Tom Hanks is supposedly an Orthodox Christian, belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church. For his role in the Da Vinci Code, should he be excommunicated?
Personally, I think it is a serious offense to deny Christ.
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2006/03/01/ ... code.shtml
http://www.goarch.org/en/special/DaVinci/
andy holland
sinner
Hi.
Here's what I dug up on the "Is T.H. Greek Orthodox" question. The complete text is found at:
http://www.ldsfilm.com/actors/TomHanks.html
the complete text profiles his spiritual journey but focusses more on his Mormon and Evangelical involvements....BTW, it suggests to me that he is NOT Jewish like the anti-Zionist conspiracy theorists (code word for gossip mongers) confidently affirm. But is a typical European American and post-Christian type person who was molded by his varied experiences among the dying gasps of the "christian middle class american smorgasbord" and voted to be a liberal agnostic who ends up in his adulthood doing something alot more fun with his life than being a dysfunctional Evangelical -- like leading an exciting and enjoyable life of being an actor instead. Anyways, should he be excommunicated? Well, are any of us Bishops whose responsibility it is to make such a decision? No? They why even ask this question? It seems to me that it is out of joint with an ORTHODOX spiritual life for laymen to make armchair decisions on such questions. Is it not an idle and careless question for us who are not clergy?
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From: Tosie Bonner, "My church gets pimped...", posted 23 November 2005 on LiveJournal blog website (http://www.livejournal.com/users/tosie_ ... 53069.html; viewed 7 December 2005):
I'll explain - when my wife and I lived in Los Angeles, we attended the St. Sopia Greek Orthodox cathedral. It's one of the biggest and fanciest Greek Orthodox churches in the country. Any Greeks involved in showbiz attended this parish. I saw a few familiar faces from time to time. We even saw Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson a couple of times (in case you didn't know, Rita Wilson is Greek - she was a producer on "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"). This was during his Forrest Gump years, so he unfortunately had to suffer many 'box of chocolates' jokes from older Greeks, but he was always a good sport.
Anyhow, my wife and I were watching Nip/Tuck last night, and one of the main characters was getting married. He and the other main character are standing outside a church when my wife and I realize, "Hey, it's St. Sophia's!"
The church is really pretty to look at - inside and out. It's one of the few Orthodox cathedrals in the U.S. And it has been used in other movies as well (Coppola's "Dracula" comes to mind). But this was just weird. Have you ever seen Nip/Tuck? The show breaks just about every sexual taboo out there, along with several non-sexual taboos too. So, yeah, this was strange.
Then they get to the wedding part, and who is playing the priest but St. Sopia's own priest, Father X (I'm not going to name him, because I'm about to say a few negative things about the guy). He was standing at the altar with a big grin on his face, looking kinda like...well, in Greek, we'd say he looked like a malaka.
You see, this priest looooves attention. He craves the spotlight, and he loves to act. He was the Greek priest in the Daredevil movie too (at the funeral of Elektra's father). He's a nice guy, and gives fairly good sermons, but man...I've just gotta question his intentions sometimes.
I mean, it's Nip/Tuck. I just don't think a real priest should associate with the show. Watch it? Sure, and he can watch "Sex in the City", "Deadwood", and "The Sopranos" if he feels like it. But to be on the show? I dunno. If the priest is supposed to be God's representative on earth, I don't think God would want him there - or that he'd want a show like that filmed in his home.
Another Father X story bugs me. Granted, this story is only a RUMOR - it may not be true at all. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were. Whatever. Here it is: rumor has it that Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks visited Father X and said Tom was interested in getting baptized (while he showed up to church, he wasn't Greek Orthodox). Father X thought this was terrific news and SUPPOSEDLY told them, "Great! You will be baptized and I will be your godfather."
That's right - he volunteered himself.
We never heard anything else about Tom Hanks getting baptized after that.
I hope this isn't true. Of course, if it's not, then I just slandered a priest. Crud.
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The Religious Affiliation of Actor
Tom Hanks
Catholic, Latter-day Saint, Nazarine, Fundamentalist, Greek Orthodox
Tom Hanks was an adherent of a number of different Christian denominations while growing up (including Catholic, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Nazarene, and a Fundamentalist Christian group. Hanks joined the Greek Orthodox Church when he married his wife, Rita Wilson. The webpage below is not a comprehensive spiritual biography of Tom Hanks, but focuses primarily on the time he spent as a Latter-day Saint.
