They let comedians in. That is always a bad idea. Always! Conan O'Brien joked after meeting with the pope.
To philosophize, moralize and pontificate on humor is a tedious, tiresome thing. Laughter, hilarity, comedy, humor and even a simple smile...is the surprising, unexpected eruption of the incongruous, non-intelligible or hyper-intelligible, miraculous, transcendent, serendipitous. It is a Mystery, beyond our control, to be received in delight and gratitude. It is experiential, not cognitive or moral.
Next, we ask: Who is chosen to be with the pope? We find Whoopy Goldberg, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Rock, Julia Louis Dreyfus, and Jim Gaffigan . These are hardly paragons of Catholic virtue. Some are shamelessly disparaging of things precious to the Catholic soul. Then we ask: Who chose them? We learn that the English language contingent was chosen by James Martin S.J. and his team. Fr. Martin is the Catholic chaplain to woke sexual progressivism. Now the humor of a comedian cannot be separated from his person, style, spirituality, morality, ideology and politics. And so what we have here is Pope Francis drawing close to himself leading comedic celebrities of the progressive elite of the West. He achieved his goal: he is described by them as a lovely, charming man. He feels great; they feel great. Mutual admiration! This is a complex man: the demeanor of affection and humility hides a narcissism that craves the approval of the privileged celebrity class even at the price of affirming them in their very anti-Catholicism.
Lastly, the shared response of the comedians: "It was bizarre!" Jim Gaffigan compared it to the principal calling in, for a special meeting, the most misbehaving boys of the school. The word "bizarre" means strange, unusual, amusing, eccentric. One might argue that the papal initiative was exactly unusual, but in a wholesome way: affirming the value of genuine humor and bringing together comedians of different faiths and backgrounds into a harmonious friendship.
I suggest a different interpretation. These are unusually sensitive, intelligent people...intuitive, insightful in ways deeper than cognitive deliberation. They clearly felt a dissonance, a tension, something "off" about joining their world with that of the Pope. They are accurate in this. Even as they fail to explain it. The world of Catholic faith and that of comedy are entirely distinct. They are not contradictory. On some deep, incomprehensible level, there is a connection between the transcendence of worship and the ecstatic liberation of laughter. But that connection is profound and not accessed by a conference in Rome. The "sacred" is precisely that which is "set aside" from the ordinary and the secular. Comedy is something different: risky, free, creative, often teasing the crude and vulgar. To put them together, to conflate them, is to damage both. Human culture in its richness includes diverse worlds which have their own boundaries, integrity and identity: athletics, entertainment, philosophy, industry, politics, opera...each of these maintain a distinct and set off world. Progressivism represents a decadence in that we cannot watch a football game or the Oscars without an invasion of woke ideology. The workings of the Supreme Court are interpreted through a political lens. Mainstream religions become centers for activism rather than worship. And so, there is a disguised clericalism in the pope inserting himself into the entirely foreign world of comedy, as he has done in regard to policy questions involving borders, death penalty and global warming.
Lets avoid confusion. Comedians have their place in the scheme of things. Popes have theirs. Let's maintain some wholesome boundaries.
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