Bill Cork links to this Maureen O'Brien post about the pressing issue of anti-Catholicism in the medium of Comic Books.

Actually, it's oddly more serious than that intro would suggest. Check out this precis:

The villains are going to usurp command of Catholicism by installing Nightcrawler as the Pope and using murderous disintegrating communion wafers. No, this is not meant to be a comedy story.

This one is a cultural issue that won't grab you unless you understand the role that "communion wafers" play in the Catholic culture. I'd bet that a substantial percentage of Catholics wouldn't get it either. Simply put, "Communion wafers" are nothing less than God. Argue the proposition if you will. Raise your eyebrows if you choose. Nonetheless, accept for the sake of cross-cultural understanding that Catholics see the Eucharist as the Body of Christ, and if you achieve that level of understanding, then you might concede that the proposed story line is as gratuitously insulting as a comic book proposing that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make bread.

The interesting thing here is the question, "where does this story line come from?" I have to concede that it is most probable that the story authors have no real understanding of the philosophical implications raised by the concepts of "accidents" and "essences" or the rip roaring historical debate over the "real presence." Why, then, does this particular story line have to be instantiated?

My humble proposition is that modern society has no understanding of the sacred or supernatural which is not Catholic. I don't mean this in a chauvinistic sense. My point is premised on the brute fact that whenever something sacred -something apart and associated with the supernatural - is called for in the popular culture it is invariably Catholic. Apart from Signs wth its Episcopalian priest - who spends most of the movie in denial - whenever some religious element is called for, that element invariably involves Catholic symbolism or imagery. Take for instance the 2000 film Bless the Child, which I initially thought was a uniquely Protestant supernatural flick because of its emphasis on angelic intervention. On a recent second viewing, I noticed the (a) lapsed Catholic status of Kim Bassinger's character, (b) the assistance of a priest in a wheelchair, (c) the prayers of nuns in a convent, etc. [Sound of hand smacking head.] Other films also repeatedly showcase Catholic symbols as the vehicle of the supernatural. Candidly, when was the last time that a Presbyterian or Methodist minister played a role in a morality tale about good v. evil?

So what is going on here? I think the answer is clearly that no other religious tradition currently active in American popular culture carries with it either such strong images or symbolisms of the sacred and supernatural or the visual symbols associated with morality. Basically, the social archetypes of Good, Sacredness, Religion and Supernatural are Catholic trademarks. [Although, I'm watching a trendline in favor of the Fundies: an episode of the X-Files which juxtaposed a Fundie minister against a liberal Protestant minister in a fight against Satan may prefigure a possibly new paradigm into this particular culture war.]

Why is this important? I think the answer is that it explains so much of the apparent anti-Catholic imagery in society. From "Piss-Christ" to a feces smeared Madonna to the anti-Catholic images at Princeton, I think the answer is that this "art" trades on the Catholic imagery simply because that imagery is the only depiction of the "holy" or "sacred" that exists in modern society. I don't think the recent showing of "Ricanstruction" was intended to be anti-Catholic; I think that the artist simply didn't have any other tradition available to visually approximate concepts associated with the "sacred." Similarly, the X-Men storyline may not be as intended to be insulting to Catholicism as it may simply be a naive attempt to reach to the only core of mystical religious experience left to the imagination of Modern secularists.

The point of this post is to act as a thoughtpiece. I'm not saying that Methodists or Presbyterians or Non-Denominational Baptists don't have art or sacred imgages. I guess I'm saying that they ought to get busy and reclaim some part of the "public square' before they disappear into complete irrelevance.