Source: David Gardner. Tom Hanks: The Unauthorized Biography. London, UK: Blake Publishing Ltd. (1999).
Pg. 20:
Winifred [Tom Hanks' stepmother] had become a Mormon while married to Amos and that soon became a source of conflict with her new husband, who was suspicious of religion in most forms. 'When we met his kids were Catholic and mine were Protestant and that had its difficulties,' said Winifred. 'Then I became enamoured of the Mormon Church and Mr Hanks [Amos Hanks -- Tom Hanks' father] didn't.
'It was funny because the kids enjoyed going to church. But after we had split up, Mr Hanks and I were at a friend's wedding and Tom ran up to me and said, "Mum, mum, guess what? I'm not a Mormon any more. Now I am a darned old Catholic!"'
She went on: 'Tom got on very well with my children. But Sandy [Tom's oldest sibiling] felt the loss of her mother. To her I was always an intruder.
'Larry was much quieter than Tom, but he would hold his own. I don't think anything was really difficult for Tom. He was one who could roll with the punches.'
[At this point, Tom's father Amos had divorced his first wife, the mother of his four children, because she wanted to leave them. She still had the youngest child with in California, but Amos and his three oldest children -- Sandra, Larry and Tom -- moved to Reno, where Amos married Winifred, who had 8 children (5 still at home) from her first husband. Tom was five years old when his father moved from California to move into Winifred's basement apartment in Reno. Amos and Winifred were married soon after that.]
Pg. 21:
The marriage had lasted less than two years when Amos once again instructed his three children to gather together their belongings and climb in the truck. Although the scenario was no longer novel to Tom, Larry or Sandra, it was no less unsettling. With the possible exception of Sandra, they had made friends, tried their best to put down some new roots and found solace in the topsy-tuvy world of a big family. Tom felt strongly enough to call Winifred 'mum', and she in turn felt very protective of the baby of her extended family.
Pg. 22:
Tom has never made any attempt to contact his 'secret' family and has been dismissive of them in interviews. Asked by the American entertainment magazine US in 1984 whether it was a Brady Bunch home, he replied: Oh, nooo. I wouldn't remember their names if they showed their faces today.'
In another interview, he said: 'My first stepmother was somewhat flaky. Her love of the Mormon Church was just one of the reasons I think dad left her. Dad did kind of rebel against it. She's not a Mormon now. She's probably into astrology or something.'
Tom Hanks: The Unauthorized Biography, pg. 39:
'I mostly just wanted to get out of the house; the house wasn't a good place to be.'
The path Tom took was to religion. A club at school led him to the First Covenant Church, just down the hill at Skyline, and a faith that would dominate his life for the next four years.
The church would provide friends, a girlfriend, structure, later even surrogate parents and a car. In return, the young recruit simply had to believe and to conform -- two things born-again Tom was more than happy to do.
Sister Sandra remembers her brother as being 'self-rightous' around his Fundamentalist Christian period, 'as if he had seen the light and the rest of us were in the dark.'
His father was equally dismissive, saying Tom suffered 'an adolescent faith attack.'
But although he admits to being 'a geek, a spaz' as he entered his teens, the church answered a very real need in Tom at a time he was having trouble shrugging reality off with a ready quip.
He had already tried being a Catholic, a Mormon and a Nazarene. But those had always been forced on him by circumstance. Here was a religion that wanted him for himself, irrespective of who his mother happened to be.
'Because of all the people I lived with, I had a chequered religious upbringing. Then, when I was in high school, I had a serious born-again experience,' Tom explained in a Los Angeles Times interview. 'A great group of poeple ran a church near where I lived, and they provided a safe, nurturing atmosphere at a time there wasn't much else I could count on.
'The beliefs I embraced at that time don't mean the same thing to me now. When you're young and idealistic you tend to view things in absolute terms, and the absolutes didn't pan out, even within the confines of that place. You begin to see the contradictions without looking too closely.'
