You know the Catholic Church is pretty desperate for recruits when it holds Homer Simpson up as a poster boy.
But
that's exactly what Papa Razzi's official newspaper did when it
bizarrely declared the cuddly pea-brained baldie a 'true Catholic'.
Even
though he's shown being dragged weekly to the Presbylutheran First
Church of Springfield, Vatican City's daily broadsheet L'Osservatore
Romano hailed in a headline: 'Homer and Bart are Catholic'.
"Few
people know it, and he does everything he can to hide it, but it is
true: Homer J Simpson is a Catholic," insists the Papal paper. "[The
family] recites prayers before meals and, in their own peculiar way,
believes in the life thereafter."
The article cited a 2005 episode
of the cult show The Father, The Son and The Holy Guest Star, in which
Bart is expelled from Springfield Elementary School and enrolled in a
Catholic school where he's lured into the faith by a kindly priest,
voiced by Liam Neeson.
His doughnut-loving dad also decides to
convert in the season 16 finale, which touches on topics like
contraception, homosexuality and stem-cell research and aired just weeks
after the death of Pope John Paul II.
Whether poking fun at
Reverend Lovejoy's soporific sermons or Krusty the Clown's blingtastic
Bar Mitzvah, the long-running cartoon series certainly takes regular
swipes at organised religion.
But Homer Simpson -- a Catholic icon?
In Excelsis D'oh! says Simpsons producer Al Jean.
"My first reaction is shock and awe," he says, "and I guess it makes up for me not going to church for 20 years.
"We've
pretty clearly shown that Homer is not Catholic. I really don't think
he could go without eating meat on Fridays -- for even an hour."
Ned Flanders must be pretty miffed too.
After
all, we're talking about a profane, pot-bellied buffoon who once prayed
for God to find his TV remote, inflicts never-ending humiliation on his
evangelical neighbour and describes Jesus as a "dude who lived a
million years ago, who most of us think was magic".
Still, you can't blame the Vatican for trying.
Rocked
by charges of everything from sex abuse to cover-ups, misogyny to
homophobia, Irish Catholics are quitting the Church in droves.
The
number of people declaring themselves of 'No Religion' on the 2006
census was 186,318 -- compared to just 1,107 in the Catholic-run Ireland
of 1961.
On the same poll, 86% professed to be Roman Catholic --
but it's guesstimated that only about half of those actually practice
the faith by attending mass.
From church to echo chamber, if the
trend continues priests across the country could find themselves
preaching to row upon row of empty pews on Sunday mornings.
Ireland's
young Catholics -- on paper, anyhow -- may find it easier to identify
with Homer Simpson than Pope Benedict, reckons Paul Dunbar of
CountMeOut.ie, a website set up to help people defect from the Church.
"The
majority of people using the site are aged 20-35 and are either lapsed
Catholics or want to renounce their membership in protest over the
various scandals that have come out," says co-founder Paul (30) from
Sligo.
"But we've also had lots of parents wanting to take their
children out of the Church and even elderly people."
'Growing up,
my parents revered the local priest and bishop and viewed them as
pillars of the community. Young people now don't see it that way and are
at a loss for Catholic role models.
"Some celebrities like Wayne
Rooney and Mel Gibson have been vocal about Catholicism -- but in light
of recent stories about them, Homer Simpson is a probably a better role
model!"
Since being set up, 12,007 card-carrying Catholics have made a 'Declaration of Defection' through the website.
But
recently it was forced to suspend its service because of changes to
Canon Law which make it impossible to formally quit the Roman Catholic
Church -- swiftly dubbed 'The Hotel California clause' since you can
check out, but you can never leave.
"You can never be
'unbaptised'," explains Paul, "but in the past, people would declare
their defection which was then noted on the baptismal register. Now, the
Church is refusing to formally acknowledge defection at all, so
Catholics who want to leave are stuck in a sort of limbo."
Today's
youngsters may rather a lie-in to early-morning mass, but that doesn't
mean they're losing their religion says Michael Kelly of the Irish
Catholic newspaper.
"There's no doubt that a lot of young people
don't go to mass any more," says the deputy editor of the weekly
religious title, "but I don't think that's any different to 10 years
ago.
"Just because they're not practising, doesn't mean they're
not still living by the tenets of the faith. Teenagers here are
volunteering in record numbers; they're still very altruistic and
charitable.
"If you go to the Gardiner Street Gospel Choir mass on
Sundays, it's packed with young people -- so they haven't given up on
Catholicism completely."
One Limerick youth group keeping the faith even discovered that the 'Hail Mary' is the go-to prayer of Irish people last week.
In
a €6 fundraising book for the Youth Ministry in the Diocese of
Limerick, school children from across the county canvassed 2,000
disciples to discover the country's all-time favourite prayer.
And the
mother of God managed to bump the 'Angel of God' and 'Our Father' into
second and third place, respectively.
So he may snooze his way
through Reverend Lovejoy's homilies, but perhaps straight-talking Homer
Simpson isn't such a bad example after all, argues Michael Kelly.
"Young
people may be more comfortable with an á la carte approach to
Catholicism," he says.
"They're much more questioning of certain tenets
of the faith and will take on the ones that are relevant to them."
But
he admits: "The Church hasn't really learned the language of modern
society. Some university chaplains across the country are doing great
work by getting students together once a week in a pub to talk about
their faith -- it's not as threatening as the confession box."
Provided there's Duff Beer on tap, that's a Church even Homer himself would happily attend.
SIC: II/IE