The response to blasphemy should be Christ-like

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, a student tabloid printed on its cover a photo of a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a banana on its head. I was so furious, I remember my rage 20 years later.

There were, of course, many other abuses of Christian imagery at the U of T, and I forget if it was this incident or another that led me to collect a pile of offensive student newspapers and throw them in the trash. To my surprise and disappointment, my father chided me for my pious act. What I had done, he said, could be considered both censorship and theft.

Another time I resigned as stage manager during the rehearsals of a campus production of a medieval morality play. The director had decided to portray Christian virtues as SS-like baddies, and when their Nazi-like costumes arrived, crosses in place of swastikas, I knew I had to quit. Some members of the drama society — highly inconvenienced — were furious with me, but there was nothing else I could do.

More recently, there was an incident at Regis College when a layman classmate referred to the maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary as “the scandal of the unwed mother” and used expressions that I shall never repeat. I don’t remember what I said in protest although I do remember the furious expressions on various Jesuit faces and a sort of red mist appearing before my eyes. It took the story of St. Ignatius of Loyola deciding not to slay a Moor who had similarly (if less seriously) impugned Our Lady to extinguish my fantasies of giving my classmate a beating.