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Showing posts with label confession. Show all posts
Showing posts with label confession. Show all posts

Friday, December 21, 2012

Film Comment: El Evangelista


You say that you want to see a Christian comedy about a professional drug gang enforcer/assassin?  Well, here it is.

Pablo (J. Salome Martinez) always pauses before killing his victims to allow them the chance to make their peace with God.  Whether or not they do, he then fills them with bullets.  Surprisingly, though the film is extremely violent, there is no cursing.

Pablo and his assistant are bumbling hit men who eventually are able to carry out their assignments.  There is a lot of running around and shooting and killing.

The turning point for Pablo comes when he is assigned by his boss to assassinate a Pentecostal pastor who is interfering with the local drug trade.  Pablo becomes a Christian and turns his life around.  This is where the real problem with El Evangelista (2006) lies.

Pablo moves to another area and begins his happy new life.  What about his probably vengeful former associates?  What about his responsibility for numerous murders?  Did he have a responsibility to self-report to the authorities?  Should he have given his knowledge of the drug trade to the police?  Is repentance without confession really repentance?  Can we escape temporal consequences for our actions?

This is a Spanish language film with English subtitles.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Selling the Confessional on eBay

Roman Catholic Priest Otto Weber needed cash for his Hirschstetten Parish in Vienna-Donaustadt, Austria, and had few ways to get it.  Then he had an idea!  He could go on eBay and offer up one of his confessional boxes for sale.  He knew the box would be a hard item to sell so he offered up some ideas for alternate uses for the thing.  It could be converted into a one person sauna, a small bar, or a children's playhouse, among other things.

Over two hundred offers were made, the largest being by some joker for 666 euros.  For those who don't know, 666 is the biblical number of The Beast, the Antichrist.

Church authorities were not amused and told Weber that "it is not acceptable to sell objects used in administering a sacrament..."

If you're interested in reading more about this, go to Google or Bing (or your favorite search engine) and enter search parameters like "Austria & confessional & Vienna."  On Google Search, I got 179 hits using this search set.