Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Thursday 10 January 2008

An' I'm proud to be an American, where at least...

... nobody mistakes, say, my fond nicknames for the Holy Father, as mockery.
Of course, I knew from my association with members of my current parish that people of that ethnic background were staunchly, even surprisingly, in the case of the young and generally irreverent, Catholic.
There is a strong element of I-can-mock-my-Mom-if-I-want-but-you-better-shut-your-mouth, I wonder if that figures into the fining of a private, (and certainly secular?) TV station.
I prefer not to think it is humorlessness on the part of Slovaks (although Himself and I discuss frequently a marked tendency to take remarks on certain topics literally among otherwise intelligent, witty and intuitive people....)
I may have told the story of the priest, who, when I made my usual remark at contentious bi-lingual liturgy-planning sessions , (by now surely at least boring, and possibly annoying to those who have to deal with me on an on-going basis,) -- I sigh melodramatically and mourn, "If ONLY the Church in her wisdom had seen fit to have some liturgical language that belonged to all of us, equally!" -- earnestly informed me that they used to, they used to use Latin. (It is only his red-faced silence when howls of laughter broke out and someone explained that I was being facetious that prevents me from worrying that it was I who was taking things too literally, and that he was having me off...)
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5geGrNEC7xz3mJvc0o-cpRDzgacOw

BRATISLAVA (AFP) — Slovakia's broadcasting regulator Tuesday slapped a two-million-koruna (60,000 euros, 88,400 dollars) fine on a private TV company for mocking the Vatican, a report said.
The broadcasting council said a programme screened by commercial station Joj's last year, which mocked Vatican instructions on applying the concept of Christian love to driving, abused viewers' religious sensibilities and was not objective, the CTK agency reported.
Priests were "not the best experts" to give guidance on driving since the Vatican possessed "only two kilometres of highway and the last traffic accident was more than half a year ago," the programme mocked.

No comments: