It is one thing for Saturday Night Live to engage in satire, quite another to single-out a religion for scorn by regularly featuring a character that ridicules it. Such is the case with the character Mary Katherine, played by Molly Shannon. And guess which religion she likes to mock?
Shannon poses as a Catholic schoolgirl, wearing a very short plaid skirt, freaky glasses and a headband. It was the executive producer, Lorne Michaels, who decided on the abbreviated skirt, described by Entertainment Weekly as “hiked to the heavens.” This explains why Shannon often exposes her underwear. And while performing, Shannon is known to say such things as “Sometimes when I get nervous I touch my boobs….”
Now if all this is just good fun, why is it that we don’t see any other religion mocked as often as Catholicism? Sure, we have the symbols galore, but that hardly explains why some in Hollywood have this strange—indeed perverse— fetish with our religion.
