film's audience has received as much coverage as The Exorcists. Religious response "One of the best things that could happen is if the Pope denounces it", Friedkin told an interviewer the month after The Exorcist was released. Some of the film's content, such as the crucifix scene, involved acts and utterances that were specifically sacrilegious from a Catholic perspective. Officially the Church, whose influence over the content of films had declined following the demise of the Hays Office and the associated Production Code a few years earlier, had bemoaned Warners' decision to release it immediately following Christmas. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting, through its publication the Catholic Film Newsletter rated the film A-IV, suitable for adults only with reservations, and gave it a generally negative review that faulted the film for suggesting exorcisms were common and possibly encouraging belief in the occult and Satanism. Individual priests familiar with the underlying theology also faulted the film. A priest who, like Karras, was a Jesuit and psychiatrist at Georgetown said that while he believed in the Devil "there is no shred of evidence from the Bible that he can possess an individual." Woods, the Loyola of Chicago professor, who had written a book about the Devil, told The New York Times that Karras and Merrin were incompetent exorcists. "They departed from the ritual in the most stupid and reckless manner," he said. "They tried to fight the Demon hand to hand instead of relying on the power of God." Eugene Kennedy, another Loyola priest and psychologist, described the film's view of the battle of good and evil as "immature ... Being a Christian and a mature person means coming to terms with our own capacity for evil, not projecting it on an outside force that possesses us." Critics of the movie's depiction of Catholicism were not limited to the Church. "Surely it is the religious people who should be most offended by this movie", wrote Kael, incredulous that Georgetown and several priests facilitated the production: Kael had nonetheless also described The Exorcist as "the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's" since the film "says that [it] is the true faith, feared by the Devil, and that its rituals can exorcise demons." A later historian has found that the Church