Moving Picture Shows by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 25, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 42.

Moving Picture Shows

By Editor

The Pope and the United States.—Through Cardinal Vannutelli, the papal legate, now in America, Pope Pius X sends by way of the Hearst papers a message to the Catholics of America. We take the following from that message in the San Francisco Examiner of October 7, dated New York, October 6:

“The Holy Father is commencing more and more to regard your wonderful United States as the favorite daughter of the church. Catholicism has here made more wonderful strides than anywhere else in the world. Your bishops and priests and teachers have built up a magnificent church organization. Under your government of freedom and personal liberty, the church and its individuals have prospered splendidly.”

There is more along the same line. We have only this to say: Let Pope Pius X and all other Catholics, and all the people of the United States, for that matter, remember that the thing that made the United States what it is, apart from its natural physical resources, is its religious liberty, its true Protestant principle of religious liberty. Under that egis the Roman Catholic Church has had the freedom which she has denied to men of other belief in other lands. There the fruitage of her work for centuries is now recoiling upon the system; while in this country, men judging her by her modified appearance, instead of taking her at her true estimate demonstrated by centuries in other lands, are turning to her fold. This would not be if the Protestant churches had not failed to protest, and failed to protest, because they have turned from the Bible as the Word of God.

Moving Picture Shows

A RECENT investigation of moving picture shows in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, revealed the following facts: Of 290 films examined, 40 per cent represented robbery; 13.1 per cent, murder; 8.2 per cent, indecent suggestions; and 5.8 per cent, domestic infidelity. Others represented suicide, kidnapping, and loose ideals of marriage. It was also found that more than one fifth of the evening audiences was under eighteen years of age.

These conditions in Cleveland are not exceptional, but may be considered fairly typical of conditions in other cities. The influence of suggestion is generally recognized and acknowledged; and information gathered from police court records, reveal the moving picture shows as schools of crime that require immediate attention at the hands of the proper authorities. Almost daily there is brought before the children’s court in New York for a violation of the law, some juvenile prisoner whose act was inspired by moving pictures.—Christian Endeavor World.