Year: 2020

CNA Staff, Sep 18, 2020 / 07:30 am (CNA).- The president of the German bishops’ conference dismissed Friday suggestions that the controversial “Synodal Way” could lead to a split in the Church.

Bishop Georg Bätzing made the comm… […]

CNA Staff, Sep 18, 2020 / 03:30 am (CNA).- Poland’s bishops have intervened in a debate over whether their country should withdraw from a European treaty on preventing violence against women. 

In a statement issued Sept. 17, the bishops rei… […]

CNA Staff, Sep 18, 2020 / 01:00 am (CNA).- Paschal Uche woke up early on the morning of Sept. 18, 2010, a day that would change his life. He needed to set off in good time in order to pass through security at the event he was attending in central Londo… […]

CNA Staff, Sep 18, 2020 / 12:00 am (CNA).- The Archbishop of Valencia said Sunday that if Spain’s euthanasia and assisted suicide bill is passed, it would be a “major and historic defeat for all of Spain, for Spanish society.”

“It is a defeat also for humanity, for man himself, for the legislature to take up the bill on euthanasia, assisted suicide, and to reject other proposals on palliative care that improved the current legislation,” Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera wrote Sept. 13.

The prelate also called the proposed euthanasia law “monstrous” and an “injustice.”

Directly addressing the country’s president, government officials, department heads, and legislators, Cañizares challenged: “Realize that you as a government or as parliamentarians should defend, protect, and guard the common good, based on fundamental rights and duties of the society you represent, the first of which is the right to life.”

But in reality “you have become enemies, who oppose society, ready to defeat that society you represent and must protect, by advocating such a bill, which spreads and expands a culture of death,” he said.

The Archbishop of Valencia pointed to the fact that the bill is being advanced through the legislative process amid the Covid-19 pandemic, so “what credibility can you hold on to in the face of that pandemic? With what moral authority can you address this people and ask us what is being asked of us? Aren’t you seen as a sign of contradiction?”

The cardinal said there’s still time left, and appealed to the authorities to make corrections to the bill, “as is so often done in government management or in parliamentary tasks and responsibilities.”

Cañizares stressed that he’s not “interfering in politics” but that his “responsibility as bishop and as a citizen doesn’t allow me to remain silent.”

The Archbishop of Valencia faulted the media for concentrating on unrelated side issues and giving scant attention to the euthanasia bill.

“Euthanasia, which does not constitute an historical defeat of a government, but a defeat of an entire state, and which is an infinitely greater and serious problem, even if you don’t see it that way, and I respect you,” he pointed out.

“Legislation like that doesn’t make for a true fraternity of authentic brothers of a new civilization of love that builds peace and is capable of facing the pandemic,” the cardinal concluded his exhortation.

The Spanish bishops’ conference issued a statement Sept. 14 calling instead for a palliative care law because “there are no patients who cannot be cared for, even if they are incurable.”

A version of this story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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CNA Staff, Sep 17, 2020 / 07:25 pm (CNA).- According to L’Avvenire, the official newspaper of the Italian bishops’ conference, those who have criticized the controversial French movie “Cuties,” released by Netflix last week “have not seen it or have really limited themselves to the poster. Otherwise they have not understood it or have looked at it with the wrong eyes.”

A review of the film, entitled “The boycott: Cuties is a hard, but educational movie,” and written by the newspaper’s TV critic Andrea Fagioli, claims that the film “does not revolve around a ‘scandalous sexualization of adolescents’ nor does it obviously ‘simulate pedophilia,’ as some of the more than 600,000 signatories of a petition against (Netflix) have claimed.”

In his review, Fagioli describes the story of Amy, the film’s main character, her struggles to integrate into Western culture and her eventual introduction to a provocative dance troupe, at age 11.

In Fagioli’s words, “Amy will become the leader, pushing the group towards an ever more daring dance. And here lies the controversial point, because the director absolutely does not force her hand on the sensual aspect. On the contrary: she tries to highlight, albeit in a contradictory picture, their innocence.”

“The problem, therefore, is not these kids who grow up too fast for certain things without having sufficient maturity or the necessary immune defenses. The problem is the world we have created around it,” with absent parents and too much social media, he argues.

“All this the director makes clear, even if the film cannot be presented to everyone. But when read correctly and presented well, ‘Mignonnes’ (‘Cuties’) can become an educational film,” Fagioli wrote.

The L’Avvenire review does not contain criticism of elements that have been lambasted across in the United States and Latin America, including long scenes of provocative dances, scantily clad 11-year-old girls performing in front of adults, camera movements deliberately focusing on private parts, or the inclusion of the naked breasts of a teenager.

Criticism of those aspects of the film have come not only from conservatives or religious groups, but also from moderates and liberals, among the U.S. Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard wrote on Twitter: “child porn ‘Cuties’ will certainly whet the appetite of pedophiles & help fuel the child sex trafficking trade. 1 in 4 victims of trafficking are children. It happened to my friend’s 13 year old daughter. Netflix, you are now complicit.”

The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg, in a mostly positive review of the movie, acknowledged that “I can see how viewers might be turned off by the way Doucouré shoots the dance routines, using close-ups of her young actors’ bodies both to show us their abilities as dancers and to make us deliberately queasy.”

British journalist Izzy Schifano is another non-conservative critic. At UK website The Tab, Schifano wrote that the dancing throughout the film is about “biting their lips, twerking, squatting down and bouncing on their knees…Some of the dancing was so graphic I genuinely couldn’t watch.”

Schifano, who has positvely reviewed several risqué movies for The Tab, complained that in “Cuties,” “the camera panned up and down the girls’ bodies multiple times in the film, at points literally just zooming in” on the posteriors of children.

The analytics firm YipitData told Variety Magazine that on Saturday, Sept. 12, Netflix’s cancellation rate in the U.S. “jumped to nearly eight times higher than the average daily levels recorded in August 2020,” reaching a multiyear high, most likely as a consequence of the #CancelNetflix hashtag campaign.

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