SIGNIS
SIGNIS is a Roman Catholic ecclesial movement of the Faithful for professionals in the communication media, including press, radio, television, cinema, video, media education, internet, and new technology. It is a non-profit organization with representation from over 100 countries. It was formed in November 2001 by the merger of International Catholic Organization for Cinema and Audiovisual and International Catholic Association for Radio and Television . At its World Congress in Quebec in 2017, SIGNIS welcomed also former member organisations of the International Catholic Union of the Press .
The word SIGNIS is a combination of the words SIGN and IGNIS. It is not an acronym.
The Holy See has officially recognized SIGNIS as an International Association of the Faithful and has included the "World Catholic Association for Communication, also known as SIGNIS" in its Directory of International Associations of the Faithful, published by the Pontifical Council for the Laity. Before the dissolution of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, the governing body of SIGNIS included a representative of this pontifical council, another department of the Roman Curia. OCIC, Unda, and SIGNIS had also members and consultors in the Pontifical Council of Social Communications. In June 2015, Pope Francis established a new dicastery of the Roman Curia with authority over all communications offices of the Holy See and the Vatican City State, including the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Holy See Press Office, Vatican Internet Service, Vatican Radio, Vatican Television Center, Osservatore Romano, Vatican Press, Photograph Service, and Vatican Publishing House. A representative of this new Secretariat for Communications is part of the governing body of SIGNIS.
SIGNIS has consultative status with UNESCO, the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, in Geneva and New York City and the Council of Europe.
Mission
The Mission of SIGNIS is: "To engage with media professionals and support Catholic Communicators to help transform our cultures in the light of the Gospel by promoting Human Dignity, Justice and Reconciliation."History
The Catholic Church has a long history of engagement with the media of communications, from the liturgy itself, in manuscripts and print publishing, in painting, architecture, and music. But with the emergence and spread of new popular media in the latter half of the 19th century, the Church faced new challenges. Already in the 19th century, Catholics considered the press, and in the 20th century, cinema and radio, to be powerful modern popular media that could influence worldviews and moral values. Many Catholics, including Pope Gregory XVI and Pope Pius IX, did not trust modernity, and the popular media were no exception. Gregory XVI published in 1832 his encyclical Mirari Vos that "Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty. Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice." In fact, they blamed them for the declining influence of religion in society. Modernity did not simply introduce technological and scientific innovations; it enabled the dissemination of new ideologies, based mostly on atheism and challenging the place of the Church in society. Pope Pius IX in 1864 condemned modernity, liberalism, and "pestilential books, pamphlets and newspapers". However, Pope Leo XIII wanted to build a bridge between the Church and the modern world and started to promote Thomism, the theology based on that of Thomas Aquinas in an attempt to see if it might help to solve modern problems. In 1888, Leo XIII wrote that unconditional freedom of speech and publication could be tolerated. Later on, in the 1920s, Pope Pius XI encouraged the growth of Catholic Action: professional Catholics working and acting in the secular world including that of the modern media.As a fruit of the contemporary Catholic Action, UCIP was founded in Belgium in 1927. A year later, the Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma came into being in The Netherlands, and the Bureau Catholic International de Radiodiffusion in Germany. In 1946, BCIR became the international professional Catholic association for radio and television, Unda.
OCIC, Unda, and UCIP had similar objectives: to bring together Catholics already working as professionals in the media. The interest of Catholics in the press and especially in the new media was understandable. They saw the opportunities offered by the mass media to present their views and opinions on life and the world and so they naturally became involved in promoting education and values.
These professional Catholic lay associations, working in the world of the professional media, wanted to unite their efforts against the secularization of society and were thus working in the secular world. On the one hand, they were aware that the press and the new media of radio and cinema were contributing to secularization. On the other hand, they also believed that by engaging in these media, and above all the secular media, they could use them as a new means of evangelization. Efforts had to be made to evangelize the secular mass media, or at least to insert the values of the Gospel into them.
