I am an ex-Catholic
who takes great delight in making fun of the church because... well,
it is so certain it is right, and it isn't. It also pretends to be
moral and isn't, and is often about as far away from the teachings of
Christ as it's possible to be and not be a Nazi. Oh wait...
I'll get back to the
Nazi aspect of this latest pope below (“he didn't want to be –
everyone had to join the party back then....”).
I'll also get around to the fact that the guy knows more about sex
abuse in the church than any other pontiff ever has and did nothing
to stop it or to punish (or even just excommunicate) the guilty. That
stuff just ain't funny, and this is supposed to be a humorous blog
post.So I'll start with the light stuff and then bring on the heavy material toward the end. First and foremost, the media attention given to the abdication... er, resignation of this high-hatted fool has fascinated me, in that it's always fascinating to watch the news media fawn over a leader who literally exists in a dimension where the past is always present and what “we” say is always right (and everyone else? Why they're ALL going to hell....). The coverage has died down, but is sure to be ratcheted up again when the cardinals do their arcane wizardry (puff of smoke, my ass).
I find it very hard
to laugh about the cruel realities of the church, but I can enjoy
those who speak about its rampant hypocrisy and its backward-looking
mindset – and yes, I do think that the other key religions have
their backward-looking, we-are-completely-right-on-everything sects,
and I have as little regard for them. I was brought up Catholic,
however, so I can personally attest to the stupidity and tunnel
vision of that faith.
So what is there to
laugh about? Well, there is one humorist who always mocked the
Catholic clergy in a pretty friendly way. I'm talking of course about
Don Novello, whose “Father Guido Sarducci” character I first
encountered on a Smothers Brothers comeback variety series in the
mid-Seventies (I believe Fr. Guido first appeared on a David
Steinberg LP called “Goodbye to the '70s”).
Father Guido is a
priest who talks common sense, a gent who will never be promoted to
archbishop or cardinal (that stripe “gets you the good veal in
restaurants”), most likely because he's been the “gossip
columnist” for the Vatican newspaper for the past 35 years. Novello
infused the character with brilliant bits like this one, explaining
how we all do literally “pay for our sins”:
He also came up with
a foolproof way to learn only the stuff that you're left with after a regular education is over. Novello's routines as Fr. Guido have
always been impeccable (that sadly misguided bit at the
what-was-all-that-about “Rally to Restore
Sanity” excepted); Novello's other work, on the Laszlo
Letters book and as a comedy writer, has always been
spot-on.
With all the
affection I have for the Fr. Guido character, I should be doing a
whole mock campaign here to get Signore Sarducci to be elected pope.
He reported on the selection of Pope Benedict for the Al Franken
radio show on Air America; the segment heard here is actually
the weaker of two appearances I heard – his explanation of how the
pope was chosen was far funnier (as I remember it, the process included being
hit in the head with a hammer), but that particular appearance on
Franken's show has not been preserved online.
There you have it –
there's one guy in a priest's garb that I do love and have loved for
over a third of a century. As for my evolving religious beliefs –
that went from agnosticism (a discovery made in Catholic high school,
mind you) to atheism – I tend to side more with the angry
ex-Catholics who know how to sum up the situation in a pithy way.
Guys like George Carlin, who pretty much was the poster boy for an
evolving consciousness (evolving away from the church).
George inspired many
standups over the years, and one who has professed his devotion and debt to Carlin is Louis CK, currently helming the best comedy
series being produced in the U.S. Louis has been directing short
films for a few decades now, but one of his finest hours (well, four
minutes) is this little item from 2007 about the true “point” of
the Catholic church:
Yeah, Louis'
contention that the church “exists solely for the purpose of boy
rape” may seem like a comic exaggeration – but only a little. I
personally never was never raped by a priest, but was taught religion
in grammar school by a priest who was arrested on child pornography
charges (he was arrested in an alley off Times Square, no shit).
He was not
excommunicated, merely shuffled off to another parish. My parish was
abuzz for a few days with this “outrage,” but all the crazy
people who believed kept believing that the church needed our
collection-plate dough and all was soon forgotten. (By the way, he
had also been running the parish branch of the Brownies.) A small
handful of the priests and nuns I was taught by in twelve years of
Catholic school were exemplary individuals; the majority, though, were
afflicted with alcoholism, sadism, or flat-out insanity.
Thus we arrive back
at the soon-to-be ex-Benedict, a man who served in the Hitler Youth
and who, according to many, was “complicit in child sex abuse
scandals.” To quote a Guardian article from last week, Pope Benedict (according to David Clohessy, the executive
director of the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests) “read
thousands of pages of reports of the abuse cases from across the
world. He knows more about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups than
anyone else in the church yet he has done precious little to protect
children."
Back when he was
just Cardinal Ratso Ratzinger, the Pope was put in charge of
investigating sexual abuse problems in different countries (among
them Ireland and the U.S.; as Pope he also ignored major cases in
Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria). In each case, the
perpetrators pretty much got off scot-free. To quote the
Guardian one last time, I cite Jakob Purkarthofer,
of Austria's Platform for Victims of Church Violence, who says that
"Ratzinger was part of the system and co-responsible for these
crimes."
So this pope is not a good, moral human being,
he's a bureaucrat and administrator. And therefore I felt that the
monologue and sketch about him from the first season of Stewart
Lee's Comedy Vehicle needed to be online. The series in its
entirety was up on YT at one point, but now exists only as small
shards.
One would think the Comedy Vehicle
sketch about Pope Ratz would be up online, though, since it
interestingly enough links the Pope to Jimmy Savile. Lee and his
producers are not accusing the Pope of pedophilia at all – the gag
is that Il Papa wanted his strikingly garish red shoes and received
them thanks to Jimmy Savile on his “Jim'll Fix It” TV series. But
yeah, it seems like a fascinating link to make anyway, between a man
who made a habit of molesting young folk and another gent who did
nothing to stop the abuse he heard about.
Savile is played by the master Scottish
comedian-provocateur Jerry Sadowitz, who did material on Savile being
a pedo way back in the late Eighties – that material (less than two
minutes worth) got his CD “Gobshite” completely pulled from
distribution.
Lee also devises a
commercial use for a likeness of Benedict's horrifyingly mean-looking
face. (Those racoon eyes, man, those eyes....). Please enjoy:
Note: some of the illustrations in this piece came from http://www.gospelaccordingtohate.com/
2 comments:
Minor nitpick: you are not an "ex-Catholic". The proper term is "recovering Catholic".
I like how you posted that picture of Ratzinger with his arm raised in a Nazi salute without realize it's just a cropped image where he had both his arms up like that.
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