Madonna was back in the news recently for offending concert-goers in France. In her latest video that accompanies the song, “Nobody Knows Me,” French National Front party leader Marine Le Pen was shown sporting a swastika on her head. After the video was played during Madonna’s July performance in Paris, the National Front said it was going to sue her. What did not attract much attention was Madonna’s vile attack on Pope Benedict XVI.
The full video of “Nobody Knows Me,” which is part of Madonna’s MDNA Tour, is replete with religious symbolism. The most offensive part for Catholics occurs when anti-gay protesters are shown just before Madonna’s face morphs into that of the pope; at the point where the pope’s face appears, protesters holding gay-bashing signs are shown on both sides of him. The accompanying lyrics, which include the refrain, “Won’t let a stranger give me a social disease,” ties the pope to hate speech directed at homosexuals. Moreover, photos of gay youths who recently committed suicide are also shown during this sequence.
What is particularly sick about this attack is that the protesters are not only not Catholic, they are anti-Catholic! Anyone who doubts this to be true only needs go to the website of the Westboro Baptist Church and find pictures of these church members holding signs that read “God Hates Fags”—the exact signs shown in the video. To demonstrate how relentlessly anti-Catholic these people are, we noted that on their events calendar, they announced they were going to picket St. Joseph Catholic Church in Shawnee, Kansas on July 22: the church was called a “whorehouse” and the priests were labeled “rapists.”
Madonna not only libeled the pope, she attributed to the Catholic Church the hate speech of those who hate Catholics, as well as homosexuals. That the media gave scant coverage to this part of her bigoted performance was also disturbing.
Madonna isn’t getting any younger, so her days of insulting us are numbered.
