It is way past my bedtime and I don't particularly like spending long hours blogging, so I will make these comments brief. I must also apologize that there doesn't seem to be any way to post your own comments on this blog. This blog is a new thing that's provided by my webhosting company, which I decided to try out. I may eventually need to get a "real" blog.
Anyhow...
Tonight I attended the not-so subtly anti-Catholic play, "The Pope & the Witch," at the University of Minnesota in order to participate in the "talkback" session afterwards. I don't feel that there is a whole lot that I can say about the play itself since it is a vile piece of work that promotes unbelievable amounts of prejudice and bigotry towards the Catholic Church and devout Catholics. But I do have a few brief remarks before turning my attention to the talk back session...
The play is very "preachy" with the liberal social agenda - a true propaganda piece that accuses the Catholic Church of being the root of all the world's problems (what's new, right?) while completely ridiculing and mocking the Church and our faith without any basis in reality. This play makes it disgustingly clear that playwright Dario Fo (and I suppose all supporters & defenders of the play) firmly believe as an all encompassing principle that it would be better for poor people and orphans to be dead, or at least to never have been born, rather than to be poor or orphaned. Very compassionate, eh? Let me see...wasn't it also the Nazi's that promoted the idea of being able to subjectively determine who is better off dead than alive, and who should be born and who should not be born? Apparently we haven't learned our lessons yet from recent history. The play also beats us over the head with the idea that artificial contraception is the answer to all the world's problems and that illegal drugs should be legal because people need them and will do them anyway. The play also preaches that doing drugs is better than having to deal with any real problems in life. I guess this all makes sense from a God-less, secular, relativistic, amoral perspective. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the blatantly hateful line in the play that basically says that the only good Pope is a dead Pope. But, NOOOO, this play doesn't promote prejudice, hatred or bigotry towards Catholics! In the end, it is faithful Catholics who are demonized by firing bullets and doing everything they can to assasinate the Pope and any Church official in sight (eventually succeeding) after the Pope "sees the light" and changes the Church's teachings on abortion, contraception and illegal drugs. How any halfway intelligent person can defend this piece of garbage and call it "art" is beyond me.
The "talkback" session after the play began just as I thought it would...as a "talk-at" session by the "expert" panel. I didn't realize that this whole thing was only allotted 40 minutes until about halfway through, when the panel finally finished being introduced (all of their many credentials and books they've written, blah, blah, blah...) and then introducing themselves (!) with their own prepared statements, all about how great this play is and how stupid and intolerant the Catholic Church is. It felt quite simply like another act was just tagged on to the end of the play.
I was there with Luke Bauman and Pat Shannon. When the floor was finally opened up to the rest of us lowly serfs a riot nearly broke out as a demoralized Catholic lost his temper and began to lash out at the panel. The hostile crowd nearly hung him from the lighting grid. That was difficult to follow. Luke and I eventually had to stand up, wave our arms and essentially walk up to the front of the stage and request the microphone in order to have our remarks heard before the short amount of time ran out. We both tried to bring a little humor to the tense situation in order to diffuse some of the hostility in the theater and thanks be to God we were able to say what we wanted to say before the session was cut off, because our points of view would not have been heard otherwise.
I remarked that this play was like watching a "black face" comedy, which of course was once a bigoted form of entertainment that mocked and ridiculed African Americans and mostly served to belittle and spread prejudice against them. This play is the modern day Catholic form of "black face" entertainment. I also posed the question: "If this play is really free from every shread of prejudice or bigotry (as was claimed by the panel of experts), then what exactly are your definitions of prejudice and bigotry?" Of course, there was no time to get any answers.
Luke made some great points about love coupled with responsibility and a professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota asked a very poignant question: "What are the limits of 'Academic Freedom?'" Again, no answer from the "expert" panel.
Afterward, we all had the chance to talk more one-on-one with both opponents of our views as well as proponents. A black non-Catholic in attendance told me that he agreed 100% with my comparison of this play to the reprehensible "black face" entertainment. I really appreciated his affirmation and wished that he could have spoken during the session.
Overall I was pleased with how things turned out after the play. We were at least able to be a light of Christ in the darkness and I experienced some small shreads of hope. One of the panelists made the effort to walk over to me at the end and thank me for my comments, as did a handful of other people leaving the theater. One of the actor's in the play actually apologized during the session, saying that she was very disappointed with how the "talkback" was structured, because it did not provide much of an opportunity for us to actually talk back. I thought that was admirable.
What came to mind in the end was one of Fr. John Corapi's sayings, quoting from Scripture, "If your light is the darkness, then how very deep will your darkness be! I do not hate the hostile anti-Catholic crowd that I confronted tonight, in fact I am striving to love them with the Charity of Christ and to pray for them with all sincerity. For Jesus tells us to "pray for those who persecute you...bless and do not curse them." Help me, O Lord, to do just that, and to be a better witness to your Truth, Beauty and Goodness in all I do and say. Amen.
