The video shows a near-naked Indian in a remote Amazon village as he digs a large hole. A terrified child is pulled out of a hut and placed in the freshly dug grave. Soon his body and face are covered in earth.

Is this a powerful indictment of the practice of infanticide by Indian tribes in the Amazon, or a distortion of the truth and an incitement to hatred by U.S. Christian missionaries?

The tribal rights group Survival International hit out this week at the “Hakani” video, which has several edited versions online,  calling it faked and a dangerous exaggeration of the problem of infanticide practiced by Indian tribes.  The video, made with the support of a U.S.-based evangelical missionary group Youth With A Mission, seems to be an attempt to rally support for a proposed Brazilian law that would ban infanticide and other harmful practices by indigenous tribes. When contacted by Reuters, Youth With A Mission said it wouldn’t comment on what it called baseless allegations.

(Photo: Brazilian Indians, 28 Jan 2009/Paulo Santos)

Enock Freire, one of the makers of the film that was shot with members of the Suruwaha tribe, defended it when contacted by Reuters. He said it was no secret that it was fiction, acted out by local Indians, but that it was aimed at drawing attention to the very real and what he said was the common problem of infanticide by Amazon Indian tribes. He said there is a widespread belief among tribes that children with “bad souls”, including those who are disabled, need to take their last breath underground to avoid them coming back to haunt the village.

The controversy raises fundamental questions about society’s relations with indigenous people and the role of religion. Should tribes be contacted and brought into line with national laws and customs, and should foreign missionaries be the ones doing it?

Proponents of the law say that children are vulnerable to cruel traditional practices. Groups like Survival accuse some missionary groups of trying to “civilize” Indians.

There is also the question of whether the video is misleading. It is introduced as a true story but the episode told in the video is not substantiated. Could it could risk demonizing Indians by giving the impression that infanticide is a general practice among tribes, something Survival says is not the case? Survival says the Suruwaha tribe, which lived in semi-isolation until the late 1970s, is known for its cultural practice of suicide and is not representative.

(Photo: Brazilian Indian, 27 Jan 2009/Raimundo Pacco)

Pope Benedict’s comments about condoms on his flight to Cameroon have made headlines worldwide. They have been quoted extensively on many websites run by news organisations and also by the Vatican. But that hasn’t stopped the same Vatican from editing them after the fact to try to make them sound more acceptable.

(Photo: Pope Benedict answers questions in the plane to Africa, with Rev. Georg Gänswein (L) and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (C), 17 March 2009//Alessandro Bianchi)

The main change on the Vatican website comes in the most controversial part, where he says: “It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem.” This was criticised in Europe and the United States as going beyond a doctrinal question and spreading untruths about public health policies. Now the Vatican’s Bollettino (daily bulletin — here in the original Italian) has watered this down to have him say:   “On the contrary, the risk is that they increase the problem.” The Milan daily Corriere della Sera has the original transcript in Italian.

The Vatican editors also softened the pope’s talk about solutions. In the original, he said: “The problem of AIDS cannot be solved only with money …” In the new version, this comes out as: “The problem of AIDS cannot be solved only by advertising slogans …”

The Bollettino flip-flopped when it came to using the everyday word “condom” (preservativi in Italian), as the pope did when he spoke on the plane to journalists. It first replaced that with the more scientific sounding word “prophylactics” (profilattici). The term “prophylactics” has a wider meaning and could include other methods besides condoms. But abstinence, which the Vatican preaches as the most effective method against spreading AIDS, can also be described as a prophylactic measure. This seems to have dawned on the Vatican editors only after they changed Benedict’s comment to say profilattici, as Corriere documents in the screenshot here. So they later had to go back and correct the correction by switching back to preservativi.

Asked in Yaoundé about the editing, chief Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said he knew about the issue with the word preservativi but was not aware of any other changes. He said the Vatican’s Secretariat of State occasionally “finetunes” the pope’s unprepared spoken workds to “make them flow better in Italian” and to “join loose phrases.” The pope’s native language is German, but he is an impressive linguist, has been living in Rome since 1982 and speaks excellent Italian.

