Your lack of faith disturbs me.
Posted on 11/15/2006 12:46:59 PM PST by presidio9
Forget the bloated deficit, forget the fact that Italy's national airlines and train network may go bust; the hottest debate in the country now is whether it is politically correct to make the Pope the butt of comic satire.
That was the question on most front pages of Italy's newspapers on Wednesday after the Roman Catholic officials reacted to a spate of Italian television and radio programmes poking fun at Pope Benedict.
"The Vatican doesn't like satire," headlined Rome's La Repubblica.
L'Unita, the newspaper of the largest party in the centre-left government, even put its banner headline -- "The Vatican Can't Take a Joke" -- above its story about the state railway system being "on the brink of bankruptcy".
In one TV programme, comedian Maurizio Crozza, dressed in white papal robes, imitates Benedict's distinct German accent as he sits behind a desk flanked by two Swiss Guards in ceremonial blue, red and yellow uniform.
Crozza does a satirical play on two identical sounding words -- Pax (peace) and PACS, the acronym for a controversial law that would give unwed heterosexual couples and gay couples in Italy equal civil rights. He says "pax (or PACS) be with you".
The Pope and the Roman Catholic Church oppose introducing the PACS law.
In a radio programme, a duo of comedians imitate the Pope and his priest-secretary, Monsignor Georg Ganswein, a 50-year-old German whose boyish good looks have made him a minor celebrity in the Italian media.
One says to the other that the Pope has started smoking three packs of cigarettes a day "like a Turk" in order to prepare himself for his trip to Turkey this month.
In Italy, the phrase "smoking like a Turk" means a very heavy smoker. The Pope is a non-smoker.
The controversy started last week when the Catholic newspaper Avennire blasted the shows and hit the headlines on Wednesday after Ganswein was reported to have told an Italian news agency that he had had enough of satire about his boss.
While some newspapers defended the Pope, L'Unita said any curbs on artistic freedom would be a "crusade" by the Vatican.
"In what times are we living?" asked an editorial headlined "Free Satire in a Free Country". It said Italians should not accept any attempt at censorship and added that "this all smells a little like fundamentalism".
A long editorial in Corriere della Sera, Italy's largest-selling mainstream newspaper, criticised the satires, calling them "a sad gag".
"The Teutonic accent of the German Pope may be the stuff of a comic sketch but there are a billion people accustomed to calling him 'Holy Father' and everyone wants to see a minimum of respect for their father, if only for his age," it said.
But perhaps an editorial cartoon on Wednesday had the last word on what some consider a tempest in a chalice.
One character said the TV and radio sketches of the Pope left a lot to be desired and the other responded that Pope was actually funnier than the comedians trying to imitate him.
I can't get Dennis Miller out of my head. He said (when John Paul was pope) that every time he saw the pope with that tall, funny looking hat, it reminded him of a post hole digger. And he wanted to "grab the pope by his skinny pope legs, turn him upside down and work him like a post hole digger". It was a hilarious mental picture.
But the pope should be pitied as well - leading so many astray from the Truth with so much of the Roman Catholic doctrine that is seriously flawed and - for some of it - heretical.
Good works abound, but sound doctrine is more needful.
Just returned from Rome Italy and rode the train 200 miles an hour into Florence, of course I couldn't read Italian so I had no idea that the trains were about to go bust.
Also enjoyed going to Vatican city and seeing the Pope.
Your lack of faith disturbs me.
I could suggest a few faces to photoshop in there on the left ...
Yeah. I know some of these people personally. Their knowledge is astounding in quality and quantity: best of the best in scholarship. They know all about these things and they know more kinds of heresy than are listed in most any textbook or encyclopedia. The Pope may or may not know that I think NOBODY has a lock on Truth. He would probably assume so if the subject came up.
I remember years ago writing an article for a German legal publication. Although the topic was a serious one and my treatment of it was appropriately serious, I tried, as I usually do, to lead into the discussion with a little mild humor. The editor took it all out. He apologized, but he said his readers would never understand it and would be offended by it.
"One thing you need to keep in mind is that the current Pope is a German. Germans are known for many things, good and bad, but a well developed sense of humor is unfortunately not one of them."
That must explain why the shortest book ever written is
"Ten Thousand Years of German Humor".
Folks have been making fun of the Pope since St. Peter, I daresay. A lot of it depends on the type of humor, I guess, but most just either think it's funny, think it's offensive, or blow it off. That's the major difference between Christians and Muslims. We Christians CAN laugh at ourselves, but when someone offends us, we don't threaten to kill them!
I'm Catholic and I have no problem with anyone making light-hearted fun of the pope or anyone else. But the Italian MSM seems to be using one sentence by the pope's secretary to go into a dither about Vatican-driven fascism. These were probably the same folks who during the Danish Battle of Khartoun wept rivers about how Europe should be more "culturally sensative". Typical Euro-leftist hogwash.
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