‘other’ stems from its history as Britain’s first colony. According to Marcus Free (2001:223), Father Ted offers audiences the opportunity to engage critically and reflectively with this colonial construct, adding that the series offers subtle levels of social and cultural commentary through its satire. Its veiled references to real people and events place Father Ted in the Irish Republic of the late 1990s. The stereotypes that the series explore, including general drunkenness, generosity, and stupidity, are historically specific, and the plausibility of their exaggerated representations rely on the audience’s knowledge of the cultural and historical constructs surrounding the Irish Catholic identity (Free 221-222). Llewellyn-Jones (2002:126,132) agrees that Father Ted is more critically in touch with cultural history and the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, suggesting that it might resonate differently from the long-held prejudices of the British against the Irish. However, she argues that the series ignores key historical and political complexities of Ireland in the late 1990s, and believes that the political situation before and during the Peace Process is not dealt with at all (Llewellyn-Jones 2002:126).
The Peace Process refers to the conflicts between the Unionist and Nationalist parties, which culminated in the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) on April 10, 1998. With a protestant majority of 53%, the Unionists considered themselves British, and supported the continuing incorporation of Ireland with the United Kingdom. The Catholic minority (44%), on the other hand, considered themselves uniquely Irish, and called for the reunification of Ireland as a single nation (Archick 2010:1). The GFA, which the BBC’s ‘The Search for Peace’ hails as “little short of a historic breakthrough,” addressed the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as the relationship of both states with England, Scotland, and Wales (BBC News:online). The agreement called for the devolving of the current government and the transfer of power from London to Belfast (Archick 2010:1). After a referendum which returned a 71.2% in Northern Ireland, and a 94.39% Republican vote in favour of the agreement, a new Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive Committee took its place, with the power shared between Unionist and Nationalist parties (BBC News:online; Archick:2010:1).However, the years following the signing of the GFA saw the government suspended four times by October 2002. The Unionist parties accused the Republicans of failing to live up to the spirit of the GFA and their promise to decommission arms; the Republicans countered this by declaring that they could not force people to give up their arms, and that the agreement merely stated that the parties would use all their power to influence the process. They also accused the British Government of not demilitarising Ireland as quickly as promised (BBC News:online). The process to peace in Ireland is still ongoing, and though the Good Friday Agreement was a historic step towards it, there is a long way to go before Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland come to a continuous and peaceful co-existence.
Llewellyn-Jones is correct in stating that the television series, Father Ted, does not discuss the political upheaval experienced by the Irish during the mid to late 1990s. However, perhaps this was the program’s intention, to provide an escape from the tension and horror that emanated from the border conflicts. By creating an image of bumbling, innocent priests meeting the religious needs of a peaceful and remote island, the creators of Father Ted were able to discuss certain social and religious issues, whilst tactfully avoiding those of political importance, thus catering to its British and Irish audiences without obvious bias.
As it was written in the early 1990s, the film Sister Act can be placed in the socio-religious context of shifting faith loyalties. According to a 2001 study undertaken by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the decade of the nineties seems to be a period of shift and decline for membership to religious institutions (Kosmin et al 2001:14). Through a random digit-dialled telephone survey of US households, the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) asked participants to identify their religion, as well as whether they were members of any religious institution (Kosmin et al 2001:6). The results of this study were then compared to those of the 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI). Although Catholicism continued to share the majority of adherents with the Baptist Church on a state-by-state basis, the study found that over the past decade, Evangelical Christians experienced a 37% increase in membership (Kosmin et al 2001:39-42, 24). Sister Act reflects this newfound interest in evangelised Christianity through its incorporation of secular songs with traditional hymns. It mirrors the attempts by Evangelical congregations to create mainstream music that hold religious messages. This is highly evident in the changing of lyrics from ‘my guy’ to ‘my God’; while maintaining a thin veil of religiosity, the song is obviously rooted in the secular realm of pop culture. The subsequent rise of church attendance as shown in the film reflects the rising popularity of the Evangelical Christian movement.
Through the application of the theories of Margaret Miles and Jacques Derrida, we have explored the social preoccupations present in filmic texts Father Ted and Sister Act. The stereotypes utilised throughout Father Ted draw attention to the underlying relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism, and highlight an attempt by the authors to bring members of the clergy down to an empathetic level, and reduce their stigmatisation as the ‘other.’ Sister Act, on the other hand, serves to maintain the idea of a religious other, in its use of the convent setting and refusal to willingly move with the times. By looking at the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as the island’s relations with the British mainland, we were able to establish Father Ted in a socio-political context. It has been argued that in order to create an arena within which to discuss social and religious issues without fear of causing serious offence to its Irish and British audiences, the writers of the Father Ted purposely ignored the contemporary events of political upheaval in its portrayal of Irish life. Sister Act has been placed within a socio-religious context of shifting faith loyalties, and was shown to reflect the rise of the Evangelical Christian movement, which occurred throughout the 1990s. It is clear that through the employment of well-known cultural stereotypes of the Catholic Church, these filmic texts have been able to raise and discuss a variety of issues contemporaneous with the social preoccupations of Britain and the United States in the late twentieth century.
Reference List
Archick, K. 2010, Northern Ireland: The Peace Process, Congressional Research Service.
Howard, J. 1992, Sister Act, Touchstone Pictures.
Free, M. 2001, “From the 'Other' Island to the One with 'No West Side': The Irish in British Soap and Sitcom,” Irish Studies Review vol. 9 no. 2, 215-227.
Kosmin, B.A., Mayer, E. & Keysar, A. 2001, American Religious Identification Survey, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Linehan, G. & Mathews, A. 1995-1998, Father Ted, Hat Trick Productions.
Llewellyn-Jones, M. 2000. “The Grotesque and the Ideal: Representations of Ireland and the Irish in Popular Comedy Programmes on British TV,” in B. Carson & M.
Llewellyn-Jones (eds) Frames and fictions on television: the politics of identity within drama, 126-140.
Miles, M. 1996, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies, Beacon Press, Boston.
O’Brien, E. 2009, ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse’: negotiating texts and contexts in contemporary Irish studies, Peter Lang.
Schleich, K. 2003, Hollywood and Catholic Women: Virgins, Whores, Mothers, and Other Images, iUniverse.
Stone, B.P. 1999, “Religion and Violence in Popular Film,” Journal of Religion and Film vol. 3 no. 1, Online. Available from: http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/Violence.htm
‘The Search for Peace: The Good Friday Agreement,’ BBC News, Online. Available from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/northern_ireland/understanding/events/good_friday.stm
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.