ROME
Irish Times
Paddy Agnew
Thu, Feb 5, 2015
It is not often that a Vatican Pontifical Council opts to kick off its annual plenary session in a downtown Rome theatre with a nice little nightclub “combo” purring away corner-stage. Yet that was happened yesterday afternoon at the Teatro Argentina in Rome when the Pontifical Council for Culture kicked off its much-discussed four-day plenary session on the theme, Women’s Culture: Equality and Difference.
This is a Vatican “happening” intended to focus on topics such as gender identity, inequality, female poverty and violence against women. However, its working document has already caused a major stir by suggesting that abuse of non-medico therapeutic plastic surgery is, essentially, “a burqa made of flesh”.
That statement hardly seemed consistent with the fact that the Italian actor used to promote the event, Nancy Brilli, is a glamorous lady who not only lives with a plastic surgeon but who has also had non-medical plastic surgery. In the end, the promotional film made with Brilli was removed from the Vatican website, following complaints predominantly from the “anglophonic” world and in particular the US.
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