“Pecker,” the title character in John Waters’ new movie, is a teenage photographer who surges to fame and fortune with his pictures of the seamier side of Baltimore life. Among his subjects are a drug addict and a shoplifter in action, gay and lesbian strippers plying their trade, two rats copulating in a garbage can—and his grandmother’s talking statue of the Virgin Mary.
League director of communications Rick Hinshaw offered the following comment after viewing the movie:
“Hollywood just can’t leave Catholics alone. There is absolutely no reason for an image of the Virgin Mary to be a recurring part of this movie. No reason, that is, except to imply that Catholics who have a devotion to Mary are just as bizarre as Pecker’s other subjects—gay strippers, drug abusers, a sugar-addicted, hyperactive little girl, or the man we see having sex with a vibrating washing machine in a laundromat.
“It is, I suppose, a measure of their creativity that—no matter what the plot, no matter how far removed it is from religious subject matter—our entertainment moguls can always find a way to work in a shot at Catholics.”
