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Bishops welcome decision to show 'Da Vinci Code'


The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) welcomed the government decision to allow the showing of "The Da Vinci Code" in the Philippines with an "R" rating. "Faith is so much bigger than a movie," Msgr. Pedro Quitorio III, CBCP spokesman, said in a radio interview on Tuesday, shortly after the decision was announced by the Movie and Television Rating and Classification Board (MTRCB). "These (films) are not the fruit of faith," Quitorio added. "The fruit of faith is doing good to your fellow men. That should be the object of our faith." Quitorio said the faithful, especially those who had already read Dan Brown's novel, on which the film was based, should not let the movie bother them. Those with the most violent reaction to the film even before it is shown are most likely those who have not read the book at all, he added. He noted how the controversy generated by the film may have been a marketing coup of sorts, with the producers likely setting up new websites on the Internet to spur interest in the movie. He described the efforts as the "biggest marketing of the century." Some Catholics all over the world, clergy and laymen alike, consider the film blasphemous for suggesting that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and thay they might have descendants that the Catholic Church has been keeping secret for centuries. Last week, the CBCP issued a pastoral statement urging the faithful not to be swayed by the mix of fact and fiction in the movie, though it stopped short of calling for its ban or boycotting. Public curiosity in the movie has been so intense that unscrupulous vendors have taken to selling pirated DVDs of documentaries about the movie and selling them as "advance copies" of the movie itself. - GMANewsTV

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