Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The Movie Elizabeth is an Anti Catholic Screed

Well I guess I am not getting this movie. It appears someone similar to Oliver Stone produced it. Father at Standing on My Head has a review here.

Mary Tudor is portrayed as a sick and wicked witch in a dungeon. She's ugly. She's dark. She's got bad teeth. She's vengeful and nasty and neurotic. Think Geraldine McEwan's over the top witch in that Kevin Costner Robin Hood nightmare. Mary Tudor may not have been the Little Flower, but surely her character deserved more sympathy than the pantomime villain portrayed here.

The religious controversy? Catholic bishops are all dressed in black with big black miters. They're filmed from an ultra low angle making them seem like big, bad monsters. Gardner is a one-eyed, raging fanatic. The pope is seen fondling little boys before he signs the bull excommunicating Elizabeth. Then he commissions a black robed murderous priest to head off to England and assassinate Elizabeth. This guy is just one step removed from Dan Brown's ludicrous albino assassin.

Oh and like a Oliver Stone JFK movies the rest of the "history" stinks too.

However this is sort of useful in a way. We see here why in a good bit of the English speaking world we saw so much anti Catholicism. It had little to do with religion but power politics. This was mostly played out in the theme of ENGLISH GOOD and SPANISH DARK AND EVIL. The English Civilized the world while the dark Spanish just foisted superstition and abused the populace.

No talk of English bad deeds. We hear about the "Spanish Inquisition" yet despite a large "Cajun/Acadian population in the USA we hear nothing about the war crime that was their expulsion from Canada. In American history class the history of France and Spain in what we know as the United States is barely mentioned. There is no talk about the laws against Catholics in America Colonial days. Again it is largely politics not religion.

Elizabeth in many ways just shows what the state of affairs has been for many hundreds of years. What is sad is in the 21st century no one thought to correct it.

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