“Resistance: Fall of Man” – that’s the title of the violent videogame recently placed on the market by Sony and set in Manchester Cathedral, in which an orgy of bloodshed takes place in the virtual battle between the player and the hundreds of enemies who materialize from among the pews of the church, and whom he is urged to eliminate with bursts of gunfire. A spokesman of the Church of England accused Sony of having desecrated a place of worship, “of the greatest importance for Christianity in England”, and declared that if the Japanese producer of the videogame does not withdrew it from sale and does not formally apologize, the Church will take legal action against it. According to the Anglican Communion, Sony did not ask permission to use the images of the church, faithfully reproduced in the videogame, of which hundreds of thousands of copies have already been sold. Nor has Sony replied to the telephone calls of Anglicans protesting about the videogame. According to the Anglican Bishop of Manchester, Nigel McCulloch, “the choice of the cathedral as the setting for the massacre shows a lack of any sense of responsibility, especially when one considers that the city has a serious problem of criminality that has cost the life of many young people. Using one of our most important cathedrals as a setting for brutal battles with automatic weapons defies belief”.
