In his Letter to Artists the Pope says that secular artists depict for us with power what the world without God looks like, and we owe them gratitude for that. Take a movie like Magnolia, or Eyes Wide Shut. When the industry is making an indictment of a particular world, for people in the church to say, "That's a bad movie," because presumably we're not even supposed to look at that world, makes no sense at all.

I would say the movie Boogie Nights, for instance, was an indictment of the porn world and what it does to people. Most thoughtful people would look at the world depicted in Boogie Nights and see that it's empty, shallow, that it's missing intimacy. It's so sad; it's tragic. No way do you come out of that movie wanting to be in that world. Yet I hear people in the church say "How dare you make a movie about the porn industry—do you know there's a scene where they're having sex?" OK, is it that we are not allowed to make a movie about that world? Do we say to our Christian artists there are areas of human life that are off limits to you? Because that notion deserves to be slammed.

To tell you the truth, I'll take an R-rated true movie over a G-rated saccharin lie movie any day. Because with the R-rated film I'm being challenged and I'm growing. If we turned over Hollywood to the Christians tomorrow, we'd make worse movies than we're making now because they would mostly be guilty of what Flannery O'Connor called—for Christians—"inexcusable sentimentality."

This is, incidentally, why I can recommend Requiem for a Dream to everyone I know and derive only minimal pleasure out of seeing a little lesbian loving at the end. I mean, yeah, you can sort of look at it and say look, there's someone's butt, and have your chuckle. Or, you can look at the world as it is, get over it, and see what you can do with the movie, what you can learn. I think this is the rather more laudable course. Surely, preparation is necessary. You don't feed a baby chile peppers, you feed him his mother's milk. But when he's grown, then he can get on to the real stuff, and it will make him stronger and better able to survive.

I think the thing I miss the most about NYU is that it was really fight or flight down there with being Catholic. You were either hardcore or you died. But I digress.

It goes back to contraception. I suppose I sound like a wacko when I say that, but once you took the self-donation, the possibility of sacrifice out of sex, the door was opened. It became about your own self-fixation, what you're getting out of it, because it feels good—that was it. About gays, we cut these poor people off forty years ago when so many pastors and teachers in the Church signed on to the sexual revolution. They hear that you can have sex with anyone you care about. And now these people are trapped.

My former pastor at my RCIA program wouldn't even speak to our young converts about contraception—he was embarrassed. So I would speak to them about it. When my catechumens hear about the Theology of the Body they start crying because it's such a beautiful ideal—two emptinesses making a whole, two people pouring themselves out in order to be fulfilled. In six years, I've never yet had a couple I've worked with—and I know when I start who's living with each other—I've never had one couple who within three months, are still living with each other. It's because they want to be pure, they want to be heroes, they want to be more than they are. That's what this teaching is. It's peace for these couples.

May I say, word. Call it like it is. People will follow.