Excommunication of actors by the Catholic Church

Excommunication of actors was both literal and metaphorical practice of demeaning the reputation of actors as individuals or of their profession as the actors as well as refusing to recognize them as the individuals deserving the benefits of the religious rites under the Catholic customs. Many bishops, priests, and monks have strongly condemned theatrical amusements, and they even declared the actors to be 'instruments of Satan', 'a curse to the Church', and 'beguiling unstable souls'. The Roman Catholic Church believed theatre caused people to “indulge themselves in amusements which its fascinations interfere with the prosecution of the serious work of daily life. Anything pleasing or appealing to the lower nature, the ‘sensual appetites,’ were considered as temptations as dictated in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Lead us not into temptation,’” which one must avoid in order to lead an ideal Christian life. One must eat and drink for strength and not for gluttony and drunkenness, rest and sleep to the glory of God and not to sink into indolence and sloth nor to become the masters instead of the servants of the body, and amusements are the most dangerous temptations and the worst impulses from otherwise, "many Christians will relax their ordinary strictness “for the sake of the cause,” and that having once obtained a “taste of the nectar, they will continue to drink it” The Church instead encouraged Christians to strive to please their neighbours for good edification rather than pleasing oneself.

Clerical attacks on the actors

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Adrienne Lecouvreur's portrait painted ca. 1725; She died as an actress who was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church

Actors endured the Church’s antitheatrical prejudice attacks which included "social humiliations, aggressive animosity toward their profession and their lowly reputation. Religious attitude toward theatre not only hampered the profession as a whole but also humiliated them as individuals which also affected their family members". In the 1860s, James H. McVicker a theatre professional in Chicago had seen “a child refused admittance to a school, for a reason that the parents were connected with a theatre." In the same decade, the actress Anna Cora Mowatt stated that “being an actress, people considered her and all the actresses as immoral, flighty, silly buffoons who are not to be taken seriously for a moment.” This was due to the low reputation the Roman Catholic Church had given to the theatre. The theatre was affected financially as well because in “many areas, townspeople were scared away from viewing the performances under the Church’s influence, and the difficulty in attracting audiences resulted in inability to pay actors living wages and forced some to abandon their professions.” Travelling troupes, who perform in different cities had experienced difficulties getting help from the locals with the tasks of “finding a place to sleep, suitable place to perform, finding carpenters to build basic set ups, and finding musicians, etc., and the lack of local help was due to religious objection.” The Church also influenced greatly in producing new actors as many parents, worried about the low reputation of the profession, discouraged their children from pursuing the career as an actor. “Noah Ludlow had to flee home to pursue his dream in theatre which his parents disapproved of, and even much later when he got married, his wife’s family pressured him to abandon his career on stage.”

Church’s treatment towards women in theatre

In 1860, John Angell James in Female Piety or A Young Woman’s Friend and Guide expresses that “the nature of the women derive from Eve, who was the cause of the sin and death in our world as well as the reason why mankind was driven out of the Garden of Eden. She is a temptress who caused the fall of the man by tempting him into doing evil.” James then adds: “She could never attain to dignity, and even with all her brightest charms, could rarely appear but with the beauty of a doll” The actresses “frequently changed costumes in the same general backstage with men, and they gave lascivious smiles, kissed and played love scene with men on the stage." The Church considered these acts as acts of tempting men, and therefore, actresses’ appearances on the stage was viewed with “impurity” or “immorality” because of her profession. Such religious prejudice led the divorce rate of actress to be higher than other women of different professions. In John Harold Wilson’s All the King’s Ladies from 1958, Wilson presents synonym of “actress” as “prostitute” because financially depraved actresses difficulty in attracting audiences were expected to be available offstage to wealthy men, and out of eighty women who were known to have been actresses in London from 1660 to 1689, at least twelve according to Wilson’s research, left the stage to become mistresses or prostitutes.

Limitations on French theatre imposed by Church

A priest giving the last rites to a sick person in deathbed.

