A Medium the Church Should Not Ignore

A Professor in the theater and movie department at the Suwon College, and a movie critic, had some interesting suggestions for the Catholic Church of Korea in her article in the Kyunghyang magazine. Since 1895 movies have grown to become, either for good or bad, an important part of popular culture. As its immense influence continues to spread, differences of age, sex, education and location are irrelevant.

Over the years, the movie industry has improved its technical capacities enormously, and movie stars are routinely given celebrity status and their personal lives chronicled in scores of magazines and TV programs. Movies have become a quasi religious phenomena, and the Church took notice in an Encyclical in 1936, acknowledging the power of the cinema:

"At the same time, there does not exist today a means of influencing the masses more potent than the cinema. The reason for this is to be sought for in the very nature of the pictures projected upon the screen, in the popularity of motion picture plays, and in the circumstances which accompany them.

"The power of the motion picture consists in this, it speaks by vivid and concrete imagery which the mind takes in with enjoyment and without fatigue. Even the crudest and most primitive minds which have neither the capacity nor the desire to make the efforts necessary for abstraction or deductive reasoning are captivated by the cinema. In place of the effort which reading or listening demands, there is the continued pleasure of a succession of concrete and, so to speak, living pictures."


The writer tells us that there are many movies with a humanitarian outlook on life that few would find troubling. However, there are many movies that would be troubling to those with a spiritual and religious value system. It is precisely for this reason that the Catholic Church in Korea should take an interest in the cinema, but has shown little interest in trying to get programs to evaluate movies, film festivals, movie appreciation days and the like.

The Catholic Church had shown some interest in movie festivals, but not for long. And programs devoted to the cinema on Catholic Brodcasting have decreased in number, and even some of the media groups are not as active as in the past.

An interest in this increasingly important medium will foster, according to the writer, a mature spirituality. The power of movies to provide a window to the culture of our times, to appeal to our feelings, and to achieve rapport with a large segment of society cannot be matched by any other medium. Movies can help us with an ongoing examination of our relationship with the earth, with others and with God and, in the process, renewing and enhancing our spirituality.

This has to be done, at times, with familiarity and joy; sometimes with a sharp intelligence and cold objectivity and sometimes with sensitivity and emotion. It can be a great help in experiencing spirituality. The cinema, used as a helpmate, can be of service to the Church in its teaching role.