Day: October 6, 2018

Mormons will start spending less time at church each Sunday — two hours instead of three — after a change announced Saturday aimed at making worship more manageable for members around the globe. 

The change, which takes effect in January, is a significant one for Mormons, who since 1980 have been expected to attend all three hours each Sunday to be considered active members of the faith.

The news triggered widespread applause from members, with some posting celebratory memes on social media. It came during the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ twice-yearly conference, where a leader also reaffirmed the faith’s opposition to gay marriage and its belief that one’s gender is God-given and for eternity.

“The senior leaders of the church have been aware for many years that for some of our precious members, a three-hour Sunday schedule at church can be difficult,” said Quentin L. Cook, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, church leaders who help run the faith. “This is particularly true for parents with small children, primary children, elderly members, new converts and others.”

The three-hour commitment is a hefty one compared with those of some other religions’ Sunday services. Many Catholic, Lutheran and Methodist churches, for instance, offer weekly worship that lasts about an hour or an hour and a half, along with voluntary classes and other gatherings throughout the week.

​Trying to be ‘proactive’

Church President Russell M. Nelson called the adjustment a new “home-centered church” strategy that comes as the faith expands throughout the world. More than half of its 16 million members live outside the U.S. and Canada.

“The long-standing objective of the church is to assist all members to increase their faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and in his atonement,” Nelson said. “In this complex world today, this is not easy. The adversary is increasing his attack on faith and on families at an exponential rate. To survive spiritually, we need counterstrategies and proactive plans.”

Paulina Porras, a mother of 1-year-old twins, was ecstatic with the news. Her daughters aren’t old enough to go to children’s programs alone, so she and her husband have to care for them during Sunday church time.

“Staying three hours is impossible,” said Porras, 29, of Logan. “Two hours, we can do.”

Instead of attending two meetings each Sunday beyond the one-hour worship — such as Sunday school, men’s and women’s groups — members will attend one each Sunday, with the meetings rotating throughout the month, Cook said. 

‘Crazy’ family schedules

Marc Fisher, an insurance company owner from Las Vegas, also lauded the change. Three hours each Sunday can be intimidating for potential converts and wayward members, and the change gives families the flexibility to weave in gospel activities at home.

Fisher, 38, has seven children ranging in age from 7 to 25 who are busy with piano, volleyball and homework, he said. He plans to have more one-on-one talks with them.

“Schedules are crazy for a lot of families,” Fisher said. “Sometimes you hear in the church we’re caught up with checklists, the pressure and the stress of just meeting everything.”

While U.S. members most likely will welcome the new schedule, it seems to mainly reflect the church shifting its focus away from being heavily Western American, where most members live near chapels and can handle the three-hour Sunday commitment, or worship block, said Mormon scholar Matthew Bowman, an associate professor of history at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.

“This change is geared toward making participation in the church more flexible and increasingly targeted toward smaller congregations: A shorter worship block means less volunteer demands upon the congregation, fewer jobs which need to be filled, and generally easier administration,” Bowman said in an email.

Church membership growth has decreased in recent years, with membership growth in 2017 being the slowest in 80 years, according to independent Mormon researcher Matt Martinich. The number of convert baptisms in 2017 reached the lowest level in 30 years, he said.

This is mainly due to slowed growth in the countries with the most members: the United States, Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines, Chile and Peru, Martinich said.

Accent on efficiency

He doesn’t think the Sunday change is aimed at increasing retention, but rather at using church resources and members’ time more efficiently. The switch could allow multiple congregations to use the same church building in places like Utah where there are large numbers of members. It also will let members do personal and family gospel activities on their own time, he said. 

The two-day Mormon conference kicked off a day after the faith announced it was renaming the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir to drop the word “Mormon.” The singing group, now called the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, performed at the conference, as it always does. 

The decision to rename the choir the was the first major move since Nelson in August called for an end to the use of shorthand names for the religion that have been used for generations by church members and the public.

The comments about gay marriage and gender came from longtime Quorum of the Twelve member Dallin H. Oaks, who called on members to oppose “social and legal pressures to retreat from traditional marriage or to make changes that confuse or alter gender or homogenize the differences between men and women.”

