was not as critical of the film as media coverage at the time suggested. Privately it considered the film to be faith-affirming. Authorities in Tunisia banned the film before its release there in 1975 as "unjustified propaganda in favor of Christianity". In 2008, Colleen McDannell, editor of Catholics In The Movies, wrote that "The Exorcist is a horror movie that believes in its villain and, even worse, recruits its villain as a witness to Catholic truth." In February 1974, the Jesuit magazine America ran several commentaries and responses by priests to the film, some of which reiterated criticisms already made. The editors allowed Blatty to publish a response later that month. He praised some of the commentators' points, "[b]ut I am truly dismayed at the misconceptions held, not only by critics, but also defenders of the novel and film. And when I see that they are Jesuits, whom I thanked on the acknowledgement page of my novel for 'teaching me to think,' I can only conclude that the fault must be mine, and that what I thought obvious, was not." The changes to the film's ending from the novel, Blatty agreed, might have made it harder to perceive that "the mystery of goodness" was the theme of the work, since it appeared to many viewers, including some of those who had written in the magazine, that the film ended with the demon triumphant through the deaths of the priests even if it had been successfully exorcised from Regan. The ending of the novel made this theme clearer, but even in the film he saw Karras's suicide as a sacrificial act of love that reaffirmed his faith in death. Blatty also corrected the misapprehension, common at the time, that the spirit possessing Regan was Satan, noting that it was explicitly named as Pazuzu in the novel, and implied strongly in the film to be him. "True, Regan tells Fr. Karras, 'And I'm the devil.'" he conceded. "But what constrains us to believe her? Believe that and you perforce must believe everything the demon has to say, including the accusation that Fr. Merrin is a homosexual." Lastly he responded to Woods' criticism of the absence of temptation as a theme in the film by saying that he chose not to explore that because not only did he see that focus as "naive, mistaken and an excuse for evasion of confrontation with personal