It was a while though, before Tom started looking back to the secular world. For now, he was enjoying his own, contradictory [pg. 40] rebellion. While other kids were his age were straining at the leash, growing long hair, pubescent moustaches, playing truant from church, and testing authorty, Tom was joining the congregation youth group and choir and faithfully attending both the morning and afternoon Sunday services at the Oakland church that had become his second home. In time, he wasn't just joining Bible readings, he was leading them.
He says he was 'a Jesus freak', the sort of boy who would approach other studnets in the hallways at school and invite them to his house after class to discuss passages from the Bible. [He was 14 years old at the beginning of this period.] ... Apart from the church, the other main influence on Tom's life at the time was director Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tom first saw it when he was 13 and he went on to see it an incredible 22 times in the cinema.
'It was probably the most influential film, story, artistic package, whatever, that I ever saw. It was just bigger. It affected me much, much more than anything I had ever seen,' he said. 'There was just awe. Eveyr time I saw it, I saw something new, something else that Kubrick had put in. He was able to suspend my disbelief. I just felt, "We are in space."'
From "Tom Terrific", article by Richard Corliss and Cathy Booth, part of "The Best of Cinema" sub-section in the "The Best and Worst of 1998" special section, in Time, December 21, 1998:
Tom also got an eclectic religious education. His mother took the kids to Roman Catholic Mass. A stepmother brought in some Mormon proselytizers [missionaries]. His aunt, with whom he lived for a time, had converted to the Nazarene Church ("What did I know from fanatical?" he asks). In high school his Jewish friends inducted him into the sacred rituals of seder, bagels and lox. At the same time he joined "a great group of people" who were born-again Christians; for four years he led Bible readings. But Tom was a man with his own mission. The mission was acting.
From an interview published in George magazine, April 1998:
The major religion I was exposed to in the first 10 years of my life was Catholicism. My stepmother became a Mormon. My aunt, whom I lived with for a long time, was a Nazarene, which is kind of ultra-super Methodist, and in high school, all my friends were Jews. For years I went to Wednesday-night Bible studies with my church group. So I had this peripatetic overview of various faiths, and the one thing I got from that was the intellectual pursuit involved. There was a lot of great stuff to think about. What were the four spiritual laws? Are you a post-tribulationist or a pre-tribulationist?
From: Tosie Bonner, "My church gets pimped...", posted 23 November 2005 on LiveJournal blog website (http://www.livejournal.com/users/tosie_ ... 53069.html; viewed 7 December 2005):
I'll explain - when my wife and I lived in Los Angeles, we attended the St. Sopia Greek Orthodox cathedral. It's one of the biggest and fanciest Greek Orthodox churches in the country. Any Greeks involved in showbiz attended this parish. I saw a few familiar faces from time to time. We even saw Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson a couple of times (in case you didn't know, Rita Wilson is Greek - she was a producer on "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"). This was during his Forrest Gump years, so he unfortunately had to suffer many 'box of chocolates' jokes from older Greeks, but he was always a good sport.
Anyhow, my wife and I were watching Nip/Tuck last night, and one of the main characters was getting married. He and the other main character are standing outside a church when my wife and I realize, "Hey, it's St. Sophia's!"
The church is really pretty to look at - inside and out. It's one of the few Orthodox cathedrals in the U.S. And it has been used in other movies as well (Coppola's "Dracula" comes to mind). But this was just weird. Have you ever seen Nip/Tuck? The show breaks just about every sexual taboo out there, along with several non-sexual taboos too. So, yeah, this was strange.
Then they get to the wedding part, and who is playing the priest but St. Sopia's own priest, Father X (I'm not going to name him, because I'm about to say a few negative things about the guy). He was standing at the altar with a big grin on his face, looking kinda like...well, in Greek, we'd say he looked like a malaka.
You see, this priest looooves attention. He craves the spotlight, and he loves to act. He was the Greek priest in the Daredevil movie too (at the funeral of Elektra's father). He's a nice guy, and gives fairly good sermons, but man...I've just gotta question his intentions sometimes.
I mean, it's Nip/Tuck. I just don't think a real priest should associate with the show. Watch it? Sure, and he can watch "Sex in the City", "Deadwood", and "The Sopranos" if he feels like it. But to be on the show? I dunno. If the priest is supposed to be God's representative on earth, I don't think God would want him there - or that he'd want a show like that filmed in his home.