This is not the first time this has happened. Two years ago, Benedict’s comments in the plane flying to Brazil about excommunicating Catholic politicians who support abortion were changed in the final Vatican version.  In his famous Regensburg speech, he said a Byzantine emperor he quoted criticising Islam had spoken “somewhat brusquely.” The final version spun this to say he spoke “with a startling brusqueness we find unacceptable.”

Unacceptable. Interesting that he should choose that word. Is this editing of his comments unacceptable?

Liberation Theology has long been out of fashion at the Vatican, but its effects have lived on in Latin America. One is a tradition of foreign-born Catholic priests who went to the region to preach its message of justice for the poor and oppressed. But the falling number of priests in Europe and the United States and a turn away from this activist view of the Gospels has taken its toll. The clerics defending peasants against landowners and denouncing child prostitution, drug trafficking and illegal logging are growing old and the flow of foreign priests is drying up. There are Brazilian priests, but with family members living in the country, they are often more vulnerable to death threats.

Stuart Grudgings, senior correspondent in our Rio de Janeiro bureau, travelled to Abaetetuba at the mouth of the Amazon in northeastern Brazil to visit Italian-born Bishop Flavio Giovenale and other members of this disappearing breed of priests.

Read the whole feature here.

(Photo left: Bishop Flavio Giovenale, 11 Feb 2009/Paulo Santos)

(Photo right: Sunset over Abaetetuba, 28 Sept 2008/Paulo Santos)

A little-known Brazilian farming town with sugar cane wealth is set to upstage Rio de Janeiro by erecting a statue of Christ this year that will eclipse its famous equivalent atop Rio’s Corcovado mountain.

The Christ statue in Sertaozinho, northwest of Sao Paulo city, will be 187 feet (57 meters) tall when perched on its 128 foot (39-metre) pedestal.

(Photo: Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, 5 June 2005/Bruno Domingos)

Here’s our story about it and the full Folha de Sao Paulo report on the statue (in Portuguese).

In 2007, a German businessman named Harry Vossberg announced he wanted to beat Rio’s record by 20 meters by building a giant Jesus statue in the Bavarian Alps. But local officials and even the local Catholic and Protestant churches were opposed to the idea. Bad Reichenhall, the town where he wanted to build it, finally decided last September against issuing a construction permit.  Vossberg has said he wanted to look for a site elsewhere in Germany.

A German businessman has plans to erect the world’s largest statue of Jesus Christ on a mountaintop in the Bavarian Alps. Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant churches there want it. A poll for the television channel Bayerischer Rundfunk showed 77.54 percent of those responding are also against it. The planners are not giving up, however. In a press release this week, they urged their critics to use the coming Christmas season to reconsider and open their hearts to “more tolerance and positive participation.” That includes a fund drive to raise the two million euros the project will cost.

Harry Vossberg, a construction magnate from Dresden, has launched an association called Christian Initiative Predigtstuhl to collect money for the over 50-meter-high statue. That would make it at least 10 metres higer than the famous Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. In its PR, the association calls the statue “the eighth wonder of the world.”

“The giant statue, constructed to the highest artistic standards, will be built with the help of prestigious experts, engineers and statue artists out of permanently weather-proof and environmentally friendly materials,” said the press release announcing the project last month. “The exact height is secret. Completely new composite materials, such as ‘liquid wood,’ will be used. The base of the statue will include a room for pilgrims to pray and meet.”

The statue would be built on a mountain appropriately known as the Predigtstuhl , or Sermon Chair, in the Bad Reichenhall spa area close to the Austrian border. There is already a hotel there, built at an altitude of 1,583 metres above sea level. It even has a webcam to show the breathtaking views over the Alps from the peak.

An official for the archdiocese of Munich told the kath.net agency that the Catholic Church preferred a large cross or a chapel, not “a colossal Christ.” In the Protestant weekly Sonntagsblatt, the local Lutheran pastor called it “much too bombastic” and said an ecumenical chapel would suffice.

Does anybody out there think this is a good idea?