# Disney’s 'Hunchback' is anti-Catholic

**By:** Luke Collins  
**Published:** 2026-07-07T06:00:00.000Z  
**Source:** [The Catholic Herald](https://thecatholicherald.com/article/disneys-hunchback-is-anti-catholic)

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 Disney’s 1996 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame will celebrate its 30th anniversary in a couple of weeks, so I thought it would be worth looking at how anti-clericalism has made its way into film, even children’s films from back in the 1990s.
The alleged source material for the film is Victor Hugo’s book, Notre-Dame de Paris. I say “alleged” because the film has virtually nothing to do with the book. Not that one would expect a children’s animated film adaptation to be a faithful rendition of a 600-page Gothic novel, of course, but the moral universe of the film is almost the opposite of that in Hugo’s novel. The book is dark, grotesque, morally complicated and, frankly, not remotely suitable for children. Disney turns it into a story about self-acceptance, prejudice and the need to be nice to people who look different.
Which is fine, I suppose – being nice to people who look different is indeed a good thing. The problem is what Disney has to do in order to get there. In Hugo’s novel, Frollo is not a moustache-twirling villain. He is a priest, certainly – and Hugo is hardly writing as a defender of clerical authority – but Frollo is still far more complicated than the Disney version. He is learned, austere, disciplined and, at least at first, capable of real charity. He takes in Quasimodo when the abandoned child is rejected by everyone else, raises him and gives him a home in the cathedral.
That does not make him good. His fall is real and horrible, but it is a fall; something is corrupted in him. Disney’s Frollo, on the other hand, is more or less evil from the beginning. Technically, he is not a priest but a judge, which gives the film a bit of plausible deniability. There is even a kindly archdeacon floating around to reassure us that Disney is not attacking the Church as such. But nobody is fooled. Frollo is surrounded by Catholic imagery: Latin chanting, candles, the cathedral, hell, sin, damnation and purity. He is obviously coded as the religious villain.
The film’s real target is not simply clerical hypocrisy. That would be fair enough: clerical hypocrisy exists, and Catholics hardly need Disney to tell us that. The target is something deeper: Catholic moral seriousness itself.
It is not merely that the film gives us a bad religious man. Catholic literature has no shortage of wicked bishops and hypocritical priests. The problem is that Frollo’s wickedness is made to appear inseparable from the things that make him recognisably religious: his concern with sin, his fear of damnation and his language of purity. The film does not simply say that a cleric can be corrupt; it suggests that the clerical mind itself is corrupting.
This is clearest in the song “Hellfire”, which is probably the best scene in the film, both visually and musically. Frollo is tormented by lust for Esmeralda, and rather than presenting this as a proud man failing to govern his passions, the film turns it into an indictment of the whole religious world he inhabits. The implication is that the man who believes seriously in sin becomes warped by it.
This is a very modern way of looking at things. The ascetic is not struggling for holiness; he is repressed. The man who denies himself is dangerous. The man who condemns lust must secretly be consumed by it. Chastity is not a virtue that can be corrupted, but a pathology in itself. In Hugo, Frollo’s tragedy is that a disciplined soul collapses into possessiveness and lust. In Disney, discipline itself is suspect.
There is another modern habit at work here too. Older stories were often far more comfortable with the idea that the exterior and interior are somehow linked. Not in a crude way, of course; no Christian should think that one can judge a human soul merely by the shape of a face. But art has always understood that form matters. Beauty and ugliness are not arbitrary. The body, the voice, the house, the city, the clothes and the architecture: all of these things disclose something.
Modern retellings often subvert this principle: the ugly creature must be innocent. The beautiful man must be corrupt, the monster is misunderstood, the respectable man is secretly depraved and the pious man is the real beast.
You see something similar in The Phantom of the Opera. In Gaston Leroux’s novel, Erik (the Phantom) is pitiable and tragic, but he is also dangerous, possessive and morally disfigured. In the more modern versions, especially Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, he becomes far more romantic: the wounded genius under the mask, the misunderstood outsider whom we are invited to desire as much as fear.
Disney’s Quasimodo is similar. He is no longer a strange, violent, tragic creature of the cathedral. He becomes a pure-hearted outsider whose misshapen body only makes his inner goodness more obvious. There is a Christian truth being borrowed here: Christianity does teach us to love the rejected; the Gospel is full of lepers, beggars, prostitutes, tax collectors and thieves. But Christianity does not elevate rejects as such. Christ loves sinners, but He also tells them to repent; He raises up the lowly, but He does not pretend that being lowly automatically makes one holy. Disney keeps the compassion and drops the conversion.
That is where the film is also quite wishy-washy. It wants the cathedral without the Creed. It wants bells, candles, choirs, gargoyles, rose windows and Latin chanting, but not judgement, penance, hierarchy, Confession or the drama of sin and grace. It wants sanctuary, but without authority.
Hugo, for all his anti-clerical instincts, at least understood the terrible grandeur of the Catholic world. Notre-Dame is not set dressing in the novel. It is almost a living thing: beautiful, grotesque, protective, frightening, half-ruined and alive. Disney borrows that grandeur, drains it of its theology and repackages it as a vague lesson in tolerance.
Disney kept the cathedral. It lost the Faith.

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