Legion of Decency

The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was founded in 1933 as an organization dedicated to identifying and combating objectionable content in motion pictures from the point of view of the American Catholic Church. After receiving a stamp of approval from the secular offices behind Hollywood's Production Code, films during this time period were then submitted to the National Legion of Decency to be reviewed prior to their official duplication and distribution to the general public. Condemnation by the Legion would shake a film's core for success because it meant the population of Catholics, some twenty million strong at the time, were theoretically forbidden from attending any screening of the film under pain of mortal sin. The efforts to help parishioners avoid films with objectional content backfired when it was found that it helped promote those films in heavily Catholic neighborhoods among Catholics who may have seen the listing as a suggestion. Although the Legion was often envisioned as a bureaucratic arm of the Catholic Church, it instead was little more than a loose confederation of local organizations, with each diocese appointing a local Legion director, usually a parish priest, who was responsible for Legion activities in that diocese.

In 1915, the Supreme Court heard a case regarding censorship in motion pictures called Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio; the Supreme Court held that states could censor films before they were released. In 1948, the Supreme Court reversed the Mutual decision in the United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. case. This is the case that established the Supreme Court's position on censoring films: that they are protected under the First Amendment as part of freedom of the press. Just four years later, in 1952, the Supreme Court heard Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, the first case where the holding was that movies were protected under the free speech section of the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. This case, also known as "The Miracle" case, was based on the New York state ban on the Italian film The Miracle because it was deemed sacrilegious by many Catholic groups, including the Legion of Decency. The court's decision that a film could not be banned because it was sacrilegious was challenged a year later in the Gelling v. Texas case, in which a city in Texas had banned a film before its release. The court upheld its previous ruling in the Miracle case, explaining that the American people could decide for themselves what they should and should not see. Later, in 1957, the Supreme Court gave the film industry even more freedom in Roth v. United States, which held that movies could not be banned for being unsuitable for children if the movie was made for general audiences. The Supreme Court's position on film censorship, established in 1948, has been consistently against state censorship of film.

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