These considerations take on greater seriousness from the fact that the
cinema speaks not to individuals but to multitudes, and that it does so in
circumstances of time and place and surroundings which are most apt to arouse
unusual enthusiasm for the good as well as for the bad and to conduce to that
collective exaltation which, as experience teaches us, may assume the most
morbid forms.
The motion picture is viewed by people who are seated in a dark theatre
and whose faculties, mental, physical, and often spiritual, are relaxed. One
does not need to go far in search of these theatres: they are close to the
home, to the church, and to the school and they thus bring the cinema into the
very centre of popular life.
Moreover, stories and actions are presented, through the cinema, by men
and women whose natural gifts are increased by training and embellished by
every known art, in a manner which may possibly become an additional source of
corruption, especially to the young. Further, the motion picture has enlisted
in its service luxurious appointments, pleasing music, the vigour of realism,
every form of whim and fancy. For this very reason, it attracts and fascinates
particularly the young, the adolescent, and even the child. Thus at the very
age when the moral sense is being formed and when the notions and sentiments of
justice and rectitude, of duty and obligation and of ideals of life are being
developed, the motion picture with its direct propaganda assumes a position of
commanding influence.
It is unfortunate that, in the present state of affairs, this influence
is frequently exerted for evil. So much so that when one thinks of the havoc
wrought in the souls of youth and of childhood, of the loss of innocence so
often suffered in the motion picture theatres, there comes to mind the terrible
condemnation pronounced by Our Lord upon the corrupters of little ones: "whosoever
shall scandalize one of these little ones who believe in Me, it were better for
him that a millstone be hanged about his neck and that he be drowned in the
depths of the sea".