While most people treated the news of the passing of Pope Francis with somberness and dignity, notorious Catholic-basher Bill Maher could not keep himself from making crude and irreverent comments. On the April 25 episode of “Real Time,” the bigoted HBO host used the eve of the papal funeral to insult a central tenet of the Catholic faith, the Eucharist.
On Friday, Maher began talking about Pope Francis with some of the clichéd lines about priests that we have seen far too often from him. He seems to think it is the pinnacle of wit to say that “the outpouring of grief” for the pope has led to priests asking altar boys to “just hold me.”
Continuing this theme, later while Maher was trying to explain why conservatives had disagreements with Pope Francis, he ran through a litany of things that supposedly conservatives found infuriating about the late-Holy Father. One thing that supposedly got the goat of conservatives, according to Maher, was Pope Francis’ “child sex ring took the focus off Hillary’s child sex ring.”
What really stood out on Maher’s list were his loutish remarks about the Eucharist. Maher went on to say that another thing that Pope Francis did to raise the ire of conservatives was that he advocated for “men eating another man’s body.” At that exact moment, on screen appeared an image of Pope Francis consecrating the Eucharist.
To take a sacrament and a core pillar of Catholicism and turn it into some sort of sick, sexualized “joke” is grotesque, but to provide such an insult at the moment 1.4 billion Catholics around the world are commemorating the death of Pope Francis is beyond the pale.
Maher is an irreverent bigot who has not been funny in years. As his star continues to diminish, he is forced to rely on mean-spirited attacks to get cheap chuckles from the handful of people who still find him interesting.
Contact Maher’s director of media relations: Ashley.Mokma@wbd.com
