| CBC uses Tim Bits and coffee in Communion satire | | | 2013-03-25 | | TORONTO, ON February 25, 2013 - The CBC program “This Hour has 22 Minutes” featured a short skit February 19 satirizing the possibilities of a Canadian becoming pope. During a spoof of parishioners receiving Holy Communion, Tim Bits and Tim Hortons Coffee were substituted for the bread and wine. We have protested the offensiveness of satirizing the Blessed Sacrament to the CBC, and also to Tim Hortons. While the company would have played no part in creating the skit, viewers associated it with their product and the association may not be a welcome one for the company. We asked the company to discourage “This Hour” producers from using their products in portrayals offensive to Catholics and many others. Visit our Facebook page for links to this and other problem content in the media, and ways to respond.... | | League responds to news coverage of Pope | | | 2013-03-21 | | TORONTO, February 21, 2013 - Media coverage of Pope Benedict’s resignation (or as it is formally known, renunciation of the papacy), has included a real mixture of good articles along with some needlessly negative, sometimes downright anti-Catholic vitriol, particularly from columnists and message board posts. To help improve balance, we have written to The Star, twice, regarding separate Rosie Di Manno columns, the Globe once regarding a news story, and later regarding a column by Gerald Caplan, CBC twice, once regarding a longish news story and again regarding This Hour has 22 Minutes (see below). Several other newspapers were contacted, including the Ottawa Citizen, St. John's Telegram and Winnipeg Free Press. We also provided an article for The Citizen, by our Ottawa director Richard Bastien. Media interviews were given by President Phil Horgan, and directors Richard Bastien and Christian Elia, with CHCH and Sun Media respectively. The Caplan piece in The Globe was a particul... | | News story corrected; MPs seek police probe of live birth abortions | | | 2013-02-05 | | OTTAWA, ON February 1, 2013 - Three MPs, Maurice Vellacott, Leon Benoit and Wladyslaw Lizon, have asked the RCMP to investigate a number of late-term abortions that resulted in live births, following which the aborted child died. While this story has been available on blogs for several months, the letter and related discussion in the House of Commons began to be reported January 31. Unfortunately, Canadian Press, the news service on which most Canadian newspapers and broadcast outlets rely on for some of their national coverage, claimed in its story that the letter asked the RCMP to investigate “all abortions performed after 19 weeks of pregnancy.” We contacted CP immediately to express concern about the inaccurate reporting. It was corrected in a follow-up story the same day, and most of the outlets that ran the earlier story have now corrected it. We will be following this story closely due to the important issue it raises. Link to corrected news story: Investigate some a... | | CBC radio contest included Church as a “vote-off” option | | | 2012-11-02 | | OTTAWA, ON Nov. 2, 2012 - The CBC Radio One weekly program "Day 6" is having a contest called “Deep Sixed” in which people can vote for or against the elimination of several things, including Facebook, maple syrup, Bluefin tuna, the Catholic Church and "white people." This was obviously intended as a joke, but we challenged why they would include the Church in a satirical contest of this kind. We encouraged our members to contact them about this bizarre choice, and suggested that "CBC funding" might be a better option! Following our protest, program managers said they had decided to remove the Church from the list, replacing it with a discussion of various countries' economic problems.... | | League responds to prayer controversy | | | 2012-10-30 | | League responds to criticism of Winnipeg’s new police chief’s favourable views on prayer and organized religion:The Editor: It’s remarkable how quickly the religion-haters come out of the woodwork when any public figure indicates he is favourable to prayer, and/or to organized religion as a whole. Given that Sgt. Clunis’ follow-up comments make it clear that he was not proposing to replace standard policing methods with divine intervention, but rather was emphasizing the importance of community action, I must ask just what is the motivation of all the critics: Has such an approach been tried and found wanting? Should we rest easy knowing that the non-religious approach to crime has worked so well? Or is it merely that we should all distrust anyone who is public about religious belief?Whatever the reason, this incident has not brought out the best face of religious tolerance. Joanne McGarry, Executive DirectorCatholic Civil Rights League- ... | | CBC “married Jesus” satire protested | | | 2012-10-03 | | TORONTO, ON, October 2, 2012 – The Catholic Civil Rights League has protested the satirizing of the Last Supper in the Sept. 28 episode of CBC’s “This Hour has 22 Minutes.” In a letter to the show’s producers, the League commented on the double standard often seen in portrayals of religious stories and caricatures.Based on the recent news story that some fragments of an ancient parchment refer to a “wife of Jesus”, the skit presented The Last Supper, as depicted in Da Vinci’s masterpiece, interrupted several times by a woman portrayed as Jesus’ wife. One interruption, to the elevation of the wine including the familiar words of the consecration, was greeted with “…can’t this wait, I was in the middle of something.” In the League’s letter, Executive Director Joanne McGarry stated, “While… the discovery of a fragmentary parchment alluding to the possibility of a married Jesus was in the ... | | Don’t abolish funding, distribute it fairly | | | 0000-00-00 | | While many people might agree that it is unfair to provide public funding to only one religious group, the “remedy,” if you like, need not involve abolition of such funding, but could equally involve the extension of it to other religious groups.Hamilton Spectator letter ... | | Vatican moves quickly to block German magazine's offensive depiction of Pope | | | 2012-07-23 | | Pope Benedict XVI has taken legal action against the German satire weekly magazine Titanic and has managed to get a cease and desist order filed against it. In the afternoon on Tuesday July 10, 2012, Hamburg judges issued an urgent injunction forbidding Titanic to distribute the front and back pages of it’s July issue both in print form and online.- Vatican Insider article continues... | | Book not banned | | | 2012-06-15 | | Re: “Vatican snuffs out a breath of fresh air” (June 10). Maureen Dowd’s claim that the Vatican is trying to send women back to the Dark Ages would not be taken seriously by anyone who has even a faint acquaintance with the modern Church. The columnist has mixed in a number of unrelated issues in her effort to portray the treatment of this book as a silencing of some sort.Full League letter from Chronicle Herald, June 14 2012... | | League protests graphic, tax-funded museum exhibit | | | 2012-05-16 | | OTTAWA, May 16, 2012 - The League wrote May 11 to federal Heritage Minister, James Moore, as well as to the museum itself to protest the exhibit “Sex: a Tell-All Exhibition”, scheduled to run at Ottawa’s Museum of Science and Technology May 18 to early next year. The exhibit, which includes detailed, “non-judgmental” information about sexual relations, masturbation, abortion and other topics, complete with photographs and interactive questions-and-answers, is geared to youth age 12 and up, with younger children admitted if accompanied by an adult.In our letter, we challenged both the content of the show and the public funding of the museum. “Based on information from the museum’s own website, as well as on information provided to a local contact during a preview, this material is far too advanced and detailed for the age group for which it is intended, and in any case has little if anything to do with the museum’s stated mandate “to... |
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