Italian comedians on radio and TV are making fun of the Catholic Church, the Pope, and other Catholic leaders. Catholics have responded by issuing orders to burn Italian radio and TV stations, holding riots in the streets, and demanding the death of the comedians…. Oh wait, no they didn’t.
It’s so nice and safe to make fun of the Church because she’s an easy target. Of course, it would be really daring for the same comedians to make fun of Mohammed and Islam, but we know how that would turn out. Yet was that the goal all along, to see if Catholics were hypocrites?
They also struck a nerve with L’Avvenire, a newspaper owned by the Italian Bishops’ Conference, which accused the comedians of “satirical fundamentalism.”
In a front-page editorial on Friday, the paper complained that the jokes had been unwarranted. “Perhaps there is the secret intention to see if the church will respond like some Muslims responded to the satirical cartoons or to articles that criticize Islam, to then scream scandal,” wrote Carlo Cardia, an author who writes about the Catholic Church and a professor of ecclesiastical law at the University of Rome. The Catholic newspaper has said that it does not want to engage in polemics about whether it is acceptable to poke fun at the pope.
Aimed primarily at Pope Benedict?
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Not exactly. Moslems do not see Mohammed as divine. But that’s not really the point. It’s a matter of denigrating the sacred. They make fun of the pope and bishops and the Church not because of who they are but because of the offices they hold.