Even exclusively Catholic countries were “tolerant of the church-goers’ ordinary theatrical amusements and allowed the general population to patronize the theatre. In most of the countries, theatres were even allowed to be opened on Sunday evenings when the popular plays are put on the boards. In Lent, the Catholic Church would dissuade or even prohibit the people from going to the theatre, and in some countries, where the civil law is controlled by the Church of Rome, the theaters were closed in Lent.” The theatres in France had even more restrictions and limitations as the actors turned to the royal patronage for financial aid by joining the state theatre, Comédie-Française. “The actors of this state theatre were considered as servants of the king and were expected to entertain at the court under the rules and regulations of the royal authority. Anything from assigning roles to the actors and demanding actors to be punctual on the rehearsals were strictly controlled by the royal authority. Playwrights were personally obligated to obtain official approvals from the Lieutenant-General of Police who read the manuscripts and gave approvals based on the rules revolved around the King as well as the Church and the political notables. Plays could not mock or violate Roman Catholic beliefs and ceremonies, nor it can satirize living public figures (including the monarch)” “The Church in France also condemned the theatre as a school for scandal, held all actors to be ipso facto excommunicated, and forbade their burial in consecrated ground - which included every cemetery in Paris:

“Actors are paid wages by the King, and excommunicated by the Church; they are ordered by the King to play every evening, and forbidden to play at all by the ritual. If they do not play they are put in to prison [as happened when His Majesty's Players went on strike]; if they play they are [at death] cast into the sewers”

In fact, in 1730, Adrienne Lecouvreur died at the age of 38, but she was denied Christian burial and was hastily buried in the dead of night in an unmarked grave. This was because the Church in France still banned the actors from receiving any sacraments which included marriage, baptism, or final rites, and only by renouncing their professions first, they were able to receive the sacraments from the Church. Also, the Church refused Molière’s burial in the sanctified burial because he had not received the last rites with the priest present and that he did not renounce his profession as an actor before his death. When King Louis XIV directly intervened, the Archbishop of Paris allowed Molière to be buried only after sunset among the suicides’ and paupers’ graves with no requiem masses permitted in the Church.

Patristic views on theatre

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The Cover of St. Augustine's Confessions

• Clement of Alexandria (150-215 A.D.): dramatic compositions are nonsense and empty and would only lead to human misery. Christ is the real, eternal truth in the theatre of the universe. Christians don’t serve two masters so they must maintain distant from theatre which doesn’t serve Christ.
• Tertullian (160-230 A.D.): First Latin Church Father was against the existence of permanent theatre. Tertullian interpreted the theatre of Pompeius as the theatre as a whole, as a dwelling place of the gods Venus and Liber, and a place where idololatria (capital crime of mankind including adultery, fraud, drunkenness, fornication; accumulation of deadly sins) committed. He thought theatre belonged to the pomp of the devil, and whoever went to theatre could not be an official.
• Arnobius (300 A.D.) and Lactantius (260-340 A.D.): Arnobius considered theatre to the special and favourable ground for the activity of the daemons to exercise their influence on humans. Lactantius says that with the conversion of Constantine in the fifth century, a Christian culture slowly began to emerge which was manifested in art, literature and Christian architecture which is committing idoloatria (capital crime; an accumulation of several deadly sins).
• Augustine (354-430 A.D.): the origin of the gods and the theatre are “deadly poison” and “crazy institution” rooted in demoralization and licentiousness and thus a dangerous influence on Roman youth. “The statues, effigies and altars of Roman theatres marked their theatres as the domain of the pagan gods, and theatre, with the rest of the pagan culture, substitutes the spiritual joy of knowing God through scripture with earthly obsessions.”

• Discusses about the theatre in his texts: Confessions, The City of God, Concerning the Teacher, and On Christian Doctrine.
• Confessions: Augustine was attracted to theatre (the tragedies) and enjoyed the actor's performances which gave him things to grieve and pity from which he gained "harmful pleasure.” Theatrical performances only affected the surface of his emotion, and as if he had been scratched with the poisoned fingernails, his life was filled with inflammation, swelling, putrefaction and corruption.

• Isidore of Seville (ca. 560-633 A.D.): emphasized the wickedness of the stage should not be blamed on men but on the daemons because they had initiated the theatre.

Defending theatre

J. M. Beckley argues that “amusement is necessary” in order to relieve frustrations from everyday life and to “let off steam.” The body and mind will alike to rebel if they are constantly being under the surveillance of the Church. Theatre gratifies some of the desires of men, pleases their tastes.