Clark Hoyt considers the reactions of religious groups to the revival of Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi,” a play that portrays Jesus as a openly gay man:
It is tempting for a secular and culturally liberal newsroom like The Times’s to dismiss such objections, especially because many appear to have come from people who neither saw the play nor read in full what The Times said about it. No self-respecting newspaper is going to avoid writing about a controversial work of art because it might offend some segment of the public. That would go against everything a newspaper stands for — examination of anything that happens in the public square — and Donohue told me he agreed that The Times should have covered the “Corpus Christi” revival. He just did not like what the newspaper said about it.
A number of Catholics I spoke to expressed outrage or embarrassment at Donohue’s methods. “He overreacts; he caricatures the things he objects to,” said Paul Baumann, editor of the independent Catholic magazine Commonweal, who himself gave “Corpus Christi” a negative review in 1998. “He raises the temperature in the room in a very unhelpful way.”
I found Donohue’s language overheated, but I wound up thinking that he had put his finger on an interesting issue: how a newspaper like The Times, which devotes great space and energy to covering the arts, should deal with the frequent collisions between art and religion. The argument, as it did with “Corpus Christi” 10 years ago, often gets framed as a First Amendment fight between those championing freedom of speech and those seeking to stifle speech they object to. But lost in all of that can be the deeper story of the spiritual and religious tensions that gave rise to the art in the first place and the sensibilities of religious readers who may be struggling with aspects of their own faith.
Read his full commentary in the New York Times.