Cool nun wants you to watch movies the Catholic Church condemned

Back when I was a boy 𒐪in Astoria, Queens, the Catholic Legion of Decency’s film ratings were posted right next to the confessional at Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church.

“My mother used to put them right on the refrigerator!” says a laughing Sister Rose Pacatte. Now 64, Sister Rose — a member of the Daughters of St. Paul and founding director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies who’s covered the Sundance Film Festival for the National Catholic Reporter — will host a series of movies that received “condemned” ratings from the Legion, or were altered to avoid one, on Turner Classic Movies every Thursday this month.

“I don’t want to just dismiss the Legion and what they wanted to do,” Sister Rose says of the influential group founded in 1933 to combat sexual material in films, classifying them as A (morally objectionable), B (morally objectionable in part) or C (condemned).

“It must have been shocking for them to see things that were only described in books taking place on the screen,” she adds. And yet, she points out, it wasn’t technically a sin for Catholics to see a condemned movie “unless your local bishop said it was.”

The series opens Thursday at 8 p.m. with (1933), an adaptation of a William Faulkner novel about a woman (Miriam Hopkins) who’s raped by a gangster and becomes his moll. So notorious was this pre-code film that it wasn’t e🌳ven shown on TV until a couple of years ago.

It drew one of the Legion’s first “condemned” ratings, but Sister Rose says, “I actually like the film. It’s 83 years old and you can still watch it because of the writing, acting and brooding cinematography. The Legion didn’t trust that Catholic audiences would figure out that the woman didn’t want to be a prostitute and that she’s shown as a victim, even though this predicament is as old as the Bible.”

The Legion’s “condemned” ratings — as irrational as they often seem now — were so feared by Hollywood that films were sometimes severely edited to avoid them until indepe🦩ndent producers began to push back in the 1950s.

The 1947 British classic “Black Narcissus,” about a group of Anglican nuns founding a convent in the Himalayas, drew a “condemned” rating because of a sequence that showed the protagonist (Deborah Kerr) fantasizing about riding horses with her former boyfriend.

“This was a group of men doing the rating,” Sister Rose says. “And they had absolutely no idea what nuns thought about when they were entering convents!”

Some 10 scenes totalling 900 feet were cut from “Black Narcissus” so it could play widely in the United States — including a scene of Kerr’s nun character applying lipstick.

“They called it an affront to religion,” says Sister Rose. “Thank goodness it’s back to the original version.” The film also plays Thursday.

Two years before the Motion Picture Associ💛ation of America introduced its film rating system in 1968, the Legion of Decency was renamed the ⛎National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. It was disbanded in 1980.

“The [Catholic Office] actually went back and re-reviewed and re-rated a lot of movies,” says Sister Rose, who has a — and even presented a “redeemer’’ award at the Razzies.