Bishop lauds Simpsons for talking about faith

BART, Homer and their yellow-faced gang may not seem like the best church-going family in the world.

However, The Simpsons has been praised by one Catholic Bishop as the only programme on television that deals with the issue of faith.

In a wide-ranging address in which he also warned against the dangers posed by the growing cult of celebrity, the Bishop of Limerick Dr Donal Murray said religion never comes into question on most television dramas and soaps, and “since the departure of Glenroe, nobody goes to Mass”.

He said, however, that one exception was The Simpsons, which while sometimes satirising various faiths, at least deals with religion in most of its episodes.

Dr Murray said Irish people have become embarrassed by religious expression, which now only appears in the public eye in the form of controversies or scandals.

The bishop was speaking on the subject of “Religion and the Secular in Contemporary Ireland” at the 10th annual Ceifin conference, which opened in Ennis yesterday.

“We have passed from a society where faith and public manifestations of faith were the norm, to a society which is, at best, embarrassed by any public visibility of faith,” he said.

“Faith appears in the public arena in the form of controversies, scandals and personalities rather than questions about God,” he said.

The bishop also warned young people against the obsession of becoming a celebrity, which he said is dangerous to both themselves and society.

Dr Murray said “the greatest aspiration of young people today is to become a celebrity” and that a society which worships famous people will end up destroying itself.

“There is nothing wrong with popularity. If Jesus had been carried down from the temple, people would have flocked to him. But the relevance of the temptation is starkly clear to us today.

“Celebrities can be built up to an impossibly inflated position before we turn on them with an equally inflated hostility.

“When this happens, one can only hope that the people involved, whether pop stars or football managers or ‘personalities’ of any kind, have understood that there is more to life than this.

“A society which lives for celebrity will destroy not only its celebrities but itself,” he said.

Dr Murray told the conference: “Our affluent society has certainly forgotten something. We know — often only in theory I’m afraid — how a few hundred yards from comfortable affluence, decent people live surrounded by burnt-out houses, burnt-out cars, intimidation, poverty, unemployment, violence and drugs: conditions which the rest of us would find intolerable. Yet their plight remains largely invisible.

“There are many kinds of forgetfulness in our society — ways in which people feel excluded, lonely and neglected, in which the provision for healthcare and education remains inadequate. In being forgetful in these ways, we diminish ourselves and the way we relate to one another.”

At last year’s event, Ceifin founder Fr Harry Bohan claimed that Irish people had become obsessed with greed, gossip and shopping. At the opening of yesterday’s conference entitled Tracking the Tiger: A Decade of Change, he said: “Debate is vital because without it we can lose the language of values altogether and become completely swamped by the values of the commercial world.

“These, as we now know, can begin to interfere in areas of life where they have no place: family, health, law. Once they have taken a grip of these, society pays the price and for some, life begins to lose meaning.”