Tonight is the opening of Portland Center Stage’s last production of the season: John Patrick Shanley’s extraordinary Pulitzer-, Obie- and Tony-winning 2004 play, Doubt, directed by Rose Riordan. The script, by far the finest I’ve read from the last decade, addresses a 1964 battle of wills between a Sister Aloysius, a nun so staunchly traditional she frowns on the use of ballpoint pens by her students, and Father Flynn, a progressive young priest determined to follow the Second Vatican Council’s directive to be friendly with his parishoners, over the possible molestation of a black student—the first to attend their Bronx parish school.
It’s a great play and should, barring disaster, make for a good production at PCS. The cast is very strong—I’ve interviewed Jennifer Lee Taylor, playing big-hearted Sister James, elsewhere—and Shanley’s play is one of the very few that is entirely satisfying when read on its own. What’s interesting is that there’s a tenuous link in the play to Oregon history—and no, I don’t mean the Archdiocese of Portland’s ongoing problems. In 1925, our state was at the center of a bigotry-charged battle over church/state rights. The Oregon Blue Book explains:
Wartime stress, emphasis on patriotism, distrust of German-Americans, eugenics campaigns championed by Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, and anti-Catholic bigotry created fertile ground in Oregon for the rise of the American Protective Association, Federation of Patriotic Societies, and the Ku Klux Klan. With a combined membership estimated at more than 64,000 Oregonians, these organizations fed on the fear and distrust of residents in a period of social flux and uncertainty. Although minorities were few in number, racism and bigotry were imported ideas. They came with newcomers from other parts of the country and grew in soil that already nurtured suspicion and tendencies to vigilante action. Chapters of the Ku Klux Klan formed in Tillamook, Medford, Eugene, and Portland, as well as many other towns. Robed Klansmen paraded in the streets, ignited crosses on hillsides, nailed American flags to the doors of Catholic schools, and intimidated African-Americans.
The Klan, FOPS, and Scottish Rite Masons sponsored a bill, passed in 1922 in the general election, to compel all children to attend public schools. The overtly anti-Catholic measure threatened to close all parochial schools and military academies. The state Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1924 and the U.S. Supreme Court concurred in 1925.
The decision in Pierce v. Society of Sisters had far reaching consequences—it marked the first time the Supreme Court applied the 14th Amendment to a non-human entity, and started the expansion of the rights it is interpreted to cover (to marry whoever you want, to have children, to have an abortion, etc.). All thanks to some Oregon nuns who wouldn’t be bullied by the forces of intolerance.