Oaks said those relationships and identities are “essential to accomplish God’s great plan” and that Satan “seeks to confuse gender, to distort marriage and to discourage childbearing — especially by parents who will raise children in truth.”

The comments align with past positions by the faith, which has tried to take a more welcoming stance to LGBTQ people while sticking with fundamental opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender operations. 
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The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements address the sexual harassment and abuse of women by powerful men in Hollywood and elsewhere today. But systemic sexism in the film industry goes back decades, influencing how stories have been told on the silver screen.

Consider the cartoon Pepe Le Pew, about a persistent skunk in relentless pursuit of Penelope Pussycat. When the TV series first appeared, more than half a century ago, it was considered cute and romantic.

Today’s audiences find the skunk’s unwanted advances creepy, and reflect female characters as passive sexual objects, said George Mason University professor Lisa Koch.

Domestic abuse and patronizing behavior of husbands toward their wives were often glorified as passionate relationships, Koch added, such as in the narrative of the 1939 epic drama Gone with the Wind. The character of Rhett Butler, played by Clark Gable, is derisive and controlling toward his on-screen wife, Scarlett O Hara, played by Vivien Leigh. She is scripted as petulant, erratic and manipulative. 

Hollywood glamorized and validated the hypermasculine male character who had to rein in the manipulative and childlike female characters, Koch said.

On screen, behind the scenes

Sexism and abuse on screen also reflected the pervasive sexual abuse actresses often endured behind the scenes, said Giovanna Chesler, director of film and video studies at George Mason University. 

“You read about how Bertolucci and Marlon Brando had an arrangement for their actress in Last Tango in Paris. They knew that this would be a rape scene they would be filming but she (actress Maria Schneider) did not.” Chesler was referring to Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci as well as U.S. actor Brando.

In her 2016 autobiography, Tippi Hedren: A Memoir, the actress who was Alfred Hitchcock’s main muse and star of his films The Birds and Marnie, writes that when she turned down the filmmaker’s sexual advances, he threatened to destroy her career.

Chesler says this pervasive culture of sexism and blackmail produced men like Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. 

“He was the Oscar maker and he anointed all of these actresses into Oscar-producing roles.” Chesler said. “They thought that once they really broke through, they would get out of being sexualized on screen. How ironic that in order to do so, they had to deal with this predator.”

Dozens of women have accused the disgraced Hollywood studio boss of sexual misconduct that includes harassment and assault. Earlier this year, Weinstein was indicted on sex crimes charges but remains free on bail while he fights the accusations.

Beyond Hollywood

Since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements began, many films have offered more nuanced and textured female characters and are telling more women’s stories. 

But activists say more needs to be done to increase women’s equitable treatment in Hollywood. Lisa Koch says there is definitely power in the number of women who are uniting against sexism and sexual abuse from all walks of life. 

“It started with 300 women in Hollywood,” she said. “It has expanded dramatically, so 700,000 farm laborers pledged their support and that is just one example across the spectrum. Within the first 60 days, the movement raised $21 million in financial backing.”

WATCH: Sexism, Assault in Workplace, Including Hollywood, Stopped by Balancing Power

Activist and filmmaker Shannon Lee says female producers and behind-the-scenes artists are offering women jobs, equal pay and creative expression, such as film producer Ava DuVernay, who has an artist collective that distributes films and mandates that all the directors be female.

Lee cautions, however, that sexism against women in the workplace is too pervasive to change overnight. 

“When there is an imbalance of power, there is an abuse of power. USA Today did a survey that came out in 2017 saying that 94 percent of women in the film industry have had some experience of sexual harassment or sexual assault,” Lee said.

Koch offers another statistic: “Ninety-five percent of Hollywood directors are men, 18 percent of those involved in film production as directors, producers, writers cinematographers, editors, are women.”

Both women say the goal in the industry is 50/50 by 2020. 

“Where there is 50 percent male and 50 percent female, you don’t have the opportunity to this gross misconduct,” Lee said.

Sunu Chandy is the legal director of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington. She represents thousands of women who have come forward to seek legal support against sexual harassment and discrimination. She says both the #MeToo movement, where women openly addressed the abuse they suffered at the hands of men, and the #TimesUp movement, where sexual predators like Bill Cosby have been prosecuted and convicted for their crimes, are significant legal steps in establishing gender equity in Hollywood and elsewhere. 

