Virgin Mary Cartoon Stirs Debate Over Freedom To Offend By Patrick Goodenough http://CNSNews.com International Editor February 22, 2006
http://(CNSNews.com) - While the Mohammed cartoon controversy rages around the world, a television channel in New Zealand was under fire Wednesday for a decision to show an episode of the South Park comedy series featuring a menstruating statue of the Virgin Mary.
The episode, entitled "Bloody Mary," originally was scheduled to air in May, but after a religious row erupted, the network decided to move it up to Wednesday.
Earlier, Catholic bishops wrote to TV Works, a New Zealand subsidiary of the Canadian media company CanWest, and urged it to reconsider. The letter also was signed by Protestant, Jewish and Muslim leaders.
TV Works rejected the complaint, prompting the bishops to call on the country's half-million Catholics to boycott the channel (and others owned by it) as well as the network's advertisers.
In a pastoral letter read to congregations across New Zealand, the bishops said the episode was offensive, not just to Catholics but to adherents of other denominations and faiths, and demeaning to all women.
Catholic bishops conference president Bishop Denis Browne and fellow bishops said a boycott "might give them pause to consider that press freedom is not a license to incite intolerance or to promote hatred or derision based on religion, race or gender."
TV Works responded by announcing Tuesday that because of the controversy, it would now screen the episode on Wednesday night, to give viewers the opportunity to make up their own minds.
Rick Friesen of TV Works said the network encouraged viewers who did not appreciate the episode's "style of humor" not to watch, adding that anyone who felt that way was likely not a typical South Park viewer in the first place.
The Catholic Church called the decision to bring forward the episode "arrogant" and "cynical."
The New Zealand branch of Family Life International, a Catholic pro-life group, has launched a protest website identifying advertisers supporting TV Works and urging a boycott of their products.
Catholics comprise 12 percent of the population of the small South Pacific nation.
In neighboring Australia, the "Bloody Mary" episode was due to run on March 6, but The Australian daily reported that after complaints by Melbourne's Catholic Archbishop Denis Hart, the SBS network agreed to "defer" it, citing "the current worldwide controversy over cartoons of religious figures."
'Gratuitously offensive'
The new controversy has erupted as New Zealand and other countries continue to debate the publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed, which first appeared in a Danish newspaper last September.
The publication of cartoons has triggered Muslim protests, boycotts, rioting, killings of non-Muslims, and calls by Islamic leaders for the U.N. to outlaw blasphemy.
Two New Zealand newspapers and the country's two main news networks reproduced the cartoons.
Other newspapers, which chose not to publish the Mohammed caricatures, took flak because readers recalled they had not demurred in the past from carrying images offensive to Christians - most notoriously when the national museum in 1998 exhibited a three-inch statuette of Mary sheathed in a condom.
One regional paper's editorial writer Wednesday compared the bishops' response - calls for a boycott - to "the mullahs, who whip the faithful into a violent frenzy."
"Christians have always been a soft target for those who find sport in causing offense," wrote Louis Pierard. "The queue of people willing to insult that which Christians hold dear is a great deal longer than that of those prepared to take a pot-shot at Islam."
Catholic Church communications director Lyndsay Freer said the Mohammed cartoon issue had opened up a debate over freedom of expression versus the media's responsibility to uphold "good taste and decency," adding that the South Park episode was "gratuitously offensive."
That assessment echoed the reasoning given early this month by the country's largest daily, the New Zealand Herald, in deciding not to publish the Mohammed cartoons.
On the South Park issue, the Herald in an editorial Wednesday said, "it is one thing to be offended by an image put in a newspaper or on a television channel with a mass audience, but less clear-cut when the item is intended for a niche publication or channel."
Anyone offended by the South Park episode should just "change the channel," it said.
But a columnist for the same paper, Garth George, said that for Catholics, not watching the South Park episode was not the issue.
"It is merely the knowledge of the sacrilege itself which will curdle their spirits and leave them sorely wounded."
In the episode, a statue of Mary begins to bleed and is considered a miracle, drawing people seeking healing for ailments. "Pope Benedict XVI" arrives to observe and, after being sprayed with blood and identifying the source, declares that there is no miracle.
The episode aired on Viacom's Comedy Central in the U.S. last December, one day before Catholics celebrated the feast of immaculate conception, marking the doctrine that Mary was conceived sinless.
The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights described it as "one of the most vile TV shows ever to appear" and Catholic Bishops Conference president Bishop William Skylstad said in a letter to Viacom chiefs the channel had displayed "extreme insensitivity."
According to entertainment news services, the episode was pulled from the program's end-of-season rerun shortly after Christmas.