SIGNIS
[9] SIGNIS is a worldwide network working in media, with the aim of alerting Christians to the importance of human communication in every culture, and encouraging them to speak out in this sector.
[10]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.
Gregory XVI published in 1832 his encyclical Mirari Vos (On Liberalism and Religious Indiffertism) 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.
[16] A year later, the Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma (OCIC) came into being in The Netherlands,[17] and the Bureau Catholic International de Radiodiffusion (BCIR) in Germany.
[19] 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 (KU Leuven).
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.
OCIC called for the creation of national organizations dealing with topics such as childhood, families, spirituality, religion and cinema, and film reviews (an early form of media education).
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.
There were some hopes and flirtations with production in the early 1930s,[29] 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.
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 (no.23).
Just over twenty years later, Pius XII issued the Encyclical letter Miranda prorsus (1957) where he urged his readers to learn how to understand and appreciate how film works.
[34] European Catholic broadcasters did meet for the first time in May 1927 in Cologne (Germany) while attending an international press exhibition organized by Dr. Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of the city.
In Sri Lanka, the layman John Fernando founded the Gnanartha Pradeepaya, a Sinhala-language Catholic weekly, as a four-page broadsheet of Church news and papal speeches in 1865.
It was UCIP's eighth Congress, held together with the 55th annual convention of the CPA, and 800 journalists, including 600 from the United States, discussed the theme: "The truth in the search for freedom."
On 19 September 2001, a few days after the attack on the World Trade Center towers, more than a thousand participants attended the twentieth UCIP Congress, at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, to discuss the theme: "The Media and the Challenge of Globalization."
This decision was a paradox, because a few days earlier, the Latin American branches of the three Catholic organizations for the press, cinema, and radio and TV (UCLAP, OCIC-AL, Unda-AL) had created a joint secretariat to cover all the media, but the rest of the world did not follow them.
SIGNIS members want to come together to use financial, material, and human resources more effectively so that they can give a coherent response to the "onslaught of national and global media" on people and cultures across the world.
Jean Bernard from Luxembourg was one of those who with UNESCO gave a decisive push which led to the foundation of the International Center for Films for Children and Young People, CIFEJ, and a year later, the Belgian Fr.
He wrote: Opportunities created by new technology, by the process of globalization, by deregulation and privatization of the media present new ethical and indeed spiritual challenges to those who work in social communications.
In the 1990s, it was clear for Unda, OCIC, and even UCIP that in the digital world, the images and sounds (television, film, music, radio, and journalism) were dissolving the boundaries between traditional media.
[63] The theme of the SIGNIS-Africa General Congress and Assembly held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in September 2019 was "The African Youth in the Digital World; Promoting Creativity for Integral Development".
Walter Ihejirika from Nigeria, affirmed that the Congress aimed at creating practical pathways for promoting the welfare of youth and children in the changing digital world.
In 2017, SIGNIS representatives collaborate with members of Interfilm in 17 international film festivals to award an ecumenical prize (Cannes, Berlin, Fribourg, Oberhausen, Locarno, Kiev, Cottbus, Leipzig, Mannheim-Heidelberg, Montréal, Yerevan, Karlovy Vary, Zlín, Schlingel, Saarbrücken, and Warsaw).
[68] SIGNIS develops this dialogue according to the criteria of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications published in 1989 in which "Manipulation or base proselytism, at times practiced in the media, is incompatible with the ecumenical task and with the spirit of inter-religious cooperation,... and as the decisions of ecclesiastical authorities affirm.
"[69] In November 2016, the Cinema Desk of SIGNIS organized the 1st International Seminar of Film and Values in Barcelona with the Directorate of Religious Affairs of the Government of Catalonia and the Blanquerna Observatory on Media, Religion and Culture.
This aimed to encourage networking and collective strategic planning to enable Catholic radio stations on the continent to better face the challenges and opportunities arising in their regions.
Some twenty Catholic journalists came from Pakistan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Singapore.
It contains also a series of workshops, seminaries to share experiences, keynote speeches of specialists in different fields of communication, a film program, a board meeting, and other activities.
In February 2019, SIGNIS started a new international multilingual trimestrial film magazine CineMag, seeing that cinema is still significant for the association and her mission to be present in the professional world.
[citation needed] The third issue of CineMag was presented at the Baku cultural event in September 2019 and at the Religion Today Film Festival in Trento in October 2019 and is dedicated to the inter-religious dialogue.
