Letters

'King Arthur' an anti-Catholic movie

Fr Brian Harrison

Contents - Sep 2004 - Buy a copy now Editorial: 2004 Fighting Fund launched - Michael Gilchrist Morwell: Vatican decision backs parish priests who uphold Church teachings - Michael Gilchrist News: The Church Around the World Pulp Fiction: Religious illiteracy and 'The Da Vinci Code' - Fr Martin Tierney Books: Exposing 'The Da Vinci Code' fraud - James Hitchcock Iraqi bishop: positive developments despite the violence and bloodshed - Bishop Rabban Al-Qas Terrorist attacks on Iraqi Christians - Catholic World News Mass Attendance: Where have all the worshippers gone? - Fr Martin Durham Sydney Catholic Adult Education Centre courses prove popular - Peter Holmes Mission: Sydney seminary's evangelisation program revitalises parish - Bishop Julian Porteous Events: Carnivale Christi Melbourne to celebrate Graham Greene's centenary - Liam Houlihan Why not a little Latin in the liturgy? - Angus Sibley Adult education: Latin language course in Melbourne Letters: Thank you from East Timor (letter) - Fr Marcos de Oliviera SDB Letters: Mass translation? - Philip Holberton Letters: NRSV Bible - Mrs M.A. Ross Letters: Liturgy abuses - Peter Lynch Letters: 'King Arthur' an anti-Catholic movie - Fr Brian Harrison Letters: Permissiveness - Ena Makaus Letters: State Aid - George Caruana JP Letters: Maronite Church - L.L. Booth Letters: Support given - Barry O'Brien Letters: The Power of One - Carola Morgan Letters: AIDS in the Philippines - Christopher Rule Letters: Freedom to be Born pro-life march - George F. Simpson Letters: Moral relativism - Tim Coyle Books: The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins - John Barich (reviewer) Books: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America, by David Carlin - Fr James Schall SJ (reviewer) Books: Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from Hitler's Reich, by Alan Gill - Michael Gilchrist (reviewer) Books: Catholic Family Catechism: 2004 Disciples Edition with 50 Questions and Answers - Fr Peter Murphy Books: More new titles from AD Books Reflection: Why the priesthood is absolutely necessary - Fr John O'Neill

I have just been to see the new movie King Arthur, in the hope that a film based on a famously Christian (even if semi-legendary) hero of antiquity might perhaps present the fifth century Catholic ethos in a favourable light.

No such luck. You won't read this in media reviews of the movie, but King Arthur is in fact a viciously anti-Catholic diatribe. Indeed, its propaganda is pitched at about the level of a Jack Chick comic book.

The bishop sent to Britain as the Pope's emissary is a leering, scheming politician. Other clerics are portrayed as pitiful, simpering cowards: one of them, muttering the Hail Mary (in that detested language, Latin), is made an object of audience contempt as he is mimicked and ridiculed by one of Arthur's "heroic" knights.

An ostentatiously Catholic landowner of Roman nationality (his teenage son is earmarked to become a bishop) proves to be an enslaver, torturer and murderer of innocent pagan British villagers - old men, women and children. All of these heathen, he protests, are "sacrificed" in the name of God and the faith.

Indeed, when Arthur breaks into this monster's dungeon to liberate the survivors, he discovers that it is doubling as a chapel where sallow, simpering monks accompany their victims' agony by praying the Divine Office.

Obviously Baghdad's Abu Ghraib was a picnic compared to the diabolical sadism and hypocrisy of torture-chambers run by the imperialistic Church of Rome.

And what of Arthur's own religion? After our hero's eyes are opened to the iniquity of Catholicism and all its works, he cuts all ties with papal Rome and stays with the religion of Pelagius - St Augustine's heretical adversary who denied original sin and claimed that man, without grace, could save himself by his own efforts. Arthur's ideological message: the God of Pelagius stands for human freedom, independence and dignity, in contrast, of course, to the God of you-know-who in the Vatican.

Catholics should expose and boycott this poisonous movie, which perhaps is Hollywood's revenge against Mel Gibson.

FR BRIAN HARRISON
Ponce, Puerto Rico

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 17 No 8 (September 2004), p. 15