SIGNIS (official name: World Catholic Association for Communication) is a Roman Catholic ecclesial movement of the Faithful SIGNIS website, Mission, article dated 27 November 2023 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 (OCIC) and International Catholic Association for Radio and Television (Unda). At its World Congress in Quebec in 2017, SIGNIS welcomed also former member organisations of the International Catholic Union of the Press (UCIP).
The word SIGNIS (always in uppercase) is a combination of the words SIGN and IGNIS (Latin for "fire"). It is not an acronym.Peter Malone. An Ever Widening Screen: A memoir. ballarat, Vic: Connor Court Publishing, 2015, pp.375–376
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 (it), 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.'SIGNIS' au service de l'oeuvre cinématographique", La Croix, Paris, Avril 9, 2013
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.""Board of Management". SIGNIS. Retrieved 9 December 2008
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 (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. 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.Staf Hellemans,"From 'Catholicism Against Modernity' to the Problematic 'Modernity of Catholicism', 117–127, Ethical Perspectives, Vol.8/2, Louvain, 2001 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.Günter Mees, Stimme der Stimmlosen. UCIP – Katholische Weltunion der Presse: Anmerkungen, Episoden, HintergründeBd. 2, LIT Verlag Berlin-Münster-Wien-Zürich-London, 2005, 208 S. A year later, the Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma (OCIC) came into being in The Netherlands,Bonneville, Léo. Soixante-Dix Ans au Service du Cinéma et de l'Audiovisuel Organisation catholique internationale du cinéma (OCIC). Québec: Fides, 1998 and the Bureau Catholic International de Radiodiffusion (BCIR) in Germany. In 1946, BCIR became the international professional Catholic association for radio and television, Unda.Kevin Francis Kersten,The structures, activités and policies of Unda, the International Catholic Association for Radio and Television, A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
OCIC, Unda, and UCIP had similar objectives: to bring together Catholics already working as professionals in the media (OCIC in the field of cinema, Unda in radio and television, and UCIP in the press). 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.Peter Malone (ed.), The Emergence of SIGNIS, Brussels, 2009. 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).Guido Convents and Tom Van Beeck, "Forum. Documenting Catholic Media Activities all over the World: the SIGNIS, OCIC and Unda Archives" (1928–1998), p. 113-121, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 29 (1), mars 2009. In 2014, the Vatican suggested that SIGNIS should also integrate the members of the former International Catholic Union of the Press (UCIP), 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 (Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada).Guido Convents, Frank and Mary Frost, "90 Years of a North American Presence in SIGNIS", p. 4-8, SIGNIS Media nr 2, Brussels/Quebec, June 2017.
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 (and the spectators). 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.Molhant, Robert. Catholics and the Cinema. A strange story of fears and passions. The beginnings: 1895–1935. Brussels: SIGNIS, 2003. 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.Susanna Petrin, "The first Swiss film buff was a Priest", Swiss review, 19 May 2017
Early film producers like Pathé Frères found also inspiration in the Bible and in religions.David J. Shepherd, The Bible on Silent Film; Spectacle, Story and Scripture in the Early Cinema, Cambridge University Press, 2013 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.The Moving Picture World, March 1907, p.42. From 1910 on, almost every Belgian city had its Catholic cinema (called mostly Family cinema, or Patria). 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.Daniel Biltereyst, "The Roman Catholic church and film exhibition in Belgium, 1926–1940", p.193-214, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 27(2), 2007.