As a result of the merger of the Catholic media organizations OCIC and Unda, SIGNIS was founded in 2001. The archives of OCIC and Unda are located in the Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture, and Society, KADOC, at the Catholic University of Louvain. In 2014, the Vatican suggested that SIGNIS should also integrate the members of the former International Catholic Union of the Press, which a few years earlier had lost its recognition by the Holy See as an official Catholic organization. At the SIGNIS World Congress of 2017 in Quebec, several Catholic press associations, former members of UCIP, were welcomed, among them CPA.
Catholics and cinema
Catholics were involved in the new art of cinema from its inception. In November 1895, the Catholic University of Louvain organised a screening of the Auguste and Louis Lumière films. In April–May 1898, the Englishman William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company cinematographed Pope Leo XIII in the gardens of the Vatican. It was the first time that a Pope appeared before a film camera and blessed it. Later when cinema became a regular and popular medium, Catholics, and above all the parish priests, reacted in two ways: condemning it or considering it as a tool of evangelisation with worldwide influence on families and, above all, on young audiences. In several countries worldwide, priests started to use cinema as part of their apostolate. Among them, there was the Jesuit priest, known as Abbé Joseph Joye in Switzerland. Before the arrival of cinema, he projected images with a magic lantern for schoolchildren, and from 1902 on, he used cinema.Early film producers like Pathé Frères found also inspiration in the Bible and in religions. In early 1907, an American film magazine published that from a modest beginning six or seven years earlier the films of the Passion of Jesus Christ became more and more popular every Lent, and were among the most expensive productions in the whole film world. It wrote also that in these years in the US, most films of the Passion were coming from France and Great Britain.
From 1910 on, almost every Belgian city had its Catholic cinema. In these cinema halls, educational as well as entertainment films were on the programme, and the selection and screening were controlled by the organizers, mostly priests.
One of the Belgian pioneers was Abbé Abel Brohée, who was active in the Catholic Action Movement and began to bring order to these Catholic initiatives. By the 1920s, he was convinced that it was necessary to inform the public of the moral value of films. His aim was not to limit the action of Catholics to moral quotations. He wanted a presence "on all fronts". That is why, as early as 1921, he joined a group of Catholics who had founded a distribution agency under the name Brabo-Films. He became one of the leading personalities, as president of OCIC in the 1930s, in the field of cinema. OCIC itself was the result of international politics.
In 1919, the League of Nations was established in Geneva with the objective to prevent another world war by promoting a culture of peace and dialogue. This was not only a matter of politicians and diplomats but also and a matter of the cultural world. In 1922, a technical committee for culture, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, was formed, with personalities like Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Gabriela Mistral, and Henri Bergson, to shape the mind of the members of the League of Nations, for example, toward rectifying errors in text books which were alleged to be a mainspring of racial prejudices. Out of this committee came a permanent organisation to study the development of cinema as a tool of education. Only member states and international organisations were admitted to this organization. In 1926, the International Union of Catholic Women's Leagues urged Catholics involved in cinema to build an international Catholic cinema organisation in order to have a say in the international film work of the League of Nations. This led to the founding of OCIC in 1928 with its first secretary general the French canon Joseph Reymond, who also became the secretary of the of the League of Nations. It was a way to counter the influence of those who had a negative attitude towards the Catholic world.
OCIC developed a complex but largely positive approach to this new art. It wanted to offer guidance to audiences and to discover and foster productions which promoted the same values as Christians did. It wanted to inform lay Catholics and others, in a professional way, about the moral and artistic quality of films, so that they could decide themselves if they would go and see a film or not. It was the beginning of film education. OCIC called for the creation of national organizations dealing with topics such as childhood, families, spirituality, religion and cinema, and film reviews. It also expressed its intention to collaborate with the film industry. One of its concerns was the promotion of 'good' films, both for education and entertainment. This was one of the aspects put forward by the Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI on the Motion Picture Vigilanti Cura, published in 1936. The dominant perspective in this encyclical was cautious, defensive, and moralising, following the approach of the Legion of Decency which had been founded by the US Catholic Church to launch a crusade against the "abuses" of the motion pictures. After the Second World War, the Vatican began to move closer to the approach taken by OCIC in the matters of cinema.
