National Legion of Decency

The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was an American Catholic group founded in 1934 by the Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences. Members were asked to pledge to patronize only those motion pictures which did not "offend decency and Christian morality". The concept soon gained support from other churches. Condemnation by the Legion would often diminish a film's chances for success because it meant the population of Catholics, some twenty million strong at the time (plus their Protestant allies), would avoid attending any screening of the film. The efforts to help parishioners avoid films with objectionable content sometimes backfired when it was found that they helped draw attention to those films. Although the Legion was often envisioned as a bureaucratic arm of the Catholic Church, it instead was little more than a loose confederation of local organizations, with each diocese appointing a local Legion director, usually a parish priest, who was responsible for Legion activities in that diocese. Film historian Bernard F. Dick wrote: "Although the Legion was never officially an organ of the Catholic Church, and its movie ratings were nonbinding, many Catholics were still guided by the Legion's classifications." In 1965, The National Legion of Decency was reorganized as the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures (NCOMP). In 1980, NCOMP ceased operations, along with the biweekly Review, which by then had published ratings for 16,251 feature films.