Movie legends Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, William Holden and Spencer Tracy at one time or another either played the role of a priest or played the role of a character impersonating a priest.

And whether these actors and many other notable film stars who portrayed priests during Hollywood's “Golden Age” were just doing their job or throwing themselves wholeheartedly into something they held dear to their hearts, is not only unknowable but also not important.

What is important is that either via fear of overstepping public levels of taste or a belief in doing good work, the roles of priests were almost universally positive. By positive I do not mean sugar coated and one-dimensional.

Some priest characters in these films were hot tempered, some were torn over their vocation, some had moments of grave doubts.

Granted, nothing stays the same and films like Keys to the Kingdom, BoysTown and On the Waterfront, have been usurped by films and television fair like “Priest,” “MASH” and “Nothing Sacred.”

Almost without exception, the character of priests portrayed in popular culture during the past 20 years has shown either outright predators, sexually repressed miscreants or pathetically weak comedic foils. In the “MASH” television series, the priest is more decent than the one in the movie, but he is also extremely timid and very very “safe.”

When the character does have his rare moment in the sun, it is almost always to stand up for some kind of obligatory theme of tolerance against a rigid figure of authority. In the thankfully short-lived television series “Nothing Sacred,” besides there being nothing sacred, all of the main characters were made interesting by the show's creators through their subtle and not-so-subtle disobedience, which was portrayed as a virtue not a vice.

The main theme of these “modern” portrayals of the priesthood is the absolute lock-step adherence to the general cultural push toward giving one's own personal conscience transcendence over a larger, moral paradigm. Can we all say magisterium? I knew you could.

Yes, Vatican II stressed the individual conscience when confronting moral dilemmas, but the other side of the Vatican II coin, which never quite seems to get the same air play, is that if your conscience finds itself in variance with revealed Church teaching, then you missed a step or two in your process and you are to go back to the chalkboard and work it out again.

The oh-so-modern premise that whatever one feels, is the truth has had a very large impact on art, and, believe it or not, the movies are sometimes art. But today, the “good” priest in movies and TV is the man who questions everything. The “bad” priest is the man who doesn't. Graham Greene was a great novelist and screenwriter and used Catholicism and the priesthood in many of his best stories. Few of the people in Graham Greene's stories were models of virtue.

They were full-bodied men of flesh and blood filled with doubts and sins and conflict. Greene's characters were not having problems because some all-powerful, unthinking, menacing “Church” was preventing them from finding their true selves. Greene's characters, especially the priests, were conflicted because their true selves were broken and in need of salvation.

The Gone With the Wind of priest movies in the so-called golden age is probably Going My Way. The priest that Bing Crosby plays is “modern” by 1940s standards but at the same time never represents an antithesis of Catholic teaching. He is a man of the world, yet he is a man who joyfully belongs to God. He was Vatican II before Vatican II — in the world but not of the world. When Crosby's character visits a young lady who is suspected of living with a man she is not married to — I know this may come to a shock to some, but that was actually quite a scandal in those days — Crosby's Father O'Malley isn't embarrassed, titillated or timid.

He is wry and sophisticated, but, more importantly, he is a defender of Catholic moral teaching and very interested in the young lady's avoidance of the near occasion of sin. This is not to say he comes down like a ton of bricks on the young lady in the movie. His tactics are subtle, but the message he delivers about the unsatisfactory nature of a potential cohabitation rings loud and clear.

Although not being sure or not having a sense of faith in the teachings of the Church seems to be the template for the modern portrayals of priests and Catholics in movies and television, it's not all dark and dire. A few years ago a small film about Damien of Molokai was made that was not saccharine while at the same time not afraid to be Catholic either.

There are Catholic writers guilds popping up and even a Catholic screen-writing organization out here in the secular wilderness otherwise known as Los Angeles.

One of Pope John Paul II's favorite phrases is “be not afraid.” If more Catholic writers, producers and directors were to follow that advice and engage the television and movie industry, maybe the portrayals of religious people in movies and television will reclaim the respect they once held and which is now reserved apparently only for crooked cops and Mafia.

Robert Brennan is a television writer in Los Angeles.