c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ Who does more damage to faith and morals, the old heretics once thought fit for burning, or the new movies that are not fit for viewing?

A quarter of a century ago, mostly because of the movie”The Exorcist,”our imaginative world was crowded with devils who seemed to possess only adolescent girls. You could tell the Devil was in them because he made them throw up.

Now our imagination is wall to wall with New Age angels, thanks to innumerable movies and television shows. How can these”angels”fly with so much sentimental goo on their wings? You can identify these faux spiritual visitors because they make us throw up.

Stephen Holden has addressed this state of affairs in a recent article in The New York Times, offering insights from a secular perspective that transcend most of the vaguely receptive observations made in professionally”religious”publications.

He lists the recent movies on whose tiny heads angels beyond counting dance. These include”Holy Man,”with its slogan”Let go, give in, and take the journey,”echoing the mind-altered 70s'”Turn on, tune in and drop out.” The mission, so right for the Consumer Age, of the angelic character played by Eddie Murphy is to help a Shopping Network sell off all the junk merchandise in its warehouse.

This film, the critic observes, exploits”mass culture’s rampant `Touched by An Angel’ syndrome, in which a heavenly figure intervenes in earthly matters to provide a comforting glimpse of spiritual enlightenment and sometimes also to solve characters’ romantic problems …. when the enlightenment involves true love, things on the screen can get awfully sticky.” It is not bad enough that in the recent”City of Angels”the angel, played by Nicholas Cage, falls in love with a mortal, a doctor, and”forfeits eternal life to taste the pleasures of sex, surf and California cuisine.”In”What Dreams May Come,”Robin Williams also plays a doctor killed in an accident who travels from an Impressionist painted heaven to rescue his wife, who has committed suicide, from hell.

And in the forthcoming”Meet Joe Black,”Death in the person of Brad Pitt is on a house call when he falls in love with _ you guessed it _ a lady doctor. He also falls for earthly food, especially peanut butter.

You would think doctors already have enough trouble in America, battling HMO business sharks who won’t pay them and trial lawyers who will sue them for any money they have left. To cast physicians as rehabilitated Adams and Eves insults them and their patients as well.

Holden rightly identifies these films as”bloated reflections of a narcissistic age obsessed with eternal youth. If love is decreed by magic, you don’t have to work at it. … If spiritual insight arrives from on high, you don’t have to waste precious time in prayer, meditation and study. … (W)hat better symbol is there than an angel, a manifestation of divinity that isn’t really attached to a particular dogma?” This film critic offers us a contemporary example of the”cheap grace”that spiritual writers have understood as an illusion of easy salvation for centuries. These movies give religion a worse name than the now heavily publicized millennialists who look forward to the end of everything, not just non-updated computers, in the year 2000.

Nobody would deny anybody else the minor pleasure of watching a show or movie that is so terrible that it entertains as only junk can. But film is an artist’s medium that may, like great novels and plays, allow us to see more deeply into our souls and, with a sense of understanding, the broader human condition.

Chances are that you have seen movies that have delivered spiritual insight. It is a safe wager that none of them contained angels or other concretized heavenly figures.

Instead, as in John Schlesinger’s”The Midnight Cowboy,”they made you work internally to grasp the way redemption takes place in life. Or against the dead-on religious background of John Gregory Dunne’s”True Confessions,”we reflect on the deepest of our human ties and the ruins of ecclesiastical ambition. You can easily make your own list.

It is not how far movies can go with special effects of angels and their visitations that make them”religious.”It is how deeply they explore the unpracticed effects of real men and women, in the ever tragic circumstances of ordinary life that make them truly spiritual and supremely religious.

DEA END KENNEDY