To Catholics, the week before Easter is “Holy Week,” a time to prepare for the church’s highlight of the year, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. To Hollywood, it is a time to flog the Catholic Church with vicious portrayals of corruption and hypocrisy.
Hollywood insists it's product reflects a market demand. There is no market demand for this. It is Hollywood, and only Hollywood, that wishes to celebrate its bigotry toward Catholics.
This year, there are entire shows which mock God and Catholics on a weekly basis. On Tuesday, ABC’s announcer actually told viewers "It's Easter Week. Celebrate with Tuesday's new hit comedy, next ... and now, ABC's The Real O'Neals.”
The show mocking a Catholic family coming to grips with a gay son focused on the boys borrowing their uptight mother’s computer and looking up gay pornography sites and being confronted with a “pornado” of sexually graphic images. In other words, your average Catholic family -- as viewed by Hollywood.
On Monday night, two shows went to town on the Catholic priesthood and the Vatican. Fox has created a show called Lucifer with the weird weekly plot twist that Satan is bored with being just the Evil One and has decided to assist the Los Angeles Police Department in solving murders. In the Holy Week episode, Lucifer has great fun in infiltrating a confessional and telling a rich, married woman troubled by thoughts of adultery with her limousine driver to just embrace her lust, and then come back and be forgiven.
After becoming convinced that a priest he called “Padre Pederast” – suspected of killing a youth drug counselor, naturally -- is innocent, Lucifer finds another way to offend the faithful, bringing the priest to a nightclub featuring strippers. Not just that – strippers dressed as nuns. It's what priests do -- as viewed by Hollywood.
NBC wins the prize for Nastiest Anti-Catholicism. On NBC’s end-of-the-world comedy You, Me, and the Apocalypse, Father Jude (played by Rob Lowe) has broken his vows of celibacy and married a nun and is losing faith in his superiors.
In case a “Saviour” missile can’t prevent a comet from ending life on Earth, Father Jude is summoned before a tribunal of cardinals and asked about finding a “contingency messiah” from a list of false prophets. He denies every raudulent possibility. Another priest begs him: “The people need hope. We promised them a Messiah. So we must give them one. Whether we believe in him or not is inconsequential.” This causes Father Jude to move further toward leaving the priesthood...and is then found hanging in his office.
So either the priest has committed the mortal sin of suicide, or he was murdered by the most powerful officials in the Vatican. Some “comedy.”
Then came Wednesday’s Law and Order SVU. The commercial’s announcer promised an episode “ripped from the headlines, a sex scandal of the highest order...it’s the ‘SVU’ everyone will be talking about.”
The cops discover the Auxiliary Bishop of New York (the number-two man) is a crime boss running a large sex-trafficking ring that grooms -- here we go -- vulnerable Catholic-school girls for prostitution. A nun and two girls end up murdered. A priest and guidance counselor at the Catholic school is blackmailed into recruiting the girls for sex parties because he has an S&M fetish – that the church subsidizes to keep him quiet. At episode’s end, the bishop/crime boss escapes as the Vatican sends him to an island off Chile for “rehabilitation.”
All of this shown during Holy Week. On purpose. By anti-Catholic bigots. And cowards too: they don't have the guts publicly to admit it.