While Unda was much more involved in its development with specifically Catholic production for Catholic audiences, OCIC soon realised that film production was beyond the funds and technical abilities of its members. There were some hopes and flirtations with production in the early 1930s, especially in the Netherlands, but the members and leadership of OCIC saw that their work was in collaboration in promoting exhibition, distribution, review, and critical writing on cinema.
During canon Jean Bernard's presidency, the writing and reviews continued but the main development was the establishing of juries at international film festivals, in collaboration with the directors and boards of the festivals, beginning at the Brussels International film festival in 1947, and a year later at the Venice Film Festival. The OCIC jury at Cannes began in 1952. This enabled OCIC to develop its criteria for its awards over these years. One difficulty which emerged was a clash of perspectives on occasion with the decisions of the US Legion of Decency which had been set up by the American bishops in 1934, the time of the enforcement of the Motion Picture Code for all American film production. In the 1950s, the Americans indicated that some films which had won OCIC awards were rated Objectionable or Condemned by the Legion and were concerned at this difference in moral perspective. The philosophy behind the Legion of Decency was not influential in Europe, although the work of the Legion was acknowledged positively by Pius XI in his encyclical letter, Vigilanti Cura, 1936. Then with changes in what could be portrayed on screen and how it could be portrayed, Fr. Bernard had to face a controversy concerning the OCIC prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1968, which resulted in discussions with Church authorities and the Vatican. The jury gave its prize to Pier Paolo Pasolini, avowed Communist, though winner of the 1964 award for his The Gospel According to St. Matthew, for his film, Teorema. The controversy was inflamed by another spark when the Berlin International Film Festival 1969 award went to John Schlesinger's Oscar winner for Best Picture, Midnight Cowboy. This meant that after forty years of activity, OCIC was able to survive controversy, articulate its aims and objectives, and establish itself as what might be called a 'consciousness organisation' within the Catholic Church. It did not set itself up as a censoring board. Later some of its members nationally or regionally were part of the work of the Bishops Conference, offering reviews, classifications, and advice which depended for its authority more on the Bishops rather than OCIC.
Preservation of film also became a concern. The consequences for OCIC in terms of policy and power was that it could not be described as a 'sacristy' organization. Later, a succinct description of how OCIC saw its scope, as both supporting Catholics who work in cinema and being a bridge between the Catholic Church and the professional world of cinema. While explicitly religious films are appreciated, OCIC came to realize that well-made films grounded in humanity made the most impact – a policy of seeing 'Christ in the Marketplace'. The image of the marketplace was later embraced by John Paul II, referring to Paul's mixed hearing in the Athens marketplace, the Areopagus, that media is the 'new Areopagus'. This policy has guided OCIC and the film work of SIGNIS over the decades, leading to the presence of OCIC juries at world film festivals, national OCIC cinema awards, publications on the cinema of different nations, movie reviews in publications and online, promotion of particular films, dialogue with directors and filmmakers, and offering advice on the release of films with particular Catholic interest or controversies.
From the 1930s on, the Vatican began to have a closer interest in cinema. With the letter of Pius XI in 1936, Vigilanti Cura, the official teaching of the Church on cinema was positive. Amongst the ideas put forward by Pius XI was one that would challenge philosophers and theologians, that cinema teaches the majority of men and women more effectively than abstract reasoning. Just over twenty years later, Pius XII issued the Encyclical letter Miranda prorsus where he urged his readers to learn how to understand and appreciate how film works. One might say that he is urging people to move on from being literate, literacy, to being visuate, visuacy. In 1971, a fuller document on communications and media following the Second Vatican Council and its Declaration on Social Communications, Inter mirifica, spoke about the spirituality dimensions to be found in cinema. Dialogue was a significant feature of the writings of Paul VI, from his first Encyclical, Ecclesiam suam, 1964, to Evangelii nuntiandi, 1975.