Condemned by the Legion of Decency!!!

Good Catholic kids were not supposed to see movies that were deemed morally objectionable. And to help us decide just which films to avoid (or see, depending upon whether you took the whole thing seriously) there existed an organization called the Legion of Decency, whose job it was to rate films. The rankings were then published in local Catholic publications, like The Tablet, the Diocese of Brooklyn's official paper. And once a year, the schools wanted all of us to stand up in church and recite the Legion of Decency Pledge, in which we promised not to see those movies our elders deemed inappropriate.

The Legion used a scale that, as far as I can recall, went as follows:

A-1. Morally unobjectionable for all. "Herbie the Love Bug" and the like.

A-2. Morally unobjectionable for adults and adolescents. This made teenagers feel good, since they wanted to feel like grown-ups. I cannot, however, remember an A-2 film.

A-3. Morally unobjectionable for adults with reservations. Huh?

B. Morally objectionable in parts for all. Here was where we were getting interesting.

C. Condemned. "The Graduate, "What Would You Say to a Naked Lady?"

I think I recited the Pledge once, when I was small, and didn't know what it was about. Only the really hard-core Catholic kids, the ones whose families, my grandmother used to say, were "Eating the lace off of the altar," took the Legion's ratings to heart. It was another example of how people's perspectives were changing.