Spin, a pop culture magazine published by Bon Guccione, Jr., featured in its July edition one of most decidedly anti-Catholic articles to have appeared anywhere in some time. “Sin City” was written by someone called Eurydice (who allegedly traveled to the Vatican for her story), and it is replete with every Catholic bashing epithet imaginable.
The Vatican is labeled “an empty sham upheld by a corrupt bureaucracy,” one that operates in a “shroud of silence.” This “monosexual theocratic fortress” is branded “the world’s last uncontested dictatorship.” Confession is slammed for its “secrecy,” with “guilt and denial” as its binding force. We also learn that “Experts estimate that only two percent of Catholic priests sworn to `perpetual celibacy’ achieve it.” Interestingly, not one “expert” is cited.
The Church, we are told, “despises the human body,” producing priests who are “lost souls, sociopathic sacrifices to the Catholic cause of image control.” The author charges that “all this moralizing about who’s allowed to lie with whom” is an “irredeemable absurdity.” “Even in this bloodiest century in human history,” writes Eurydice, “Catholic doctrine locates humanity’s crimes in people’s bedrooms. Like the pornographer…the Pope defines sex as degradation.”
The Spin piece elicited the following news release from the Catholic League:
“Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, is known solely for his pornographic ventures. We now have Son of Bob entering the arena with his own sordid picture of the Catholic Church. The tie that binds is more than biological: the Guccione’s have a vested commercial and ideological interest in promoting filth and trashing virtue, hence their fascination with pornography and their excitement over bashing the Catholic Church.
“In a grand testimony to her ignorance, the author of ‘Sin City’ says “it’s high time for the Vatican to develop a theology of human sexuality.’ That is on the order of having Al Capone lecture criminologists on developing a theory of crime control.
“The one saving grace about the article is that it is so blatantly anti-Catholic that only the undiscerning will believe it. Nonetheless, the Catholic League will be sure to showcase this piece as a classic example of vintage Catholic bashing.”
