Sarah Silverman and the Pope

Courtesy of Fr. James Martin, I came across Sarah Silverman’s anti-Catholic rant in which she tells the pope to end world hunger by selling the Vatican – and promising him that, among other things, the involvement with the Holocaust would be forgotten. Regular readers will be aware that I’m not exactly Bill Donohue’s biggest fan, but it is at times like this that I want to be become the next Bill Donohue. For the point is basically correct – it is perfectly acceptable to attack Catholicism in a way that is not the case with other religions.

The point of this post, though, is not to point out how dumb Silverman’s argument is – as Fr. Martin points out, the pope cannot sell the Vatican, as it belongs to the Church, not to him. And that the Catholic Church is the single biggest provider of health care and social services in the world. No, the point of this post is to point out the hypocrisy of Silverman’s smugness. Silverman is Jewish. Perhaps she needs to look a little closer here. Perhaps she needs to ask why a group of her co-religionists feel that they have a unique right to their own secular state, and to deny human rights to (and commit war crimes against) the non-Jewish inhabitants of that territory. Look to your own backyard first, Sarah, before pointing out the moral flaws of the Catholic Church.