Another Father X story bugs me. Granted, this story is only a RUMOR - it may not be true at all. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if it were. Whatever. Here it is: rumor has it that Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks visited Father X and said Tom was interested in getting baptized (while he showed up to church, he wasn't Greek Orthodox). Father X thought this was terrific news and SUPPOSEDLY told them, "Great! You will be baptized and I will be your godfather."
That's right - he volunteered himself.
We never heard anything else about Tom Hanks getting baptized after that.
I hope this isn't true. Of course, if it's not, then I just slandered a priest. Crud.
Webpage created circa May 2002. Webpage last modified 7 December 2005.
May Christ our True God be glorified!
Anyways, should he be excommunicated? Well, are any of us Bishops whose responsibility it is to make such a decision? No? They why even ask this question?
Hesychia,
When bishops and priests (in this case I don't believe we are talking about real bishops and priests) make decisions that scandalize the local chuch, and not only the local church, but all the faithful in the world, by blaspheming the Lord, then the matter is no longer a private one of "Bishops whose responsibility it is to make such a decision".
Putting that aside, I feel sorry for Tom Hanks, having been through so many earthly religions, just when he is finally so close to being presented with the truth and the path to salvation, a false priest steals it from him. This is not just happening with Tom Hanks, but with a great many people. That is why "priests" like this are called "wolves"; wolves they are indeed - and it is not only proper, it is imperitive, for people to discern false priests from real priests, for the sake of their own souls.
True enough that it may not be our "responsibility...to make such a decision", but it is our responsibility to discern the truth.
It seems to me that it is out of joint with an ORTHODOX spiritual life for laymen to make armchair decisions on such questions. Is it not an idle and careless question for us who are not clergy
You are right about that. Who should be sitting there wondering if a person should be excommunicated? That is rather like wondering what medicine a doctor should prescribe for some obscene desease. The situation does however bring up the question of whether or not the doctor is even fit to make such a descision, a question which should concern everyone very much. I mean, who knowingly goes to a quack doctor saying, "it is not my responsibility to act when my doctor appears to be prescribing poison, it is a matter for the health authorities. It is my job to be a good citizen and not cause trouble. And not only that, but if anyone else causes trouble I must make them be quiet"?
Laymen are just as much and sometimes more defenders of the faith than ordained Bishops and Priests.
Certainly as laymen we don't finally decide excommunication, but we can surely complain when we see violations of the canon and blasphemous public behavior that is a denial of Christ.
Can one express an opinion as to whether such behavior is something that should be excommunicated because the Church canon is as much a rudder of the laity as it is of the hierarchy? "It seems right to the Holy Spirit and to us" includes the laity in "us."
Furthermore, if one sees a person who is ill, one can opine about a medication that might help (excommunication is a medicine of the Church).
I don't know, I am sure I have sinner by bringing it up, on the other hand, I feel bad for Tom Hanks and think that something should be done for his sake and the sake of the Church.
I doubt the heirarchy would touch him - honestly, I don't think they have the nerve to go against Hollywood. If the laity raised a big stink over it, maybe Tom would get the message.
andy holland
sinner
Hanks reacts to Da Vinci critics
Da Vinci Code star Tom Hanks has said the film of Dan Brown's controversial best-seller is just "a good story" that should not be taken too seriously.
The actor told London's Evening Standard newspaper the film was loaded with "hooey" and "nonsense".
"If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you'd be making a very big mistake."
The film has attracted criticism from religious leaders and organisations.
The Da Vinci Code receives its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
'Scavenger hunt'
Leading figures in the Catholic Church have called for a boycott of the film, which they claim is blasphemous and an attack on their faith.
Author Brown's book includes a tale that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had children, a secret bloodline that has been covered up by the Catholic Church.
But Hanks, who plays a Harvard professor in Ron Howard's film, said the film was "a lot of fun", likening it to a "scavenger hunt".
"We always knew there would be a segment of society that would not want this movie to be shown," he said.
But he claimed that it "never hurts" for a film to provoke "dialogue" about religious issues and history.
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They say that I am bad news. They say "Stay Away."
