‘Blue Bloods’: The Most Catholic Network TV Series Bids Farewell
National Catholic Register, 13 December 2024
For the past 14 years on Friday nights, the Reagan family endured the pains of policing with the help of God’s grace.
The most Catholic show on network television has its finale tonight, 14 years and 283 episodes after its premiere in September 2010. Blue Bloods has had an extraordinary run in a time when network television has been hemorrhaging audiences.
Blue Bloods is not only a police drama. It’s a family drama about a police family. Tom Selleck stars as Francis (Frank) Xavier Reagan, the Irish Catholic police commissioner of New York City. Widowed, he lives with his widower father, Henry Reagan, who also served as the NYPD commissioner, now retired. Frank has three sons, all New York policemen, though corrupt cops killed the eldest before the series begins. His daughter is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. Law enforcement is the family business.
There have been other family crime shows — either highlighting the cops or the robbers. But Blue Bloods is a show about a practicing Catholic family. They go to Mass every Sunday and then have family dinner together. Every episode includes the Sunday dinner scene, the most distinctive and popular part of the show. The Reagans don’t begin until they have said grace before meals, making them the only network TV family shown praying regularly.
There are plenty of other Catholic aspects to the show. Frank goes to confession and regularly consults with the archbishop of New York. Key scenes are often set in churches. There have been the obligatory storylines about the seal of the confessional, including one of the best dialogues about confession ever filmed, prompted by Frank asking a priest to help him find a child who has been kidnapped.
The patriarch of the clan, Henry Reagan, upbraids his son for trying to get a priest to break the seal, no matter the emergency.
“You did a shameful thing,” Henry tells Frank, one NYPD commissioner to another. “And you know it.”
“Put yourself in Father Phil’s shoes,” Henry continues. “He’s earned his right to protect the seal.”
“How?” Frank asks.
“You confess your sins. You say your three Hail Marys. You drop some change in the poor box on your way out. But the priest, he’s left with your sins. He absorbs your sins. He prays for you.”
“As he took a vow to do,” says Frank.
“Yes, and he has nothing but smiles and good cheer for the cheating husband and his innocent family when he sees them at church after Mass on Sunday,” Henry explains. “This costs a priest — times all the sinners, times all the years.”
For reasons like that, Bill Donohue of the Catholic Civil Rights League — usually in the umbrage-taking business — wrote in 2011, when the show was returned for a second season, that it was “one the few TV shows on the broadcast networks to treat Catholicism fairly” and that “the family-oriented program often casts a good light on Catholicism. Glad the Catholic-friendly show is being renewed.”
Blue Bloods portrays a typical Catholic family as it is, not an idealized version. Actually, given that the vast majority of Catholics do not attend Sunday Mass, it is a bit of an idealized version. Otherwise, the family struggles with all the problems the culture throws up. Daughter Erin is divorced. Danny, the elder surviving son, struggles with faith in the face of tragedy. Jamie, the other son, debates about whether to get married in the Church (he eventually does).
Along the way, there is a myriad of struggles over how to do the right thing when you expend extensive energy trying to catch people doing the wrong thing. Blue Bloods is more about how policing is done properly than it is about catching the perps. Investigative techniques, legal procedures, political priorities, media passions, racial tensions, excessive force, corruption — all these are considered in the light of moral character, and the obligations of honor, duty, religion and faith.
There have been occasions when the umbrage-takers have taken umbrage. In 2014, one storyline had Frank handling the case of a gay cop, and confessing that he thought the Church was “behind the times” on matters homosexual, even if he himself “liked the Latin Mass.” Donohue was on the case, “wondering whether CBS is turning on its audience.”
“We were bombarded with complaints,” said Donohue. “The audience for Blue Bloods has been carefully cultivated, so the price tag for alienating its base is high. Time will tell.”
Time did. Blue Bloods stayed on the air for another 10 years.
The Catholicity of the Reagan family has been a needed corrective to an ecclesial culture that too often elevates the moral law above the worship of God, as if the Fifth and Sixth Commandments were more important than the Third. The police know a lot about violations of the Fifth and Sixth, so observing the Third — Keep Holy the Lord’s Day — is significant.
The Reagans, aside from their unusually faithful worship, are reflective of U.S. Catholics as a whole, who by large margins do think that Catholic teaching on homosexuality is outdated. That doesn’t make the teaching wrong, just unpopular. It does mean that a family that disagrees is part of the American Catholic landscape.
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