FRANCE: The French Catholic Church yesterday condemned the poster for Costa-Gavras' latest film, Amen, which is currently showing at the Berlin festival.
The poster shows a red crucifix, the upper three branches of which turn into a Nazi swastika, with the word "Amen" in white letters on the horizontal branch of the cross.
"The superposition of the Christian and Nazi symbols is an intolerable identification of the faith of Christians with Nazi barbarity," said the statement issued by Dr Jean-Pierre Ricard, the Archbishop of Bordeaux and President of the Conference of Bishops of France. The poster "gravely wounds the sensibility of Catholics".
The poster - whose red and black colours and swastika make it look like a Nazi banner - is scheduled to appear on walls and cinema hoardings in France on February 19th, eight days before the film opens in Paris.
The Catholic bishops must decide quickly whether to take legal action against the advertising campaign.
"If they do nothing, they will be accused of not acting," said Henri Tincq, Le Monde's religious affairs correspondent. "If they make a fuss, they draw attention to the poster."
Mr Tincq finds the poster offensive.
"No one has the right to associate the most important symbol of the Christian faith with that of the most monstrous regime in human history," he said.
Church officials say Amen is a good film that must be dissociated from the poster.
It is based on the German author Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play, The Vicar.
This play started the debate about the silence of Pope Pius XII during the second World War.
An 11-volume history of the church during the war, written by four Jesuits and completed in 1981, did not quell the argument.
Amen points out that the League of Nations, the US government and others were equally guilty of silence.
One of the film's main characters, a German Protestant SS officer named Kurt Gerstein, existed in real life.
The other, a Jesuit diplomat named Ricardo Fontana who denounces the Vatican's silence, is completely fictional.
The French church clashed with Jean-Luc Godard in 1985 over Je vous salue Marie, whose poster showed a naked pregnant woman.
The bishops denounced Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.
And they went to court in 1996 to block the poster for Larry Flynt, which showed a naked woman nestled against the lower abdomen of Christ on the cross.
"That poster was terrible, but this is worse, for ideological reasons," Mr Tincq said.
"It flies in the face of decades of reconciliation between Christians and Jews. The implied message is that Jews killed Christ, so the church was an accomplice of the Nazis out of revenge. It's hateful."
A meeting of the Judaeo-Christian Friendship group in Lyon on February 9th called the poster "perverse and shameful".
The Amen poster was designed by Oliviero Toscani, who left Benetton because his advertising campaigns led to boycotts of their clothing.
Mr Toscani created controversy in the past with images of lesbian nuns, AIDS victims with concentration camp-style tattoos and wounded bodies wearing khaki-coloured T-shirts and jumpers during the Yugoslav war.
"Toscani exploits human misery to sell pullovers," said Ms Cathy Bubbe, senior consultant at RPCA public relations.
"His strategy has always been to shock people."
