Catalan religious parody upsets Catholics and southerners

A Catalan television show that lampooned Catholic religious traditions has been condemned by the Spanish church and has enraged political leaders in the south of the country.

The satirical programme “Està passant” included a segment in which an actor dressed up as the Virgin of Rocío – a revered religious statue kept in a hermitage in southern Spain – and spoke in a mock Andalucían accent as she was interviewed by the two co-hosts. The actor held a doll replicating the baby Jesus and at one point said: “I haven’t been able to have sex for 200 years as ordered by God”.

The interview, which lasted about nine minutes and was shown by TV3, Catalonia’s regional broadcaster, immediately triggered a backlash.

The archbishop of Urgell, in Catalonia, Joan-Enric Vives Sicília, described it as “a grotesque element of humour that is hurtful for religious feelings”.

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His colleague Santiago Gómez, the bishop of Huelva, in Andalucía, expressed similar sentiments.

“The criticism and ridicule of Catholics shows a lack of human sensitivity and can lead to undesirable provocations,” he said.

As well as causing religious offence, the programme also struck a nerve on a regional level, with some politicians in Andalucía seeing it as an attack on their regional identity, which is closely linked to Easter parades in which the Virgin of Rocío and other similar statues are carried through the streets of towns and cities.

“Humour is one of the characteristics of our region, but to be funny you need to do so with respect and fondness,” said the conservative president of Andalucía, Juanma Moreno, who described the programme as demonstrating “a lack of respect to Andalucía and to thousands of Andalucíans and their traditions”.

On the political left, the Forwards Andalucía party echoed Moreno’s criticism, claiming the sketch had fomented negative stereotypes about the region.

Those responsible for the programme have been unrepentant. The hosts have refused to apologise and one of them, Jair Domínguez, wrote: “Not a day goes by without some idiot getting offended”.

The controversy has also fed into longstanding tensions over Catalonia’s relationship with the rest of Spain. The conservative Popular Party has said it will raise the issue in the Catalan regional parliament and it has demanded an apology from the region’s pro-independence government because it is responsible for supervising the broadcaster.

Meanwhile, Spanish interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska was drawn into the debate on Monday. When asked about the incident, he said that “respect and consideration” were needed when dealing with the religious or ideological views of others.

The “Està passant” programme was subject to criticism from some Catalan nationalists just a week earlier, when it parodied the arrest in Barcelona of Clara Ponsatí, a pro-independence politician who had been living abroad since 2017 to avoid judicial action by the Spanish authorities.

In 2013, Mr Domínguez was called to appear before the national court after he shot a silhouette of the then king, Juan Carlos, on a different programme.