The ‘Sacred’ Debate

“Nothing Sacred,” the TV series about a fictional Catholic parish, recently won a full season on the air despite its poor ratings, leaving Catholics divided over whether it’s an insulting portrait of trendily liberal priests or a worthy attempt to show them grappling with moral problems as doubt-plagued humans.

The decision by ABC to extend the series, despite a boycott campaign by the conservative Catholic League, brought cheer last week to the show’s set, a converted former shampoo factory in Canoga Park that stands in for the interiors of the fictional St. Thomas parish. (Exterior shots are of Angelica Lutheran Church near downtown Los Angeles.)

“We love this show,” said Steve Tao, ABC’s vice president of drama programming. “It’s one of the rare shows that moves and touches people.” Was it given a full season in part to defy the boycott campaign? “Not at all,” Tao said.

“ABC believes in the show and prefers to give it an opportunity to grow,” said David Manson, the executive producer.

The series about a liberal priest struggling with his faith came in 94th in the A.C. Nielsen rankings while competing at 8 p.m. Thursdays with NBC’s hugely popular “Friends.” Given a one-time try at 8 p.m. last Saturday, the program got a 2.3 rating among viewers 18 to 49, up from the 2.0 rating it averaged for the season, said Kevin Brockman, ABC vice president for public relations. “Nothing Sacred” will return to Thursday again on Dec. 11, he said.

Aside from schedule tinkering, more serious suspense looms in the creators’ minds over whether ABC will air an already-filmed episode featuring a priest who reveals to the series protagonist, Father Ray, played by Kevin Anderson, that he is gay and HIV-positive. Brockman would say only that no broadcast date has been set.

“I know it will be controversial for ABC, but I’m very proud of it,” Manson said. The script has Father Ray trying to dissuade the remorseful priest who broke the vow of celibacy from leaving the priesthood.

“We know there are in fact some gay priests and some with AIDS,” Manson said. “We didn’t want to do a piece about AIDS, but about compassion--about Father Ray’s desire to bring this man back into community, which is after all one of the great gifts the church offers.”

That is precisely the sort of topic that offended the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which accuses the program of propagandizing “to convince viewers that those Catholics who challenge the church’s teachings on women and sexuality are more compassionate . . . than those who uphold church teachings.”

The league is claiming victory for its boycott campaign, saying it succeeded in driving big-name sponsors off the show, such as Sears and Red Lobster restaurants.

But other Catholics have defended the program, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and Msgr. Gerald Wilkerson, an Encino parish priest who will be installed Jan. 21 as auxiliary bishop for the San Fernando Valley area.

“I don’t see anything too terribly wrong with the show,” Wilkerson said recently. “I guess nobody really wants to believe that a priest is human, that he never has doubts or questions.”

At the Oct. 26 Catholics in Media awards ceremony, the cardinal pointedly posed for photos with Anderson, the show’s star, and praised it for stirring up “tremendous discussion of the role of the parish priest” and portraying the “human struggles that people bring to their parishes.”

The Tidings, the newspaper of the Los Angeles archdiocese, said in an Oct. 3 editorial that the boycott campaign was unfair and that the show deserved a chance.

The names of more than 100 priests, nuns and bishops appeared Nov. 17 in an ad in the trade magazine Advertising Age, criticizing the Catholic League and urging advertisers to support the show. Among the signers were many Jesuit priests based at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester, including Father Donald Merrifield, the university’s chancellor.

The program’s principal writer is a Jesuit priest, Father Bill Cain of New York City, although in the credits he uses the pseudonym Paul Leland, saying he wants to avoid having the show marketed as written by a priest.

Disputing the claim by the Catholic League that “the [program’s] agenda is to make the culture more accepting of dissident Catholics,” Cain said: “What I’m trying to do is depict genuine people struggling to be faithful to the church, something that is no more easy to do than to raise a family.

“It is difficult to represent the goodness of what the church is trying to do while representing it honestly with its darkness and light,” he added.

The reaction from its Catholic defenders, as well as favorable comment from some critics, was cited by ABC and its parent, the Walt Disney Co., as major reasons for renewing the show.

At Disney headquarters in Burbank, spokesman John Dreyer said it was renewed despite poor ratings because “it’s a quality show.”

That leaves the standoff in place, pitting ABC and Disney on one side against the Catholic League on the other, with its newfound Protestant allies--Southern Baptist leaders and broadcaster James Dobson of Focus on the Family.

Last June, the Southern Baptists voted to boycott all Disney-related products.

Cain offers no apologies. He is delighted that the priests and nun depicted on his show “have turned out to matter to people,” he said, judging from many letters the show has received.

“This is the kind of Catholicism that people haven’t seen on television before.”

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* “Nothing Sacred” airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on ABC (Channel 7) but is preempted tonight.