“Hiring women into roles that are traditionally male roles is absolutely something that we are pushing for,” Chandy said. “But if someone goes there and is sexually harassed and leaves, it’s continuing the problem. If the Time’s Up fund helps that case to come forward and be publicized and that company takes meaningful steps to create a better workplace, more women will be encouraged to apply there.”

Chandy says that although progress is being made in offering women the legal help and support they deserve, much still has to be done to bring about real change in the workplace, be it a factory, a farm or a Hollywood movie set.
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Since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements began, many films have offered more nuanced and textured female characters and are telling more women’s stories. But activists say more needs to be done to increase women’s equitable treatment in Hollywood. In this installment, VOA’s Penelope Poulou talks with activists, filmmakers and actresses about the legal and behind the cameras groundwork that will empower women in the film industry.
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The discrimination and objectification of women in Hollywood is not a new phenomenon. For decades sexist behavior by powerful men in the industry has been part of the star system, and it has influenced how stories were told on the large screen. In the first part of a two-part series on Gender Inequality, VOA’s Penelope Poulou examines sexist stereotypes in iconic films that have permeated our popular culture.
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Montserrat Caballe, a Spanish opera singer renowned for her bel canto technique and her interpretations of the roles of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, has died. She was 85.

Caballe died early Saturday at Hospital San Pau in Barcelona, hospital spokesman Abraham del Moral told The Associated Press. Caballe’s family requested the cause of death not be released, saying that she had been in the hospital since September, del Moral said.

Spanish media said that Caballe entered the hospital last month because of a gall bladder problem.

“A great ambassador of our country has died,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a tweet. “Her voice and tenderness will remain with us forever.”

An early talent

Born into a working class family in Barcelona, Caballe unveiled her musical talents early on, singing Bach cantatas at the age of 7.

In her almost unlimited repertoire, she starred in 90 opera roles with nearly 4,000 stage performances.

At 8, Caballe entered the Liceo’s Conservatory in Barcelona with Eugenia Kenny, Conchita Badea, and Napoleone Annovazzi among her first teachers. She won the school’s Gold Medal on graduating in 1954. She went on to study opera in Milan and in 1956 joined the Basel Opera and played her first major role that year in the city’s Staatstheater as Mimi in Puccini’s “La Boheme.”

Four years later, she was a principal singer with the Bremen Opera.

In 1964, Caballe gave a highly praised performance of Jules Masenet’s “Manon” in Mexico City, but it was a year later in New York that a lucky break launched her on the road to international stardom.

Lucky break

On short notice, Caballe stood in for indisposed American soprano Marilyn Horne in a concert performance in Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia” at New York’s Carnegie Hall and achieved a thunderous success. It opened the doors to all the major opera venues around the world.

She produced a highly acclaimed performance as Elisabetta of Valois in an all-star cast of Verdi’s “Don Carlo” at the Arena di Verona in 1969. The concert became famous for her “la” on the final “ah” at the very end of the opera, which lasted for more than 20 bars up, driving the audience wild with delight.

Caballe was also a noted recitalist, particularly of songs of her native Spain. She was particularly admired for her purity of voice, vocal shadings and exquisite pianissimos.

​Duet with Freddie Mercury

In a brief excursion into pop music, Caballe’s duet “Barcelona” with Freddie Mercury, of the rock group Queen, was a hit single in 1987, accompanied by an album of the same name. The title track later became the anthem of the 1992 Summer Olympics in the city.

Caballe performed the song live, accompanied by a recording of the late Mercury, at the 1999 UEFA Champions League soccer final in Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium. In 1997, she sang on two tracks on an album by New Age composer Vangelis.

In 2015, Caballe was convicted of tax fraud and was given a suspended sentence of six months in prison, which she avoided since first convictions resulting in sentences of less than two years in Spain can be suspended by a judge. She had failed to pay the Spanish treasury more than 500,000 euros ($550,000) in taxes on her earnings.

Caballe, who was born Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepcion Caballe i Folch, dedicated herself to various charities and was a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. She also established a foundation for needy children in Barcelona. In 1964, she married Spanish tenor Bernabe Marti. They had two children, Bernabe Marti, Jr. and Montserrat Marti, herself a successful soprano.
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