Bill Donohue is supposedly cool with what he feels are casual jokes being cracked on his religion. However the Catholic watchdog claims that the Simpsons pushed the envelope too far with their Halloween Special episode by poking fun at the Eucharist.

Case in point: The segment where Springfield inhabitants turn into zombies after eating tainted meat hamburgers. Bart remains immune to it though and hence he becomes the Chosen One. He leads the still uninfected people to a safe zone where a zombie guard stops him and claims that to live, they must consume Bart’s flesh, to which Marge questions him that which civilized society eats the flesh of its savior.

Donohue feels that this is a direct attack on the Eucharist (and hence a direct attack on Catholics) and more serious than the dig at Apostle’s Creed last Halloween.

However John Gehring of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good is shunning the media’s attempts to portray Donohue as an upholder of the faith. He feels that this attempt by Donohue is only media hyped sensationalism and that Donohue in the past has been uncharacteristically silent on far more serious issues such as torture, war, capital punishment, genocide, racism and poverty.

Coming back to the Simpsons, this isn’t the first time they find themselves mired in a controversy. In 1998 in response to a comment by Bart as to turning to Catholicism to get free Communion wafers and booze, Marge had said that they weren’t turning Catholic in the near future since three children were enough. This was followed in 1999 by a controversial in-show advertisement on the Super Bowl Special episode. Inspired by a ZZ Top video, the ad starts with a car rolling into a dusty pumping station for refueling. The nerdy driver gets out, looks around and blows the horn. Rock music starts emanating and three scantily clad nubile females emerge from the station seductively. As the driver looks on wide-eyed, they (suggestively) flip open the car hood, shake off the squeegee and plunge the nozzle of the gas tube right into the tank. The driver gets even more charged up as he spots a shining cross bouncing on the ample cleavage of one of the babes as she wiggles around. As the accompanying voiceover indicated, this was supposed to be an advertisement for the changing times of the Catholic Church.

Donohue was apparently effective in whatever he did. FOX Studios were pressurized to change the “Catholic Church” to “Church” for future broadcasts, which they eventually did.

In fact the state of affairs had reached such that the FOX vice president himself asked the executive producer of the Simpsons Mike Scully to make the change. When Scully objected to the proposal, the vice president said that he could keep it to Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists or anything else but Catholic. The reason behind this was that FOX could afford to anger any other community but they had already run into trouble with the Catholics earlier that season!