 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
May 8 , 2006 • VOL. 44, NO. 9 • Oakland, CA
Vatican official
suggests Catholics
boycott ‘The Da Vinci Code’ film
ROME (CNS)
-- Catholics should consider boycotting the film “The Da Vinci Code”
as one way to let the world know the story offends and defames the church,
said Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith.
If the kind of “slander, offenses and errors” contained in
Dan Brown’s best-selling book and the film based on it had been
written about “the Quran or the Shoah (the Holocaust), they rightly
would have provoked a worldwide uprising,” the archbishop told Catholic
communications directors.
The archbishop spoke April 28 at a Rome conference for church communications
personnel sponsored by the Opus Dei-run University of the Holy Cross.
Archbishop Amato said he was in the United States in 1988 during Christian
protests over the film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” based
on a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. The film portrayed Jesus being tempted
by imagining a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, but rejecting
the temptation.
Christians not only attacked the “historically false” episodes
in the film, but also organized “a well-deserved economic boycott”
of theaters showing the movie, he said.
Speaking about “The Da Vinci Code,” Archbishop Amato said,
“Christians should be more sensitive to rejecting lies and gratuitous
defamation.”
In responding to questions at the end of his talk, Archbishop Amato declined
to issue a clear call for all Catholics to boycott the film.
However, during his speech, he did tell the communications directors,
“I hope you all boycott that film.”
Archbishop Amato’s speech at the conference focused on communicating
the Catholic Church’s teaching in the modern media-dominated world.
He said that, in addition to being surrounded by cultures hostile to the
church and to any defense of objective moral truths, the church had to
face the fact that many of its own members lack a basic understanding
of their faith.
“One must consider the extreme cultural poverty of a good portion
of the Christian faithful who often do not know how to give the reasons
for their hope,” he said. “There is no other way to explain
the strange success of an obstinately anti-Christian novel like ‘The
Da Vinci Code,’ which is full of slander, offenses and historical
and theological errors about Jesus, the Gospels and the church.”
Archbishop Amato said that while the church often is treated superficially
or even unfairly by the media it must find ways to communicate in the
modern world.
The church has an obligation “to interpret the word of God with
fidelity and to communicate it to the faithful with authority,”
he said.
Archbishop Amato said the church must have its own media and well-trained
journalists in order to present its teaching accurately and fully.
Too often, he said, the secular media demonstrate a “refined technique
of falsification and reduction” of a Vatican document’s contents,
by highlighting only a few, polemical passages.
The archbishop said church communications efforts surrounding such documents
must “be authoritative, immediate, correct, convincing and positive,
otherwise documents written with great care and widely shared by pastors
and by the faithful can be completely overrun by well-prepared press agencies.”
