Pray for Colbert 2

Stephen Colbert's day of prayer helped him choose a 3 Musketeers Bar ("All for one and one for all, just like the Holy Trinity," he says) over Combos, he reflected on his show, The Colbert Report last Thursday. (See the "Pray for Colbert" entry on Wednesday, Feb. 21.)

He then proceeded to don his lucky praying hat and giant prayer hands and pray for those who prayed for him. See him declare "Jesus, No. 1!" yourself under his recent highlights.

On the same show, he takes Larry King to task when King says the dead person he would want to interview was Christ. "Larry, you know he's not dead...Rose from the dead on the third day, ascended to Heaven, is seated at the right hand of the Father, will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, or don't they teach that you in Hebrew school?" (See end of Larry King clip).

Cool pictures

St. Clement's Anglican Church in Marrickville, Australia makes a political statement (from the Sydney Morning Herald Stay in Touch blog):



Here is a task for somebody who has way too much time and far too many Legos (More pictures):


And finally, an advertising campaign to get Catholics to Confession this Lent hits the roads of Washington, D.C. (Click here to see the picture).

Offensive Theater Update

As covered in the March 07 issue of Catholic Tastes (Offensive Theater Part 2), the University of Minnesota theater department currently is performing The Pope and the Witch, despite protests from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

The satire about a pope's nervous breakdown involves a witch, drugs, and crime. Dario Fo, the play's author and the 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a "well-known Stalinist and anti-Catholic bigot," said William Donohue, president of the Catholic League (see the Catholic League press release for more). Donohue criticized the university for protecting other groups, but not Catholics, from prejudice. He asked university president Robert Bruininks to cancel the performance, but the show will go on. Bruininks said that a university is the place for "the free exchange of ideas."

A review in the Pioneer Press says that the idea that the play is blasphemous is based on the wrong assumption that the play is about religion, when it is actually about politics. Theater critic Dominic P. Papatola says it is "a play less interested in sacrilege and more interested in comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable."

For more information on the controversy, check out this article in The Minnesota Daily. Catholics in Minnesota can decide what they think for themselves by checking out the play in the next week, or the script is also available on Amazon.com.